Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [134]
Why anyone thought it worth even threepence to obtain these data is hard to say, but during the run of the exhibition, 9,337 persons did so. Perhaps the activity seemed meritorious in itself; it was a time when precise measurement was becoming the hallmark of science and had great cachet even if one had no specific purpose in mind.
If the visitors to the Anthropometric Laboratory had no specific purpose in mind, its proprietor did. He was Francis Galton, a tiny bald man with white sideburns whose penetrating blue eyes, jutting nose, and slit of a mouth gave him an air of authority a larger man might envy. Galton, an amateur psychologist, was convinced that the differences in intelligence among individuals were largely hereditary, and hence that society could advance the evolution of the human race by offering the most intelligent people rewards for procreating. But how were they to be identified? He believed that a number of hereditary physical traits or abilities, particularly acuity of the senses and reaction time, were related to intelligence and therefore were gauges of it. (Among his reasons for thinking so were two of his own observations: first, that mental retardates had poor sensory discrimination; second, that work requiring sensory acuity, such as piano tuning, wine tasting, or wool sorting, was always done by men, who, he took for granted, were far more intelligent than women.)2
Galton’s lineage may have predisposed him to his view of intelligence. On one side, he was a grandson of the eminent physician and botanist Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin, another grandson, was Galton’s cousin), and on the other side the grandson and son of successful bankers. But he had additional grounds. Earlier, he had collected genealogies of a large number of illustrious men and shown that eminence—which he equated with intelligence—runs in families.
It was to run trials of tests measuring physical characteristics allied to intelligence and to collect the results that Galton, at his own expense, set up the Anthropometric Laboratory at the exhibition. In so doing, he initiated a form of psychological research wholly unlike the experimentation Wundt was even then conducting in Leipzig, the introspection James was practicing at Harvard, and the “talking cure” Freud was discussing with Breuer in Vienna and would shortly start using in his office.
Whatever one may think of Galton’s views, he was no well-to-do, idle, Victorian chauvinist but a scientist of extraordinary mental gifts, enthusiasm, curiosity, and dedication to work. A genuine polymath, he was a successful inventor, award-winning geographer, authoritative travel writer, meteorologist, developer of the first workable system of identifying fingerprints, pioneer in the use of twin studies to tease apart the influences of heredity and environment, and inventor of correlation analysis, one of the most valuable research tools of psychology and other sciences.
Above all, Galton was the first to use mental tests, thereby inaugurating a new form of psychological research and a new field of study: individual differences. Other psychologists, Wundtians in particular, were looking for universal psychological principles such as the