What I would like you to do is to find a topic from chapter 8 that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find youtube clips that demonstrate something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. But use at least 3 sources.
Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter, and why you are interested in it. Next, I would like you to take the information you found related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.
By now you all should be skilled at synthesizing the topical material you have obtained from the various web sites you visited. If you need a refresher please let me know.
Thanks,
Hugo munsterburg was one of the most well known German-american psychologists. His contributions were mainly with applying psychology to business and industry to make them better.
He published a book that became a best seller and very influential on how businesses hired and selected employees. It was called Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. It was separated into three parts—the best possible man for the job—which dealt with selecting workers, the best possible work—which dealt with how employers and employees could exhibit and the most efficient work strategies, and the best possible effect which dealt with marketing, sales, and advertising. He came up with different mental tests and simulations to tests applicants skills and abilities, and conducted research in a variety of different work places such as streetcar workers, telephone operators, ship captains, and salesman.
He contributed to forensic psychology in a large way, mostly by analyzing eyewitness testimony and how people see and remember things. He argued that each person perceives and interprets things differently and in their own way and that people’s own experiences and biases effect how they recollect specific memories and events. One way in which he did this was by creating a test that was just a series of dots. He had a number of people stare at the dots and then write down what they thought they saw, or interpreted, which ended up being vastly different from participant to participant. He also conducted experiments with crime scenes, and would ask witnesses questions about the events and found that details were very different from witness to witness based on their own experiences and biases.
Munsterburg was also a force in clinical psychology, but he it was once again, also controversial. He employed “reciprocal antagonism” into his treatments which involved strengthening the thoughts opposite of the ones causing the problem—however it was less effective because he rarely targeted the underlying causes of these symptoms and surface problems. He also strongly relied on the theory of psychophysical parallelism, which argued that all physical processes also had a parallel brain process.
Unfortunately munsterburg held a controversial and belittling view of women and deemed them incapable of serving on juries or completing graduate school because they were incapable of rational thinking.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/hugomunsterberg.html
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hugo_Munsterberg
http://books.google.com/books?id=iZwXnfYAo3oC&pg=PA347&lpg=PA347&dq=hugo+munsterbergs+contributions&source=bl&ots=czlRshlGRr&sig=z8eXTrA4Jk4sLSCDVXFwiLiRbac&hl=en&ei=uyRtTeiCMorcgQfH0MWYBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFAQ6AEwCA#
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Hugo_M%C3%BCnsterberg
The topic I chose was Alfred Binet and The Birth of Intelligence Testing. I picked it because I've always found it interesting how people choose to measure intelligence. It fights into this chapter because the whole thing is basically on mental testing. The completion test was designed to assess the effects of mental fatigue in school children. Benit came up with what he called the mental level. This meant that a normal 5 year old could solve tasks at the 5 year old level but a subnormal 5 year old might only be able to score at a 4 year old level. Where the child scored was called the mental level. He also thought that children scoring 2 years behind their actual age should be put in a special class. Goddard proposed using the word “moron” so the public understood that they were a special kind of group.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/binet.htm
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/binet.shtml
http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/34/Alfred-Binet.html
I found the topic of intelligence and testing to be most interesting to me. I thought the topic is interesting because intelligence is one of the most ambiguous things to me. What makes someone more intelligent than another? Does knowing quantum physics matter in day to day life? These are the kinds of questions that I ask when I think of intelligence.
Intelligence is a term describing a property of the mind including related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, learning from past experiences, planning, and problem solving. This seems like a good description of general intelligence, but is this what we really measure when we dictate someone as smart or stupid? We measure intelligence using IQ. IQ , is a score derived from one of several different standardized tests designed to assess intelligence. A standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent and are administered and scored in a predetermined, standard manner.
Now looking at intelligence and how we measure it and try to determine it through tests, can we really look and say someone is smarter than another? I am a firm believer that anyone has the capacity to be the next Steven Hawkings in terms of intelligence, some people just have to work harder at it. Is that intelligence? The amount of effort/work ratio it takes to get good grades? Is someone that studies 30 minutes for a test and gets an A smarter than someone that studies 2 hours on a test and gets a B?
Most of this topic is just questions but I feel a strong dislike for our testing and educational system. I feel that we are no longer out to learn anymore, it is to earn grades. As long as you can BS enough to get a B on a test you can forget everything you just learned and move on. It's how I learn so I am not self-righteous or anything, I just wish we could actually LEARN...and learn practical knowledge we might actually use in life. It pains me to see that psychologists are the reason we have this kind of testing system we have today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardized_test
Hugo Munsterberg was a pioneer in the study of applied psychology. He searched for ways to apply the findings of researchers of his time to real-life situations. His work fits into this chapter because the field of applied psychology evolved the fields of Industrial Psychology and other areas.
Musterberg performed a lot of experimental research in the area of I/O psychology. He was uninterested in whether or not his results held up against other experimenters’ findings. He was simply interested in sparking interest in others to conduct further interest in these emerging fields. Munsterberg wrote one of the first books in industrial psychology called Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. This book investigated some monotony, attention, and fatigue, physical and social influences on working power, the effects of advertising, and the future development of economic psychology. This served as a base point for many of the new industrial psychologists of the time. He believed that an efficient workplace was one that matched the demands of the job to the skills and values of the workers. These beliefs are all still modern theories for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He created mental tests and job questionnaires to help facilitate this process.
Munsterberg also forged the way in forensic and clinical psychology. Munsterberg was strongly interested in mental illness, which is what led him to further his work in clinical psychology. He didn’t take the traditional approach to treating patients. His work was centered around the theory of psychophysical parallelism. This stated that psychological processes had a physical process in the brain parallel to them. As for forensic psychology, Munsterberg was interested in the area of eyewitness testimony. Munsterberg questioned the reliability of eyewitnesses. By analyzing testimonies both in his lab and from field studies, he proved that people can warp what they think they see. These misperceptions can be influenced by an individual’s own biases, interests, and experiences. He published the book On the Witness Stand which discussed how eyewitness accounts shouldn’t hold such a prominent part in the courtroom and how some people are prone to confess to crimes they had not committed because of their need to please others. Munsterberg’s work in applied psychology was very important and controversial at the time.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/munsterb.htm
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hugo_Munsterberg#Industrial_psychology
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/hugomunsterberg.html
In Chapter 8 I found the Kallikak Family study to be very interesting. Henry Goddard believed that feeblemindedness was caused by poor genetics. He wrote a book called The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness. It tells the story about his stay in Vineland. Goddard’s story focuses on Deborah Kallikak who was twenty-two when he met her. It had been suggested that she go to Vineland when she was younger because she was considered to be feebleminded since she had not been doing well in school. It was encouraged that she go to Vineland to have tests conducted on her using the Binet-Simon scales. Deborah had some capabilities such as cooking, sewing and woodworking. However, she could hardly read, write or do math. The test results showed she was menally as old as a nine year old. I found this study interesting because this was before learning disabilities were discovered. Of course there have been disabled people all throughout time, but this is when studies began to take place and prevention ideas began to be popularized. Goddard believed that feeblemindedness was caused by heredity. He said “we must recognize that the human family shows varying stocks or strains that are as marked and breed as true as anything in plant or animal life.” The idea I took away from this statement is that one should look at an individual for what they are and if there is something wrong with them and you choose to reproduce with them, your offspring will most likely also have something wrong with them too. Basically, genetics are passed on. Good and bad. Goddard studied Deborah’s family history back six generations and found a large amount of defectiveness in every generation. The Kallikak family was well-known for having mental deficiencies. Somewhere down the line a soldier in the Kallikak family had an affair during war and the result of this unfaithfulness was a feebleminded son, Deborah’s great-great grandfather. The solider went about his life and married a girl from a “good” minded family. They produced “good” genetics, whereas the unlucky girl did not and chose to still use the Kallikak last name.
Goddard’s study was very well thought out and extensive but it was still inconsistent. There are many factors that could have contributed to the “bad” Kallikak side. Such as starvation, malnutrition, poverty and environmental issues could have all contributed to their short comings. Henry Goddard was a very wise man during his time, but he did not believe that the environment could impact a person’s life. Let alone consider that just because a person is feebleminded does not mean they will necessarily be a criminal. A person that is well off and fully functioning could also be a criminal. There are many factors that drive a person to be the way they are. It is nearly impossible to pinpoint one particular event on a person’s entire being.
Goddard’s solution to ridding society of feebleminded people was to create more places like Vineland so they could be removed from society. Once removed from society, they would be sterilized in order to prevent them from reproducing. I found this whole topic really amusing because it seems like such a simple solution. If you don’t want to deal with “morons, idiots, and imbeciles” then simply remove them from society and make it impossible for them to produce offspring with their unfortunate genes. If an idea like that was actually followed through with, the world would be a much different place today. Today that idea seems absurd and like it would go against our freedom. But, if institutions like that actually were created and still around today, maybe nobody would be around that disapproved of this method of “purifying society”. This was just a really interesting topic to me because it raised a lot of “what if’s” for me. It fits into the chapter since the whole chapter is about mental testing.
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/kallikak.shtml
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Goddard/
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=col_facpub
I chose to write about Robert Yerkes and Alpha and Beta testing for my topical blog. Yerkes started out as a comparative psychologist at Harvard. Because comparative psychology is expensive, he shifted more towards consciousness. He wrote a text book. He worked at the Boston State Hospital doing Binet’s tests on patients. Binet was the first guy to develop an intelligence test. He used this to determine if children were in need of special education. He was elected the president of the American Psychological Association. He was in the Experimentalists with Titchener. At this time world war 1 was beginning. The Army put Yerkes in charge of a group of psychologists. He was eventually promoted to a Colonel. They used Binet’s tests to soldiers. They had to make a few altercations though. They had to do group testing, and he changed the tests from seeing who was unfit for public school to who would be more fit for what position. This really caught on like wild fire. There were two tests made. The Army Alpha test was a tests given to the recruits literate enough to read and follow the directions. The Army Beta was the tests for those who could not read as well. 1.5 million soldiers took the test and positions were given to recruits depending on the scores of the tests administered.
I was stated that at the time the average mental age for these soldiers was about 13 (mild mental retardation). This also caused a bit of chaos during the time period, because at the time, I swear these people thought you could catch mental retardation. This caused a big uproar. Everyone was kind of freaking out because they thought by letting people with low IQs make babies it was making people in America stupider. People at the time were really in to Eugenics. Eugenics is the idea that individual differences are due to genetic factors. So people thought that because people of lower intelligence were breeding, they were causing the population to decrease in IQ. They also kind of blamed this on letting foreigners in. This caused controversy about “Nativism”, a defensive nationalism that viewed all outsiders with suspicion and alarm. They did find though that the more levels of education a person had the higher the score they achieved. Hmm… wonder why that was??? This is something that is still true when looking at current scores. I think they might be on to something there! haha
The tests weren’t that much help to the military in WWI because they were still tweaking them a little bit and the higher up people didn’t really believe in them. Over time they began to see these as beneficial though. They used them in WWII and they still use variations of them today.
These tests were not only beneficial to the military though. They were also beneficial to universities, schools, and also to businesses.
I really liked Lippmann’s view on the topic, he was “outraged at the possibility that testing could forever doom a child who happened not to perform very well on one fifty minute segment of their life.”
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/IntelligenceTests.html
http://www.official-asvab.com/history_coun.htm
http://www.nald.ca/library/research/adlitus/page19.htm
http://www.holah.karoo.net/gouldstudy.htm
I was interested in the topic of Human Factors and ergonomics. These two topics are related to psychology in that psychology is a major factor in creating these two topics.
“Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance. Ergonomists contribute to the design and evaluation of tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems in order to make them compatible with the needs, abilities and limitations of people.”
The topic of ergonomics and Human Factors became quite popular after World War II. Psychologist Elisa Porter was the first person to really invest time and effort into ergonomics and its concepts. Human Factors studies consist of taking a product and observing how a person uses the product and its efficiency. The researchers will ask the subjects to discuss verbally what they thought about the product and from their observations of the subject and the product, they can see if changes need to be made. The researchers will decide if they feel changes need to be made to the product to increase its success. The main focus of Human Factors studies is human behavior related to technology. They look at the human –system interaction and see if there are big problems in this interaction. If there is, problems can be fixed with the different approaches that are found within the Cycle of Human Factors. The cycle contains 5 different approaches to it. These include, equipment design, task design, environmental design, training of the individuals, and selection of individuals. When a problem is detected, either one of the previous approaches can be applied to it to help fix the issues with the human-interaction with the system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors
http://www.hfes.org/Web/EducationalResources/HFEdefinitionsmain.html
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/human-factors
I thought that Robert Yerkes work with the military testing was really interesting so I decided to look more into the Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests. An intelligence test measures mental characteristics. Yerkes did his work during the First World War and in 1915 decided to get more credibility for mental testing. He hoped by using a scientific approach to mental testing he would be able to make psychology a “hard” science. In WWI he found his chance to promote the use of mental testing and hoped to improve the status of psychology as a serious science. Yerkes created different types of mental tests that were used on 1.75 million Army recruits. The Army Alpha test was a written test for literate men and emphasized verbal abilities. There were eight parts in this test. These included analogies, fill in the missing number, practical judgment, directions, and unscrambling a sentence. Modern IQ (intelligence quotient) tests still commonly use these types of tests. The Army Beta test was a pictorial test for illiterate men or those who failed the Alpha test and emphasized non-verbal abilities. There were seven parts in the Beta test – this included running a maze, number work, and picture completion. For those who failed the Beta test there was an individual exam that was an oral test. Both Alpha and Beta tests took less than an hour to complete and could be taken by large amounts of people at a time. Yerkes discovered three “facts” with his intelligence testing. 1. The average mental ago of White American adults was 13 – 13 was at the top of the moronity scale. 2. One could grade European immigrants by their country of origin – generally men from Northern and Western Europe scored higher than the Slavs of Eastern Europe and the darker people of Southern Europe. 3. Black men had an average score of 10.4, which was quite a bit lower than the average of 13 for White men. Some criticisms, mainly from Gould, of Yerkes tests are that there seemed to be a cultural bias in his tests. An example of a question from his Alpha test is: Crisco is a: patent medicine, disinfectant, toothpaste, food product. Also, he underestimated the amount of men who were illiterate in the English language so there were incredibly long lines to take the Beta test. Because of this many men were transferred to take the Alpha test causing them to then fail the test. Not everyone who failed the Alpha test was called back to take the Beta test, because of this those who had a poor grasp of English or had little formal training did not score well on the Alpha test. Even the test of the illiterate men, the Beta test, required the use of a pencil and writing numbers; some men had never used a pencil or written numbers before. Also, the test taking conditions were not conducive to taking a test. Military recruits are still given some form of testing to this day.
Terms: Yerkes, Army Alpha tests, Army Beta tests, Gould, intelligence testing, IQ
http://www.holah.karoo.net/gouldstudy.htm
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/IntelligenceTests.html
http://www.official-asvab.com/history_coun.htm
http://www.drugs.com/dict/army-alpha-tests.html
I thought that Robert Yerkes work with the military testing was really interesting so I decided to look more into the Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests. An intelligence test measures mental characteristics. Yerkes did his work during the First World War and in 1915 decided to get more credibility for mental testing. He hoped by using a scientific approach to mental testing he would be able to make psychology a “hard” science. In WWI he found his chance to promote the use of mental testing and hoped to improve the status of psychology as a serious science. Yerkes created different types of mental tests that were used on 1.75 million Army recruits. The Army Alpha test was a written test for literate men and emphasized verbal abilities. There were eight parts in this test. These included analogies, fill in the missing number, practical judgment, directions, and unscrambling a sentence. Modern IQ (intelligence quotient) tests still commonly use these types of tests. The Army Beta test was a pictorial test for illiterate men or those who failed the Alpha test and emphasized non-verbal abilities. There were seven parts in the Beta test – this included running a maze, number work, and picture completion. For those who failed the Beta test there was an individual exam that was an oral test. Both Alpha and Beta tests took less than an hour to complete and could be taken by large amounts of people at a time. Yerkes discovered three “facts” with his intelligence testing. 1. The average mental ago of White American adults was 13 – 13 was at the top of the moronity scale. 2. One could grade European immigrants by their country of origin – generally men from Northern and Western Europe scored higher than the Slavs of Eastern Europe and the darker people of Southern Europe. 3. Black men had an average score of 10.4, which was quite a bit lower than the average of 13 for White men. Some criticisms, mainly from Gould, of Yerkes tests are that there seemed to be a cultural bias in his tests. An example of a question from his Alpha test is: Crisco is a: patent medicine, disinfectant, toothpaste, food product. Also, he underestimated the amount of men who were illiterate in the English language so there were incredibly long lines to take the Beta test. Because of this many men were transferred to take the Alpha test causing them to then fail the test. Not everyone who failed the Alpha test was called back to take the Beta test, because of this those who had a poor grasp of English or had little formal training did not score well on the Alpha test. Even the test of the illiterate men, the Beta test, required the use of a pencil and writing numbers; some men had never used a pencil or written numbers before. Also, the test taking conditions were not conducive to taking a test. Military recruits are still given some form of testing to this day.
Terms: Yerkes, Army Alpha tests, Army Beta tests, Gould, intelligence testing, IQ
http://www.holah.karoo.net/gouldstudy.htm
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/IntelligenceTests.html
http://www.official-asvab.com/history_coun.htm
http://www.drugs.com/dict/army-alpha-tests.html
In chapter eight I found the most interesting thing to be Goddard’s research on the Kallikaks family. I started in on some research that focused on the study and then I found a few articles comparing his research of genetics to the research occurring today. One article compared his work to pseudoscience, like many of the eugenics studies that were done in Goddard’s time. Of course back in the day all they had to go off of was what was published and founded; concrete evidence about certain things came later. In looking through his research people found Goddard to be biased about the situations and environments ‘feeble-minded’ people were involved in, and his assistants that did a good chunk of the research were also biased against what they were studying. Goddard as well as his assistants got it in their heads that feeble-mindedness had to be a genetic thing, thus the reason for their research, so they found anyway they could to twist results to fit their opinions.
Some of the results that were biased came from Goddard’s assistants, as I mentioned above. When talking with ancestors of the Kallikaks family the researchers would dub them feeble-minded based on pure observation after only a few minutes; they would not run tests that had become popular during this time period, to determine so. Also, health problems and issues that some of the Kallikaks family were dealing with were due to malnutrition and bad dieting habits, not feeble-mindedness as it is documented. There were also manipulations with certain photos that appeared in the book that Goddard wrote about the Kallikaks family. It has been said that Goddard degraded the appearance of some of the people in the photos to make his theories and ideas seem stronger and more accurate.
All of this research led Goddard to becoming a full believer in eugenics. This later led him to doing intelligence tests on immigrants and denying many of the immigrants access to our country because they were not able to pass his tests; the administrators of the test did not take into account the language barriers, culture differences, etc. A few years later in his life Goddard became quit remorseful as he realized that the tests given to immigrants and those to determine statuses of feeble-mindedness and morons were not as accurate or appropriate as he intended. Unfortunately, however, his book about the Kallikak family and his views that feeble-minded people were harmful to society had reached Germany around the time that Hitler came to power. Goddard stated that he never intended for his opinions to go that far, but he had no way of changing the things he had done in the past.
Terms: Goddard, feeble-mindedness, moron, eugenics, Kallikaks, intelligence testing
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/kallikak.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kallikak_Family
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Goddard/chap2.htm
This week I decided to do research on Alfred Binet and Intelligence testing and his Binet-Simon Scales. and Henry Goddard and the Kallikaks family. The goal of the Binet-Simon scale was to find out the mental level of the child. His theory was that he could study children and find out what age their thinking was and what was considered to be normal. If a child who was being studied was 5 then the mental level of the child was expected to be 5. He developed a testing method to help determine the mental level. He could study the tests and find out how far behind they were in years. When looking at some of the testing that these children had to do, one part of the test they children had to be able to draw an image in 10 seconds or less. In the link below there is a picture of a cube and the cube was introduced to me in 8th grade. I wasn't able to fully draw the cube until I was in high school. To me this visual memory drawing is difficult to do. I am glad to know that I would be considered a moron or an idiot if I grew up in this era. I also wanted to research some of Goddard's work as well. Goddard developed the mental level which classified idiots as those who scored the mental ages of 1-2, imbeciles were ages 3-7, feebleminded was meant to cover the spectrum of retardation. Moron was proposed for those who had mental ages between 8-12. Goddard came to believe that feeblemindedness came from a recessive gene so he set out to mind the feeblemindedness gene, after all he was a eugenicist. He studied a woman, Deborah Kallikak who lived in the ward of Vineland. Deborah was there because she was not getting along with others in school and had difficulty reading and in math and might possibly be feebleminded. Goddard said that hereditary might have a "bad stock." In an excerpt from the last link, the best way to describe the feeblemindedness gene is, "Goddard's genealogical research revealed that the union with the feeble-minded tavern girl resulted in generations of "mental defectives" who were plagued by illegitimacy, prostitution, alcoholism, epilepsy, and lechery. His investigation of the other Kallikak branch revealed precisely the opposite: The marriage of Martin Kallikak, Sr., to the respectable Quakeress yielded generations of society's finest citizens. Goddard believed that the striking schism separating the two branches of the family was due entirely to the different genetic input from the women." Being a eugenisist that he was he traced the family tree back to Deborah to determine where the gene came from. Goddard went on to wanting to eliminate the gene all together.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Binet/binet1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Goddard
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/kallikak.shtml
The topic I chose to examine more closely was Lewis Terman’s belief that America should be a meritocracy. Meritocracy is mistaken as being a type of government when in reality it is just an ideology. It is a system used in government that involves appointing as well as assigning responsibilities to individuals based on their “merits” or intelligence, credentials, and education. This is done through evaluations and examinations. Terman and many others had in their minds to create an American meritocracy. The word hadn’t actually originated during this time but was later created by a British sociologist named Michael Young. Terman believed that IQ tests should be used in order to sort out the population. He used his revised version of Alfred Binet’s scale of intelligence and called it “Stanford-Binet”. Terman was involved in the development of intelligence testing for the army as well as using a form of the test in schools. Children took the test so they would be classified into different groups based on their abilities which came known to be a tracking system. He believed that young people would be assigned to certain levels throughout the school system that would eventually lead to the corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. He believed that mental abilities were strictly hereditary and that those children who were gifted could be discovered and made into potential leaders. Terman did this in hopes of creating a society where advantages would be given to those who deserved it and not just those who were “born into it.”
I chose to research this topic because it seemed interesting to me. It is definitely a different way to view how our society should work but if you actually think about it, it kind of makes sense. I do not know that I would believe in such a thing because it is not extremely valid. It has been criticized because all it looks at is intelligence or “merit” and not necessarily other components on an individual.
This topic fits into the chapter because intelligence testing plays a big role in psychology and it always will. Also, seeing the different views of psychologists helps us to understand what our society today has become and how we can compare it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
http://205.188.238.181/time/time100/scientist/other/iq.html
http://www.education.com/reference/article/terman-lewis-1877-1956/
I found chapter eight pretty straight forward and so didn’t have much to research as far as trying to better understand things. I decided to research intelligence testing. I felt it was something that had evolved over what seemed like short period of time (considering) and that not a lot has happened since Terman revised the Binnet test. What I found was a basic overview of what we did in class and the book plus some interesting new details.
Originally I looked at intelligence testing of soldiers, having just commented on the blog about eugenic soldiers. I found an interesting tidbit that explained Yerkes Army Beta tests in more detail. Apparently they had to demonstrate to the entire group and pantomime. The tests he made were questioned and mostly discredited by Gould later.
I also found more on Spearman. Other than his Rho, he contributed a two factor theory of intelligence. The first factor was general ability. This is a sort of mental energy and it is required for intelligence tests of all forms. It is noted “G.” The second factor is special abilities, noted “S” and are distinctive on each test. He later said that all aspects of intelligence are correlated with one another to an extent.
Next was Galton, Darwin’s cousin. Personally I would feel bad about myself if my cousin was Charles Darwin, who’s name I learned even at a private catholic school. In comparison (which is maybe not fair) Galton is not that impressive. He felt that intelligence was hereditary and said that intelligent people reproduce less than non –intelligent people. Enter Eugenics. He specifically noticed that those with bigger heads tended to be more intelligent, but later realized this was not an adequate measure (Perhaps he had a small head himself). He also looked at reaction time, and visual and auditory discrimination to test how fast and efficient the nervous system works in these situations.
Cattell and his graduate student created the Cattell-Horn theory of Fluid and Crystalized intelligence. They theorized that general intelligence was a conglomerate of abilities working together. For this theory fluid intelligence was the ability to think and act quickly, solve problems and encode memories. This was relatively independent of education and was something that was formed on its own. Crystalized abilities are the result of retained knowledge, learning, and a variety of skills. This was developed by personality, culture and education.
An interesting side note about Catell was that he was given a lifetime award later in life, although many felt he was racist and shouldn’t receive it.
Binet was a big believer in individual differences and the possibility that intelligence would manifest itself differently in different people. He did not believe intelligence was inherited, which was unusual for psychologists of his time. He felt that people had a mental peak that was rarely ever reached but that an unintelligent person could work on things. So he invented “Mental Orthopedics” to develop attention and memory. It was Binet that developed the mental age on his original intelligence test. When it came to America Terman tested it on many children and found that the mental age of younger children had been overestimated while the age of older children had been underestimated. He ended up reworking the test while at Stanford University, visa vis the Stanford-Binnett test which is still used today to test average mental levels.
Today we also commonly use the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence scale, now known as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence scale. I was curious as to how these work in modern day and I never knew that intelligence tests are typically individually distributed by someone called a psychometrition.
Group tests began with Yerke’s Alpha tests but there is also the Otis Group Intelligence test. It surprised me to learn that entrance exams into colleges and grad schools are considered a group test, as they are taken individually.
http://www.cps.nova.edu/~cpphelp/pantheon/spearman.htm
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.loh/charles_spearman
http://pages.slc.edu/~ebj/IM_97/Lecture17/L17.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/rcattell.shtml
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0858853.html
I decided to do a little bit more research on James McKeen Cattell for this blog. The thing that interested me most about Cattell was the statement in the book where he says that he's done drugs in higher doses than anyone else not trying to commit suicide. While doing some research it seems that Cattell did drugs both for psychological purposes and he also did them for his own enjoyment. For psychological purposes he recorded all of the information he had while he was high on the chosen drug, and was even quoted as saying it was like he was two people, one of whom would do tests, and the other would be the subject of those tests. Also, while under Hashish, Cattell once compared the whistling of a schoolboy to a symphony.
Besides drugs Cattell also did lots of work with intelligence testing, as was mentioned in the book. Cattell believed that smart people should be paid to mate with other people who are smart so as to produce valuable offspring for the purpose of enhancing our knowledge. Cattell believed so much in this in fact that he told his own kids that he would pay them $1000 to marry children of other professors.
Cattell was a professor at Columbia university, which fired him for going against the federal government by writing a letter against the drafting of young boys into the army. Cattell sued the university for firing him and recieved $40000.
After being fired Cattell began to work with publishing and editing. He was an editor for many major publications at the time, and even purchased the rights to "Popular Science," a magazine that I personally enjoy reading to this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McKeen_Cattell
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/jamescattell.html
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/cattell.htm
I thought Galton’s mental testing movement was the most interesting part of this chapter. He emphasized physical and basic sensory measures that James McKeen Cattel introduced to America. Cattel also emphasized the idea of mental testing which was basically any test designed to measure mental activity or ability. His mental test was designed in 10 different categories: dynamometer pressure, rate of movement, sensation areas, pressure causing pain, least noticeable difference in weight, reaction time for sound, time for naming colors, bisection of a 50 cm line, judgment of 10 sec time, and numbers of repeated on once hearing. In all aspects, it is evident that in any of the foregoing tests are not of a degree sufficient for practical purposes. The completion test was also very interesting to me stating that it measures the mental fatigue in school children because it focused on higher mental activity. Later on in his career Binet discovered the individual psychology which basically proposed to us that psychology should focus on ways of identifying and measuring individual differences rather than on general laws. Alder’s idea on individual psychology was psychoanalysis, which basically emphasized the development of the individual. The Binet-Simon Scales was also intriguing to me. I liked the idea how they developed a test empirically by identifying two groups of students, one normal, one impaired , and giving them a long series of tests that appeared to be conceptually related to intelligence, looking for tests that differentiated between two groups. The mental level that Binet termed was to indicated a child’s level of of mental functioning; those in need of remediation scored two levels below the norm for their chronological age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McKeen_Cattell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
I decided to research Leta Hollingworth (Harry Hollingworths wife) further because there was a tiny blurb about her in chapter 8.
She earned a phd from Columbia at a time when it was hard to women to do so. She was called "the mother of gifted education" because she firmly believed that men were not intellectually superior to women.
Her first encounter of sexism was when she tried to teach in NY after following Henry there but encountered a law that prohibited married women from teaching, thus stating that married women are to be exactly that- no career for them. So she started taking graduate classes under Thorndike, and became an instructor. She began teaching a course geared specifically toward gifted children and through this she published the first text book geared toward gifted children. She believed that gifted children should be placed in classes with other gifted children and given a more challenging curriculum that surpassed that of a normal classroom.
Hollingworth also was active in many groups that advocated for the right for women to vote. Her research supported her role in these groups- she challenged the "variability hypothesis" which was the evolution based idea that women showed less variation in traits than men and were therefore less suited for highly intellectual tasks. "One logical conclusion drawn from the variability hypothesis was that since women were not expected to exhibit above-average intelligence it was unreasonable to expect eminence from them. This led Thorndike and Hall to suggest the adoption of curricula aimed at preparing women for their future roles as mothers and wives". Hollingworth argued this research had no empirical evidence and ny possible differences in variability between men and women must also be understood with reference to the fact that women lack the opportunity to achieve eminence because of their prescribed societal and cultural roles.
She also challenged the "periodic function" which was the idea that sex difference were due to a periodic function- aka women were intellectually incapacitated during menstruation. This was Hollingworths dissertation - Functional periodicity: An experimental study of the mental and motor abilities of women during menstruation”. She concluded that if the belief was the women were unfit during this week, then cooks, mothers, housekeeps, nurses and such should be relieved of their duties. She researched 23 women and compared their performance with that of mens and found no differences.
One of her studies showed that no difference existed between men and women in variability in physical traits and this research was widely criticized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leta_Stetter_Hollingworth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
http://versai.tripod.com/science/
8 - According to the APA Intelligence testing is considered one of Psychology’s greatest successes. It is the most widely used of the primary tools for identifying learning disabilities and mental retardation in children. It has been accused of being laced with biases, however. Newer tests have been released based on modern theories of the brain and how it functions. The current dominating test is the WISC-III, 3rd edition, developed by David Weschler. APA President Dr. Stenberg from Yale developed the STAT (Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test). It includes multiple choice questions that according to him, test three areas of intelligence; analytic, practical, and creative.
Alfred Binet used IQ to determine someone’s mental age. Mental Age divided by actual age is then multiplied by 100 to get their Intelligence Quotient. An average child would have an IQ of 100. This is hard to do after the age of 16,however, because this is where the tests seem to level off. Modern test’s use deviation to determine IQ, or how you compare to the average of society. On the modern scale the general categories include IQ’s of 70 being borderline retardation, 55 being mild, 40 as moderate, 25 severe, and 10 as profound. 145 is considered extremely exceptional and is considered genius by some, but others put it at 160. IQ tests are located online, they give examples of what they are like but are mostly used as money-makers. An example of one is at the last link listed below.
www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligent.aspx
www.psychologicaltesting.com/iqtest.htm
www.iqtest.com