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WHAT DID THE TESTS TEST?

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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).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 143

The technology of mental testing advanced considerably with the work of Binet, who extended the tests beyond basic mental pro- cesses to assess higher functions, like language and reasoning. When imported to the United States by Goddard, the Binet test encountered a receptive audience. With American psycholo- gists’ involvement in World War I, intelligence testing, as well as vocational aptitude testing and tests of emotional fitness, defined the work of psychologists and brought the tests to an even larger audience. After World War I, due to ever-increasing urbanization and immigration, the American educational system was in need of an efficient method for sorting students of highly varying levels of ability. The intelligence test proved to be just such a technology. In- terestingly, in France, Britain, the Netherlands,

and Germany, the intelligence test fared dif- ferently than it did in the United States, due to the variations in social policy, values, and needs that uniquely characterized each coun- try. Since Psychology and its products arise out of and return to the society of which they form a part, different societies produce differ- ent psychologies, that is, psychology is socially constructed.

In the background of these practical devel- opments was remarkably little consensus as to the very nature of the concept that had garnered American psychologists, at least, so much cultural currency. Whether believed to be hardwired or acquired, unitary or multifaceted, intelligence was, nonetheless, measurable. Debates about the nature of intelligence continue, heatedly, to this day.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

There is no paucity of sources on the history of intelligence testing. A few of the sources that have significantly informed our thinking are Ray Fancher’sThe Intelligence Men(1985), which pro- vides an extremely useful and sensitive account of the development of intelligence testing told through the lives of its major protagonists, as well as the controversies that have beset the enter- prise. We drew upon it for various aspects of this chapter but especially the sections on Galton and Binet. We also consulted Michael Sokal’s indis- pensable edited volume,Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890–1930 (1987), especially his chapter onCattell and mental anthropome- try. JoAnne Brown’sThe Definition of a Profession (1992) was useful for its analysis of the role of intelligence testing in the professionalization of psychology.

Leila Zenderland has written the definitive biography of Goddard,Measuring Minds(1998), effectively demonstrating how he recanted his extreme hereditarian views by the end of his

career. Terman’s life and career is ably chronicled by Henry Minton (1988), who has argued that Terman held to a committed liberalism and the progressive belief that science was an instrument of social progress throughout his lifetime. In his bookSchools as Sorters,Paul DavidChapman (1988) also covers Terman’s work on intelligence testing, further embedding it in the social problems and progressive ideals of the early 20th century. Paul McReynolds (1997) has written a useful biography of Witmer.

For our coverage of the rise of intelligence testing in the American context, along with the aforementioned books, we drew upon several journal articles among a large literature. We drew heavily on Paula Fass’s excellent article

‘‘The IQ’’ (1980) to contextualize the rise of IQ testing in the school system, where it was seen as a scientific method for regulating and organizing an increasingly unruly and hetero- geneous democracy. Her discussion of Dewey’s educational philosophy and how it fit into these

144 CHAPTER 6 PSYCHOLOGISTS AS TESTERS: APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY, ORDERING SOCIETY

goals was also helpful. For our coverage of the impact of World War I on American psychol- ogy we used Daniel Kevles’s article ‘‘Testing the Army’s Intelligence’’ (1968) and Franz Samel- son’s article ‘‘World War I Intelligence Testing and the Development of Psychology’’ (1977). For the different paths and experiences of Yerkes and Scott during the First World War, we drew upon Richard von Mayrhauser’s chapter ‘‘The Man- ager, the Medic, and the Mediator’’ (1987), in which he argues that Scott met with more success because of his comparative lack of ambivalence about applied psychology generally and because of the perception by the military that Yerkes was more interested in collecting data than in be- ing of practical service. For information on early personality tests, we consulted Ludy Benjamin Jr. and David Baker’s comprehensive work,From S´eance to Science(2004). For more information on Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet and subse- quent personality measures used in industry, see Robert Gibby and Michael Zickar’s article ‘‘A History of the Early Days of Personality Testing in American Industry’’ (2008). Jung’s 1910 publi- cation, ‘‘The Association Method,’’ presents the lectures he gave on the topic while visiting the United States with Freud in 1909 and is available online at theClassics in the History of Psychol- ogy website (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/).

In the section titled Sorting the Sexes, we drew upon Katherine Milar’s article ‘‘The First Generation of Women Psychologists and the Psychology of Women’’ (2000), as well as Henry Minton’s article concerning the same period,

‘‘Psychology and Gender at the Turn of the Century’’ (2000). Rosalind Rosenberg’s bookBe- yond Separate Spheres (1982) has an extremely useful account of Woolley’s work and an in- formative discussion of the ‘‘new woman.’’ For more details about Woolley, consult Jane Fowler Morse’s article ‘‘Ignored but not Forgotten’’

(2002). The author is Woolley’s granddaugh- ter. For information on Hollingworth’s work, we used Stephanie Shields’s article ‘‘Ms. Pil- grim’s Progress’’ (1975b). There are two book- length biographies of Hollingworth, one written by her husband, Harry Hollingworth (1943), and one written by an educational psycholo- gist that focuses on her later work with gifted children (Klein, 2002). For information on the professional patterns of women psychologists af- ter World War I, we used Laurel Furumoto’s chapter ‘‘On the Margins’’ (1987). Margaret Rossiter’s canonical two-volume work Women Scientists in America (1982, 1995) has much use- ful information about women psychologists, as well as important contextual information about women in science more generally.

For the development of intelligence testing in the French context, we relied heavily on two sources: William Schneider’s article ‘‘After Binet’’ (1992) and JohnCarson’s masterful com- parative volume on the evolution of intelligence testing in the American and French contexts,The Measure of Merit(2007).

You can also find a highly informative auto- biographical statement by Henri Pi´eron in the fourth volume of the seriesA History of Psychology in Autobiography (1952). It sheds light not only on his career but also on the character of the French higher educational system and French experimental psychology in the early decades of the 20th century.

Intelligence testing and its discontents in the British context are discussed by Nikolas Rose in his book The Psychological Complex (1985), and we have drawn heavily on this work for this short section. For our brief discussion of intelligence testing and eugenics in the Netherlands, we consulted Ernst Mulder and Frieda Heyting’s article ‘‘The Dutch Curve’’

(1998). For more information on pillarization

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 145

and its effects on Dutch academic psychology, see Peter van Strien’s ‘‘Transforming Psychology in the Netherlands’’ (1991).

For the development of psychotechnics in Germany, we drew upon Andreas Killen’s article

‘‘Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Fascism’’ (2007), as well as the short il- lustrated chapter on psychotechnics by Peter van Drunen (1997) in the extremely useful vol-

umeA Pictorial History of Psychology. In this same volume, Horst Gundlach (1997) has a useful chapter on the application of psychology to the railroads, and Wilfrid Schmidt (1997) has an informative chapter on Stern. M ¨unsterberg’s career and contributions to applied psychol- ogy are chronicled and analyzed in Matthew Hale’s book Human Science and Social Order (1980).

Ernst Mach(1838–1916)

James Mark Baldwin(1861–1934) Oswald KüKK lpe(1862–1915)

Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944) James Rowland Angell (1869–1949)

TIMELINE 1830–1940

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