Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [142]
(Even a strong correlation, to be sure, may be “spurious”—an artificial result of some other cause. In men, for instance, the degree of baldness correlates with length of marriage—not because one has any connection with the other but because age is related to each. Later techniques of analysis have been able to screen out such misleading correlations.)
The psychologist George Miller, appraising the value of Galton’s discovery, writes:
Covariation is a central concept, not only for genetics and psychology, but for all scientific inquiry. A scientist searches for the causes of events; all he ever finds are correlations between antecedent and consequent conditions… Galton’s insight has been, and continues to be, essential for vast stretches of modern social and behavioral science, and is useful in countless ways to engineers and natural scientists as well.16
Add to that his many other important methodological contributions and one can see why, although Galton was not a profound thinker, Raymond Fancher says that “few men have had greater impact on modern psychology.”17
Galtonian Paradoxes
The outcome of Galton’s work is a paradox. Although several of his methodological inventions are of vital importance in contemporary psychological research, his name means little to most psychologists and is all but unknown to the public. Working alone outside a university setting, he created no school of psychology, supervised no doctoral dissertations, and had few followers. Moreover, his chief contributions were research methods rather than illuminating theories, but the world remembers the latter, even though ingenious research methods are often the route to great insights.
And there is another and larger paradox. The measuring of individual differences in intelligence, a prominent goal of Galton’s life, has had a great impact on Western society since the early part of the present century—but not by means of his method. Although he conceived of and originated mental testing, his name is not linked with any of the tests used today or in the past ninety years; except in histories of psychology, he is remembered, if at all, as the originator not of mental testing but of eugenics.
In Great Britain, Galton was the founder of a “new psychology” of individual differences, but almost no British psychologists thought of themselves as Galtonians.18 In the latter part of the nineteenth century most British experimental psychologists went to Germany for training and brought Wundtian procedures and theory back with them. They adopted many of Galton’s ideas and methodological inventions but considered themselves Wundtians. The new German psychology was held in much greater esteem than the British; it was the product of the university system and was “pure,” while Galton’s was the product of a gifted amateur and was intended to serve practical purposes.
Galton’s effect was greatest in America, but again not in the form of a school of psychology. Before the turn of the century, many American psychologists were structuralists (Wundtians), who had no interest in the measurement of individual differences. By 1905 the functionalists (Jamesians) were dominant, but though they were sympathetic to many of Galton’s ideas, they defined themselves in grander theoretical terms than those of his psychology. Like William James, many leading figures in American psychology, including John Dewey, James Rowland Angell, George H. Mead, James McKeen Cattell, Edward Lee Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth, based their theories on the evolutionary selection of the mentally