Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [143]
The most enthusiastic advocate of anthropometric measurement was James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944).20 Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and educated there at Lafayette College, he went to Leipzig in 1883 and studied with Wundt until 1886. His main research interest was the study of reaction times, but he was a fiercely independent young man and dared to differ with the great Wundt on a key methodological issue: Cat-tell doubted that anyone could really introspect in the manner called for by Wundt, namely, by subdividing reaction time into perception, choice, and so on. As a consequence, Cattell, though he was Wundt’s laboratory assistant, had to carry out some of his work in his own quarters, because Wundt would not allow in the laboratory research by those who could not or would not follow his introspection method.
Cattell was intrigued by the differences in reaction time among the people he tested, and discussed it as a matter of “special interest” in an 1885 paper.21 After earning his doctorate the following year, he went to London, met Galton, and, despite nearly a forty-year gap in their ages, found him a kindred spirit. Deeply impressed by Galton—many years later Cattell called him “the greatest man whom I have known”—he worked for him off and on for two years in the Anthropometric Laboratory at the South Kensington Museum and became thoroughly conversant with the tests performed there.
In 1888, at only twenty-eight, Cattell became a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (probably the first person in the world to hold that title; James, at Harvard, was not designated a professor of psychology until the following year). Cattell assembled a set of fifty tests, some Galtonian and some adapted from Fechner, Wundt, and other sources, and administered ten of them to his students to measure individual differences in intelligence. He supposed, as Galton had, that the chiefly physical characteristics measured by the tests were related to intelligence: strength of grip, speed of arm movement, reaction time to sound, just noticeable differences in weight, memory span for letters, and five others. In 1890, he described his work in a paper, in the journal Mind, called, “Mental Tests and Measurements”; it was the first use of that term and launched the mental-testing movement.
In 1891 Cattell moved to Columbia University as professor of psychology and head of the department. He expanded his battery of tests and each year gave them to fifty volunteers from among the entering freshmen. His admirable aim was to prove that the tests measured intelligence by showing a relationship between the test results and the students’ grades; toward that end, he collected test data and student grades for close to a decade. Meanwhile the same method of testing intelligence was demonstrated at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, where Joseph Jastrow, a leader of the American Psychological Association, created a virtual replica of Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory. Visiting psychologists undoubtedly found it interesting and impressive; during the 1890s such testing was begun in a number of laboratories in America and Europe.
By 1901 Cattell had collected enough data for a definitive study, and Clark Wissler, one of his students, performed a Galton-Pearson correlation analysis of them. His findings astonished and dismayed Cattell: there were no significant correlations between the students’ grades and any of the anthropometric tests. If grades and academic standing were indications of intellectual ability, the anthropometric tests were not.22 Furthermore, the tests were so little correlated with one another that it seemed plain they were not measuring a common attribute, as intelligence was presumed to be. Thus by yet another paradox, it was Galton’s discovery, correlation