History of Psychometrics

History of Psychometrics: Chinese Influence

  • From ~2000 BCE to the early 1900s, such testing practices existed but were later discontinued 

    • These tests included systematically testing intelligence, ability, knowledge, aptitude

  • 2000 B.C.E. 

    • Scattered evidence of civil service testing in China 

  • 206 B.C.E. to 220 C.E. 

    • Han Dynasty in China develops test batteries 

      • Two or more tests used in conjunction

      • Test topics included civil law, military affairs, agriculture, revenue, geography

      • Scores from these tests determined which jobs people could do

      •  Select government workers 

  • Started putting more weight onto these tests:

  • 1368 C.E. to 1644 C.E. 

    • Ming Dynasty in China develops multistage testing 

    • Local tests lead to provincial capital tests, capital tests lead to national capital tests 

    • Only those that passed the national tests were eligible for public office 

  • 1832 → English East India Company (based in UK) copies Chinese system to select employees for overseas duty 

  • Up until this point, these tests were used to allocate people to jobs 

    • Used scores at face value, as it were objectively correct, to put people to jobs 

  • 1855 → British Government adopts English East India Company selection examinations 

    • French and German gov follow shortly 

  • 1883 → US establishes the American Civil Service Commission

Developed and administered competitive examinations for government jobs 

History of Psychometrics: Individual Differences, Darwin and Galton

  • Darwin: Individual differences– despite our similarities, no two humans are exactly alike → because some individual differences are more ‘adaptive’ than others

    • These differences, over time, lead to more complex, intelligent organisms 

    • This was formally published in 1859

Galton → introduced the idea that psychological traits can be measured, created the first systematic mental tests

  • Galton (Darwin’s cousin): some people possessed characteristics that made them ‘more fit’ than others 

    • First systematic mental tests in 1884 London → Anthropometric Lab → looked at the variation between human responses, how did ppl do things differently based on who they were, what were the different range of responses they could get from people

    • Lab involved playing sounds from a whistle to measure range of sounds people could hear, or have people estimate a bar’s length  

    • This established the tradition of individual differences testing, which modern psychometrics is built on 

  • Galton also noted that persons with mental retardation (delay/hindrance) also tend to have diminished ability to discriminate among heat, cold, and pain 

  • Other advances of Galton’s: 

    • Considered by some the founder of psychometrics → measured ppl’s reactions, abilities, reactions

    • Pioneered rating scales and questionnaires

    • First to document individuality of fingerprints → first to notice the difference in ppl’s fingerprints 

    • Studied efficacy of prayer 

    • First to apply statistics in the measurement of humans 

    • Founder of eugenics 

      • Eugenics: let the fittest survive; don’t treat or help people that actually have bad genes or traits (let them die) so that these traits are not around anymore, it ‘purifies/cleanses’ the population

      • So like, not letting the bad genes to be reproduced 

History of Psychometrics: Galton’s Famous Students

  • Karl Pearson: extended Galton’s early work with statistical regression

    • Developed: 

      • Linear regression as a formal statistical method 

      • Product-moment correlation (1896)→ we now call it Pearson’s r/ Pearson correlation coefficient

      • Standard deviation and variance as measures of spread

      • The chi‑square test

  • James McKeen Cattell: first to use the term “mental test”

    • U.S. dissertation on reaction time based upon Galton’s work 

History of Psychometrics: Early Experimental Psychologists 

  • Early 19th century scientists, generally interested in identifying common aspects, rather than individual differences → what is the normal behaviour? (different from Galton’s)

    • Differences between individuals was considered a measurement of error from tools and could just be ignored. This is caused by instruments producing slightly different readings each time so scientists assumed that the true value is the average

  • Johan Friedrich Herbart: mathematical models of the mind; founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline; went against Kant’s theories 

  • Ernst Heinrich Weber: sensory thresholds; ‘just noticeable differences’ (JND) → how much the things have to differ before you can tell that they are different

  • Gustav Theodor Fechner: mathematics of sensory thresholds of experience; founder of psychophysics; considered as a founder of experimental psychology; first to relate sensation and stimulus; considered by some the founder of psychometrics 

    • He influenced many prominent psychologists, such as Wundt, Freud

    • Wilhelm Wundt: considered one of the founders of psychology; first to set up a psych laboratory

    • Edward Tichner: succeeded Wundt; brought Structuralism to America

      • Guy Montrose Whipple (student of Tichner’s): pioneer of human ability testing, conducted seminars that changed the field of psych testing, APA issued its first set of standards for professional psych testing because of his criticisms 

      • He made psych testing more ethical because before his criticisms psych tests were used in wrong ways

    • Luis Leon Thurstone: large contributor to factor analysis, attended Whipple’s seminars, approach to measurement was termed the law of comparative judgement 

History of Psychometrics: Interest in Mental Deficiency 

  • 1805 Jean-Étienne Esquirol, French Physician 

    • Favourite student of Philippe Pinel (founder of psychiatry) 

    • Wrote a manuscript on ‘mental retardation’ 

      • Differentiated between insanity and mental retardation 

      • E.g. insanity had a period of normal intellectual functioning 

    • Measured degrees to mental retardation

      • Normality to ‘low-grade idiocy’ 

    • Attempted to develop system to classify people into these many degrees but found that the individual’s use of language provided the most dependable continuum 

  • 1940s Edouard Seguin, French Physician 

    • Pioneer in training mentally-retarded 

    • Rejected the notion of incurably mental retard 

    • 1837: opens first school devoted to teach mentally retarded children 

    • 1848: emigrates to USA, wide acceptance of his theories 

    • 1866s: experiments with physiological training of mentally retarded people 

      • Sense-training/muscle-training still used today 

      • Leads to nonverbal tests of intelligence (Seguin Form Board)

History of Psychometrics: Intelligence testing

  • 50 years after Esquirol and Seguin → 1905

  • Alfred Binet

  • French Society for the Psychological Study of the Child urged French ministers to develop special classes for children who failed to respond to normal schooling 

  • Ministers required a way to identify the children for special education

  • First Intelligence Test: Binet-Simon Scale of 1905

    • 30 items of increasing difficulty 

    • Standardised administration → same instructions and format for ALL children

    • Standardisation sample → created norms by which performance of one child can be compared with other children

      • 50 normal children aged 3-11 years, ‘some’ mentally retarded children and adults

      • They tried to standardise what was ‘normal’ by looking at this sample of 50 children

    • In 1908, more items were added for greater reliability 

      • Better standardisation sample (300 normal children)

      • Introduction of Mental Age: the child’s standing among children of different chronological ages in terms of his or her cognitive capacity 

Alfred Binet’s Legacy

  • 1911 Binet-Simon minor revision 

    • Binet dies 

  • 1912 Kulmann-Binet revision 

    • Extends testing downward to 3 months of age

  • 1916 Lewis Madison Terman and Stanford Colleagues revise Binet’s test for use in US

    • More psychometrically sound procedures (reliable, valid)

    • Intro of the term IQ

    • Mental Age/Chronological Age = IQ (intelligence quotient, see above images)

    • Terman was a Eugenicist 

      • This is not good because the intelligence testing was used to identify and support children with learning needs but being a Eugenicist is opposite of this goal

      • So a Eugenist bringing the test to the US → funnel sources away from them?? Thats suspicious 

      • But luckily it wasn’t being consistently, widely used like that, been used for both pos and neg purposes

        • Neg purposes → IQ score determined if you tried as an independent adult (e.g. if u murdered someone but ur IQ is below 70 u wouldn’t receive death sentence)


WW1

Robert Yerkes

  • Him and Colleagues developed two group tests of general mental ability for use with recruits to the US armed services during the First World War. 

    • Army Alpha test assessed the ability levels of those who could read and write

    • Army Beta test for those who were not literate. 

    • Although there is some dispute about how valuable the Army Alpha and Beta tests were to the war effort, they gave considerable impetus to psychological testing in the postwar period, and their basic structure was used subsequently by Wechsler when developing the Verbal and Performance subscales for his test of adult intelligence. 

There was a testing frenzy in 1930s

  • 1937 revision of the Standford-Binet includes over 3000 individuals in standardisation 

  • 1939 Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale 

    • Developed by David Wechsler and was a rival of Standford-Binet 

    • Subscales were adopted from the Army Scales 

    • Produces several scores of intellectual ability rather than Binet’s single scores (e.g. Verbal, Performance, Full-Scale)

    • Didn’t really require reading, more performance focused

    • Evolves into the Wechsler Series of Intelligence tests (e.g. WAIS, WISC, etc.)

History of Psychometrics: Personality Testing

  • Rise 1920s, Fall 1930s, Slow Rise 1940s

  • Intended to measure personality traits (not temporary state)

    • Trait: relatively enduring dispositions (tendencies to act, think or feel in a certain manner in any given circumstance)


First Rise and Fall

  • WW1 Robert Woodworth 

  • Woodworth Personal Data Sheet 

    • First objective personality test meant to aid in psychiatric interviews 

    • Designed to screen out soldiers unfit for duty 

    • Problem: Mistakenly assumed that a subjects’ responses could be taken at face value (i.e. no faking)

    • Problem: wording questions and questions were questionable 


Slow Rise: Projective Tests

Project your thoughts from an image 

  • Herman Rorschach inkblot test (1921) 

  • Started with great suspicion but was taken seriously in 1932

  • Systemetric colored and b/w inkblots

  • Your brain constantly makes sense of patterns, therefore these tests are trying to understand what you make sense of these nonsensical patterns

  • Based on Freud’s Fundamental assumption of psychic determinism- all mental events have a cause.

  • But responses may reflect cultural background rather than personality traits, reducing fairness and accuracy, interpretation depends heavily on the examiner’s training, theoretical orientation, and biases.

Thematic Apperception Test

  • 1935 Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan

  • “Ambiguous” pictures, more structured than Rorschach 

  • Subjects shown the picture and asked to write a story including:

    • What has led up to the event shown

    • What is happening at the moment

    • What the characters are feeling and thinking 

    • What the outcome of the story was

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

  • Early 1940s Starke R. Hathaway

  • Designed to discriminate between those without symptoms of mental illness (‘normal’) and patient groups with particular diagnosis.-566 Items.

  • Tried to deviate from tests like Woodworth where it made too many assumptions 

  • The meaning of the test response could only be determined by empirical research

  • Most widely used (MMPI-2, MMPI-A)

At the same time, there was other personality questionnaires being developed 

Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire 

  • Early 1940s Raymond B. Cattell 

  • Based on Factor Analysis → method for finding the minimum number of dimensions (factors) for explaining the largest number of variables