The story of the U.S. army’s adoption of intelligence is, in part, the story. . .of how notions of intelligence and its tests that had been nurtured largely away from public view came to be disseminated to the larger culture through the intersection of the practical needs of wartime, changing character of American society, and professional ambitions of psychologists.
—John Carson, The Measure of Merit, 2007
During the 20th century, war provided many professions with unique opportunities not avail- able during peace time. The First World War was an event of enormous professional signifi- cance for psychology. The war helped solidify
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psychology’s standing in the public mind, as well as in the minds of other professionals and the mil- itary. The intelligence test played an important role in this process, as did tests of occupational skill and vocational aptitudes. In this section, we describe psychologists’ involvement in the war to address the following questions: How did psychologists use World War I to advance and professionalize Psychology, and how, in turn, did Psychology affect the war effort? What were the social and political factors that influenced the scientific development of psychological testing, and how did these factors determine the form and use of the IQ test in American society?
During the war, two groups of psychologists whose work had overlapped only minimally be- fore the war came into direct contact. Under the aegis of the Psychology Committee of the National ResearchCouncil, two committees on testing were formed as the United States en- tered the war in spring 1917. The first group, called theCommittee on the Psychological Ex- amination of Recruits, was led by Yerkes. The committee’s mandate, as they developed it, was to test the intelligence of army inductees to make recommendations for their placement within the military. The other group was led by Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) and included Walter Van Dyke Bingham (1880–1952), Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), and Louis Leon Thur- stone (1887–1955), among other well-known psychologists. They formed the Committee on Classification of Personnel and served as civil- ian consultants to the army. Their committee was devoted to evaluating trade aptitudes among army personnel and sorting recruits into the spe- cialized tasks for which they were best suited.
Although both committees were concerned with testing, they had somewhat different experiences in the military. We turn first to Yerkes and the psychological examination of recruits.
In trying to decide how psychologists could be of most use to the military, Yerkes decided that his committee would develop proposals for the psychological testing of army inductees, whose sheer numbers posed a huge logistical problem
for the army. Yerkes called upon Terman and Goddard, among others, to develop a test that would screen out mental defectives but would also help the army make basic personnel selection decisions—who should be an officer, who should be a soldier, and so on. The large numbers of recruits required that a group intelligence test be developed; the Binet test was designed for individual administration and was too cumbersome for mass testing. The tests they produced—based closely on tests that Terman brought with him from his doctoral student, Arthur Otis, were called the Army Alpha (for recruits who could speak, read, and write English) and the Army Beta (for illiterate recruits). At the height of their game, psychologists were testing 200,000 recruits a month. By the war’s end, some 1.75 million men had been administered one of the two tests.
This meant that almost 2 million people were exposed to psychology and the intelligence test during the war. To be sure, this was a rather dramatic debut. However, as impressive as these numbers are, they tell only part of the story. As historian of psychology Franz Samelson (1977) has discussed, in practice the tests were beset with problems ranging from inconsistency in administration to more serious issues of validity.
The conditions under which the tests were administered were less than ideal. Recruits often had to sit on the floor and might barely be able to hear the administrator’s instructions. Men who had never before had to hold a pencil were asked to respond to lengthy lists of seemingly irrelevant items. Testers failed to take into account the important fact that scores on the tests were highly correlated with education and insisted on promoting the tests as measures of innate ability. One of the more alarming scientific findings that emerged from the test data, put forth by Princeton University psychologistCarl Brigham in 1923, was that the average mental age of recruits was only 13 years; 12 years was the cutoff for feeblemindedness. This was indeed shocking, and many found it hard to believe the tests were measuring intelligence
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accurately. Less hard to believe by the American public at the time, and less readily challenged, except by African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois and, later, African American psychologist Horace Mann Bond and others, was the finding that Black soldiers were vastly inferior to White soldiers in intelligence. Both of these findings fed into eugenicist agendas and fueled fears about degeneracy, miscegenation, and unchecked immigration.
How did the military respond to this new sorting technology? The military made little use of the mass intelligence testing, preferring to rely on its own members’ professional judgment in the placement of recruits and reacting somewhat warily to the incursion of scientific researchers among their ranks. At any rate, the Armistice of 1918 made any plans to use the test findings for practical purposes obsolete, and the army dropped intelligence testing from its activities within two months of the war’s end. Although the psychologists had made big promises about processing the recruits efficiently, thus saving the army thousands of dollars and considerable time, they did not have the occasion to deliver on these promises.
Another committee, theCommittee onClas- sification of Personnel, met a somewhat different reception within the military, due in no small part to the energy and entrepreneurship of Walter Dill Scott (see alsoChapter 4). Scott’s committee quickly discerned that in an organization of 4 mil- lion men, the ability to assess vocational aptitudes and occupational skills swiftly and accurately, and match men up with appropriate jobs, could be an essential service. Scott had recently published work on rating scales for selecting salesmen, conducted with his colleagues at theCarnegie In- stitute of Technology, which consisted of group tests of intellectual ability as well as ratings of character and manner. Scott proposed a system for matching recruits to appropriate military po- sitions and met little opposition from army brass, perhaps because of his committee’s civilian sta- tus and the obvious practical utility of their task, but no doubt also due to Scott’s pragmatic and
magnanimous personal style. The committee it- self eventually grew to more than 175 members who oversaw the work of about 7,500 men in personnel units at army posts across the country.
By the end of the war, the committee had in- terviewed and classified almost 3.5 million men.
One-third of those classified went on to spe- cialized duties. The committee also established a trade tests division that developed proficiency tests for 83 military jobs. In acknowledgment of these impressive accomplishments, the army awarded Scott the Distinguished Service Medal at the close of the war.
A final war development should be noted.
In addition to intelligence and vocational tests, World War I also occasioned the development of the first objective paper-and-pencil tests of per- sonality in the United States. Military officials were becoming alarmed at the number of psychi- atric casualties among soldiers who were involved in trench warfare. Although some believed that this was simply a matter of normal decompen- sation after an extremely stressful experience, others called for a method of screening soldiers who might be predisposed to emotional break- down in these situations. Accordingly, psychol- ogist Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962) was placed in charge of theCommittee on Emo- tional Fitness and developed a written form of the questions routinely used by psychiatrists to assess emotional stability. Woodworth generated his test items by surveying hundreds of case reports of diagnosed neurotics to identify the emotional and personality characteristics they displayed.
Based on this review, he composed hundreds of questions inquiring about symptoms and ad- ministered them to a group of normal subjects, eliminating the questions that were endorsed so often by this group that they would be of no diagnostic value. The result was the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet. Examples of items included
‘‘Do you think you have hurt yourself by going too much with women?’’ ‘‘Have you hurt your- self by masturbation (self-abuse)?’’ ‘‘Were you considered a bad boy?’’ and ‘‘Do you feel that nobody quite understands you?’’ Unfortunately
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(at least for Woodworth), the war ended before he had the opportunity to try it within the mil- itary and ascertain its usefulness. Psychologists continued to use it after the war, however, and it was considered one of the earliest self-report measures of neuroticism.
Although Woodworth’s test was one of the first objective tests of personality, another kind of personality test was being developed even be- fore the war. One of the earliest projective tests of personality, with open-ended response formats that were thought to reveal the respondent’s un- conscious desires, needs, feelings, and thought processes, was the familiar word association test originated by Galton and then studied byCattell but most influentially developed for use in per- sonality assessment byCarl Jung (1875–1961) in Switzerland and then Grace Kent (1875–1973) in the United States. Jung conceptualized word associations as revealing information about the personality types of introversion and extrover- sion, as well as revealing unconscious processes that could be related to normal and patholog- ical phenomena, such as complexes. According to Jung, complexes were strongly or emotion- ally valenced sets of related attitudes requiring active repression. He carried out empirical work on word associations, starting with a list of 400 words administered to 38 people of different ed- ucational levels and under different conditions of attention. Respondents would be read a set of
FIGURE 6.10 Carl Jung
words and were then asked to respond as quickly as possible with the first word that came to mind;
words were chosen to sample common or fre- quent complexes, such as the mother complex.
Latency or reaction time would also be recorded, along with the response, with the assumption that longer reaction times would be indicative of a complex. Other deviations from normal respond- ing, such as repetition of a word, the inability to make a response, and a senseless response, were all considered indicative of complexes.
Jung published some of this empirical work in theJournal of Abnormal Psychologyin 1907 and then published a series of lectures he had given on the topic atClark University in theAmeri- can Journal of Psychologyin 1910. Grace Kent, in collaboration with a psychiatrist A. J. Rosanoff, used Jung’s word association method to develop the Kent-Rosanoff Word Association Test in 1909–1910, as we mentioned inChapter 5. In her research, she administered 100 words, selected to be fairly neutral, to 1,000 individuals and tabu- lated the responses so as to record the number of times any word (such as ‘‘nail’’) had occurred as a response to each word in the series (such as
‘‘hammer’’). Any response in further experiments was then assigned a value according to the num- ber of times it was listed in the frequency table.
For example, the association hammer–nail was recorded 185 times, so the response ‘‘nail’’ would get a value of 185. For the purposes of calculation, the researchers divided this number by 10 to get 18.5. Responses that did not appear in the table were classified as ‘‘individual reactions’’ and as- signed a value of 0. In normal people, the average number of individual reactions was 7, with that number increasing as education increased. She then compared the normal responses with those from resident patients at the Danvers State Hos- pital in New York. What the test produced was a precise measurement of the tendency of a person to respond along the same lines as the peer group.
It was regarded as a measure of the conformity of thought processes and was used as well to detect complexes or response abnormalities indicating thought disturbances.
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Although the development of projective tests accelerated in the post–World War I period, especially after the publication of Hermann Rorschach’s (1884–1922) famous inkblot test in 1921, projective tests have never been used in mass testing the same way objective tests have been. By their nature, projectives are more suited for the individual, clinical situation and have remained largely the purview of psychologists working with clients in private, hospital, or clinic settings or for research (for more on projective tests, seeChapter 7).