History of Psychology

In Chapter 8, we discussed Sir Francis Galton‘s attempts to measure intelligence with simple tasks of sensory discrimination and motor coordination. We then discussed how James McKeen Cattell tried to validate the Galtonian approach in the United States, with disappointing results. Meanwhile, a very different tradition of cognitive assessment was developing in France, and its adoption in England and the United States was far more permanent, although not without controversy. In this chapter we consider the growth and evolution of this second tradition. We start with Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who developed the first modern-style psychological tests designed to measure intelligence. We then see how his tests were brought to the United States and used for a wide variety of purposes, some of them far from Binet’s intentions. We explore the work of Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, and Robert Yerkes in detail before finishing with some of the more recent controversies over IQ testing.