Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [139]
Despite the questionnaire’s “alarming” length—Galton’s own rueful term—most of the subjects completed and returned it. (It was the first such questionnaire in history; today a researcher might get no such compliance.) When Galton tabulated the responses, he found that a majority believed their taste for science was innate; on the other hand, most respondents had a lot to say about how their education had either helped or hindered them. Galton felt obliged to admit that environmental factors, education in particular, could enhance or inhibit the development of scientific aptitude, and that its inheritance did not inevitably lead to success. Nonetheless, he maintained that hereditary aptitude had been shown to be the essential factor in scientific achievement.
Much later, as research methodology developed, it would become apparent that Galton’s questionnaire and his analysis of the data had serious weaknesses. For one thing, many of the questions, particularly those about the reasons for the respondents’ success, yielded purely subjective answers; for another, Galton had not given the questionnaire to noneminent scientists and nonscientists to see whether their answers were any different from those of eminent scientists; for a third, he had no way (though later he would invent one) to mathematically measure the relation between any two factors so as to judge whether it was accidental or significant. All the same, Galton’s use of the questionnaire and analysis of the data were innovations of immense value and have been important weapons in the armamentarium of psychological research ever since.
During the next decade Galton, now middle-aged, worked harder than ever at studies of individual psychological differences. In 1883 he published his observations on some thirty miscellaneous topics in an omnium gatherum titled Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, a curious mixture of science and speculation, data and conjecture, statistics and anecdotes. Some of it purported to be science but was little more than Victorian male prejudice. In the chapter on “character,” for instance, Galton asserted without offering evidence that “one notable peculiarity in the character of the woman is that she is capricious and coy, and has less straightforwardness than the man.” He approved of this on evolutionary grounds: in courtship, were there no female hesitancy and male competition, “the race would degenerate through the absence of that sexual selection for which the protracted preliminaries of love-making give opportunity.”
But a good deal of Inquiries consisted of highly original scientific studies. One dealt with the ability to summon up mental images. Many nonscientists, Galton found, think in vivid images, many scientists in purely abstract terms, and he speculated that the ability to summon up sharp mental images hinders thinking in highly generalized and abstract terms. In another study he reported his invention of the word-association test; he drew up a list of seventy-five stimulus words and exposed them to his own view one by one, jotting down his first two or three associations to each. Most of what he learned was unremarkable, such as that, on repeating the test, he came up with the same associations. But there was genuine value to his observation that many of his associations sprang from his own experiences and that other people would be unlikely to have his associations. The result was that word-association tests became a leading way of studying individual personality traits.
Another noteworthy study was a report of one more Galton innovation. Still grappling with the problem of how to demonstrate the relative influences of nature and nurture on the development of the mind and personality, he had