So far, we have shown how central intelligence testing was to the science and practice of American psychology in its first several decades, as well as how central it was to a society looking for ways to deal with several emerging social problems. But was intelligence testing as central, to both psychology and society, in other parts of the world? If not, why not?
What contextual factors may have relegated
testing to the periphery of psychological research and practice, and the concerns of society, in other parts of the world? Were other forms of testing, such as personnel, vocational, or ability testing, more central than intelligence? If so, what practical needs were they responding to?
In this section, we examine these questions by looking at the reception and evolution of testing in four other countries: France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany.
The French Twist
We have discussed the seminal role that Binet played in the development of intelligence testing.
We have also outlined his concerns and caveats about the nature and use of the tests and noted that these were largely overlooked by American psychologists in their zeal to quantify, classify, and sort. This begets important questions: What happened to intelligence testing in France? What happened to Binet’s test in its homeland? More generally, did testing and its applications gain as strong a foothold in France and elsewhere as they did in the United States?
Although Binet died prematurely in 1911, well before the outbreak of World War I, he had begun a study with Simon developing an intelligence test to be used in the French military.
However, his pilot results were misinterpreted and publicized by a French military official, and the research never got off the ground.
Moreover, they reflected Binet’s belief that detailed, individualized assessment was necessary as the basis for test formulation.
After Binet’s death, the directorship of his lab- oratory was given to Henri Pi´eron (1881–1964), an experimental psychologist of diverse inter- ests. At this point, with the transition in the laboratory and the advent of war, work on intel- ligence testing was put on hold. When Pi´eron resumed this line of work, assisted heavily by his wife Marguerite Pi´eron, he adhered closely to Binet’s view of intelligence as multifaceted and complex and to his view of tests as tools
138 CHAPTER 6 PSYCHOLOGISTS AS TESTERS: APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY, ORDERING SOCIETY
for creating individual, diagnostic formulations rather than as technologies of mass classification.
Collaboratively, the Pi´erons developed an intelli- gence test for vocational guidance that they used extensively at L’Institut National d’Orientation Professionelle, cofounded by Henri Pi´eron in 1929 to help French students make career de- cisions. The test, reflecting the Pi´erons’ belief in the multifaceted nature of intelligence, con- tained seven parts. The end product of the test was a graphical profile, not a number for ranking, that clearly indicated the individual respondent’s relative strengths and weaknesses to be used for individualized recommendations. The test was intended to fill a fairly specialized need in a system that already had a structure for selecting students for either higher education or vocational training. It was intended to help students in the vocational stream make more specific decisions about career options. The intent was not mass testing and policy recommendations but individ- ualized assessment (for more on Pi´eron and his work, seeChapter 8).
The Binet-Simon test was also used by French child psychiatrist Georges Heuyer (1884–1977) in the 1920s. He developed a medicopsycholog- ical examination procedure for assessing juvenile offenders that was adopted by the French Soci- ety of Legal Medicine in 1927 as compulsory for all minors appearing in French courts. Heuyer’s use of the tests to give a quick gauge of the child’s mental level came under attack by some, who were displeased with what they perceived as a cavalier, American-type attitude to using the tests for screening. Heuyer was careful to point out, however, that the test was but one of many in a comprehensive examination with six components.
Thus, despite lively interest in the tests and their use for specific purposes, by the 1920s and 1930s, unlike the United States, France had no tradition of mass testing. One of the primary rea- sons for the absence of mass intelligence testing in France was that, as one historian has noted, the French simply ‘‘did not need them’’ (Schneider, 1992, p. 128). As we have already mentioned, the
structure of the French educational system was quite different from the American system. Al- though both countries supported universal edu- cation, France had a centralized, national system, unlike in the United States, where each state con- trolled its own colleges and universities. Thus, France already had in place an elaborate sys- tem of national examinations that automatically funneled students into university placements or vocational training. The educational system itself functioned as a gatekeeper for identifying the in- tellectual elite who would proceed to higher and more specialized training, and intelligence tests were largely reserved for the problem of identi- fying the mentally deficient. The United States, although no less meritocratic, did not develop such a state-supported system, partly because of an underlying belief, as one historian of psychol- ogy has put it, in the ‘‘free play of talents among self-determining individuals’’ that would allow the most talented to rise to the top (Carson, 2007, p. 3).
Finally, the development of intelligence test- ing also reflected differences in the way psy- chology, more generally, developed in each of the two countries. As we have already discussed, American psychology came to rely quite heavily on quantification and measurement as indicators of its scientific status and technological potential in the early years of the 20th century. Employed on a large scale, the intelligence test provided both scientific legitimacy and practical efficiency.
While no less scientific in orientation, French psychologists relied more heavily on a tradi- tion of clinical observation and thus were more comfortable with the individualized use of tests to achieve circumscribed practical aims, such as individual vocational counseling.
The British Context
Yet a different picture of the development of intelligence testing emerged in Britain. As we have previously discussed, Galton’s formulation of intelligence as hereditary and biologically
INTELLIGENCE TESTING AROUND THE WORLD: CENTER OR PERIPHERY? 139
based was highly influential. He believed that intelligence could be assessed by measuring the strength of the nervous system through sensory, motor, and perceptual tasks and that performance on these tasks was indicative of a unitary, biolog- ically based, heritable trait. Charles Spearman’s (1863–1945) development of his two-factor the- ory of intelligence, first published in a 1904 paper titled ‘‘General Intelligence: Objectively Deter- mined and Measured’’ postulated that a gen- eral factor—g—orgeneral intelligence, worked through specific intelligences to produce abilities on specific tasks. Spearman’s work was moti- vated, in part, by the desire to elaborate on the theoretical underpinnings the Galtonian con- ception of intelligence. The practical goal, in this tradition, was to collect thousands of responses to these simple tests to chart the distribution of indi- vidual variation in the population, which would be used to support and propel the eugenicist agenda. Tests of higher, more complex mental functions, such as Binet and Simon were develop- ing, were not Galton’s, or Spearman’s, concern.
First, this kind of assessment would take too long.
Second, they were convinced that their relatively simple tests were tied to a unitary factor of gen- eral intelligence that was heritable. Third, they could use individual deviation from statistical norms to diagnosesocial pathology without the need for extensive individual assessment. Their system was designed to serve an administrative, not a clinical, function. Interestingly, however, it was for just such an administrative function that the Binet test usurped (in fact, preempted) the Galtonian-type tests of sensory functions. As sociologist Nikolas Rose has written of this kind of test,
Yet despite the link it forged between the social requirements and psychological assess- ments, despite its certainty of the possibility of assessing intelligence through the mea- surement of sensory functions, and despite the corollary that psychologists possessed the rights and capacities to adjudicate in cases of suspected pathology of the intel- lect, these claims fell on deaf ears as far as
administrative procedures for diagnosing the feeble-minded were concerned. (1985, p. 123) The Binet-Simon test was introduced in Britain not by psychologists but through the medical profession. It was through this conduit, and for the practical task of identifying the men- tally deficient, that the Binet test succeeded and was adopted whereas tests of sensory and motor ability failed to be taken up. According to Rose, the Binet-Simon test provided the crucial link between the measurement of internal, individ- ual mental capacities and the measurement of behaviors that could be linked to social norms.
By forging this link, despite their repeated ac- knowledgment of the inherent limitations of the test, Binet and Simon had produced a measure of adaptation to social norms and requirements that was well suited to the administrative demands of identifying the feebleminded.Combined with this was the professional monopoly of this task by physicians, who kept both educators and psychol- ogists well out of what they saw as their exclusive clinical domain. Intelligence was just one factor among many others in formulating a specific case and making recommendations. Thus, in Britain, medicine displaced psychology in the individual diagnosis of intellectual pathology, and eugenic psychologists were extremely critical of the Binet test, citing lack of theoretical sophistication and the assessment of acquired (i.e., language) rather than innate characteristics, for example. Such cri- tique was unsurprising, given Binet’s divergent viewpoint on the very nature of intelligence as malleable and heavily influenced by environment and learning.
Although British psychoeugenicists (to use Rose’s term) objected to the Binet test, they nonetheless conceded that it was here to stay, and by 1920 they had succeeded in statistically revising and restandardizing the test so that it was in line with their conceptualization of intelligence as a ‘‘normally distributed, innate, heritable, general cognitive capacity’’ (Rose, 1985, p. 140). Instrumental in this work was Cyril Burt (1883–1971), who was later found to
140 CHAPTER 6 PSYCHOLOGISTS AS TESTERS: APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY, ORDERING SOCIETY
have fabricated much of the data on which he based his claims of the heritability of IQ.
Through the 1920s, several developments in Britain contributed to the waning of the cen- trality of the problem of mental deficiency as a social concern and the use of tests to detect it. Primary among these were legislative equiv- ocations over enforced institutionalization and sterilization of mental defectives and increased emphasis on noninterventionist practices, such as mental and moral hygiene enacted within the private sphere of the family. With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, eugenicists lost their last vestiges of credibility. Although intelligence tests could be used for many other purposes, their utility for the psychoeugenicists was cur- tailed, and any public receptivity to their aims was significantly foreclosed.
Dutch Society
In the Netherlands, unlike in England and to some extent the United States, intelligence test- ing was not tied to a tradition of viewing intelli- gence as a unitary, heritable faculty, and eugenics occupied a comparatively marginal position in Dutch society. Although as late as the 1920s some researchers were still publishing studies of skull size as an indication of intellectual ability, a Dutch variation of the Binet-Simon test, called the Binet-Herderschˆee test after the psycholo- gist who revised it, was in use starting with its publication in 1919 through the 1960s (although it was never actually fully restandardized on a sample of Dutch children). It too was originally devised to identify subnormal children for ed- ucational purposes. The Netherlands legislated mandatory education in 1901. Herderschˆee was a eugenicist, but he believed not in a unitary theory but in the multifaceted nature of intel- ligence. The Netherlands never passed eugenic legislation. Although there were certainly propo- nents, eugenics was never a major preoccupation and those social scientists who adhered to a eu- genicist agenda were, apparently, professionally
marginal. As two historians of Dutch psychology have written, ‘‘Altogether then, the debate over the introduction of intelligence testing in the Netherlands . . . lacked the sharp edges that it has in the United States and in Britain’’ (Mulder
& Heyting, 1998, p. 356). They argue that the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of the Nether- lands failed to provide eugenicists with a fertile ground for their techniques.
Another inhibitor of the mass use of intelligence tests to address eugenic concerns was the structure of Dutch society itself. In 1917, to settle a long-standing political dispute among religious groups over the control of primary education, the Dutch constitution was changed to sanction an educational system divided into autonomous and separate religious spheres. Thus, Protestant,Catholic, and Neutral pillars were created. Thispillarizationof Dutch society extended well beyond the educational system into almost all aspects of social, cultural, political, and economic life, from the arts, to the workplace, health provision, sports and leisure, and even media. Two consequences of this pillarization for academic psychology were a re- sistance toward technoscientific incursions into the private realm of the family and a lingering distrust of a purely materialistic, reductionistic, and deterministic science. Protestants,Catholics, and other denominational groups were generally opposed to a completely mechanistic and economical approach to daily life and were critical of purely empirical, as opposed to more interpretive and holistic, approaches.
Science, in this context, could be useful, but only as it accorded with religious beliefs and Christian conduct. Intelligence testing and eugenics, inasmuch as they exemplified this technoscientific trend, were never embraced.
Germany and Psychotechnics
The situation in Germany provides our last point of comparison. Although German psychologist William Stern (1871–1938) was responsible for suggesting the calculation of mental age
INTELLIGENCE TESTING AROUND THE WORLD: CENTER OR PERIPHERY? 141
divided by chronological age from Binet’s test to produce the IQ, Stern’s program ofdifferential psychologyencompassed more than intelligence testing. His approach stressed the understanding of the total personality in its individuality, what he later termed ‘‘personalistic psychology.’’
Stern was also committed to the thoroughgoing applicationof psychology in all domains of public life, from education to the courtroom to the workplace. It was this latter attitude (i.e., the importance of practical application rather than mass intelligence testing per se) that seems to have characterized the testing movement in German psychology, at least through the First World War.
In 1900, Stern coined the termpsychotech- nik (psychotechnics, sometimes regarded as an extension of Taylor’s scientific management system) to refer to the practice of studying
individual differences for ‘‘human management’’
purposes. Stern did early work on the psychology of eyewitness testimony for which he devised pic- ture tests to test subjects’ visual memory, such as the Farm Kitchen Test and the Bunny Birthday Party Test. In 1908 he cofounded theJournal of Applied Psychologywith Otto Lipmann. His Ger- man colleague, Hugo M ¨unsterberg (1863–1916), who came to the United States to replace William James (1842–1910) as the head of the psycholog- ical laboratory at Harvard University, also did testimony research but is even better known for systematizing the field of psychotechnics in his 1913 bookPsychology and Industrial Efficiency(for more on M ¨unsterberg, seeChapter 4).
In the German context, World War I pro- vided ample opportunity for the development of psychotechnics (although the development of psychotechnics was certainly not limited to Germany; it spread rapidly throughout Europe and North America). For example, under the direction of Max Rubner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Labor Physiology in Berlin, pilots and transport personnel in the German military were tested for the effects of fatigue on performance. Various manual and physical dexterity tests, as well as tests of concentration, attention, and reasoning, were devised as well for personnel selection purposes, and these practices proliferated after the war, spreading rapidly into business and industry. Although paper-and-pencil tests were sometimes used, psychotechnics gradually became associated primarily with apparatus tests, often constructed by the researchers. The apparatus was often designed to emulate as closely as possible the actual work tasks or skills that would be required of a particular occupation. For example, during World War I, German psychologists Walther Moede (1888–1958) and Curt Piotrowski (1873–1944) were asked to screen potential drivers of costly army motorcars to reduce the high accident rates. In the laboratory, they built a simulated driving situation and measured subjects’ abilities to react to different challenges and dilemmas. As a result of the success of this
142 CHAPTER 6 PSYCHOLOGISTS AS TESTERS: APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY, ORDERING SOCIETY
program, Moede and Piotrowski were contacted by the head of the Royal Saxon Railroads and were asked to extend their methods to testing railroad personnel. The railroads had become an important means of transportation during the war, and safety problems associated with con- ductor error were a constant concern. In 1917, they installed a testing laboratory in Dresden and thus began an important and enduring liaison between psychotechnicians and the railroads, not just in Germany but throughout Europe and the United States as well (for more on German psychotechnics between the world wars, see Chapter 8).