The Strange History Of Psychometrics

1860: The Gall and Spurzheim model is discredited, but it leaves conventional medicine with a new model that describes mental and emotional abilities.

1865-1879: Victorians from Britain travel the globe to newer places and document that their testing devices show the 'white sahib' to be indeed more intelligent than his counterparts in any other region of the world. Francis Galton, one of the fathers of psychometric testing, supports this contention.

1879: The first ever psychological testing laboratory is set up in Leipzig, Germany, by Wilhelm Wundt. His student James Mckeen Cattell establishes the American Psychological Association.?

1896: Cattell publishes his first paper, Mental Tests and Measurement, listing 50 tests. Victor Henri proposes a test for the all-rounder. He suggests the need for tests of memory, imagery, imagination, aesthetic sense, attention, motor skills and strength of will.

1903: Binet's book L'etude Experimentale de L'intelligence lays the groundwork for standardising intelligence tests.

1905: Theodore Simon produces the first ever intelligence scale for children.

1917: Intelligence tests are used extensively in the US Army to test individuals. Robert Yerkes uses the analogy of the tests to argue that Jews were so inferior that they should be kept out of the country. The Stanford-Binet intelligence test is introduced.

1927: Watson declares that all of America is 'psychologically mad'. A host of magazines spring up consequently, claiming to help and test the Americans.

1939-1945: Nazis run tests on Jews showing pictures of naked women and evaluating results based on the responses and attitude change.

1960s: A big boom in tests. Their numbers increase at a phenomenal rate.

1971-1977: Over 2,000 tests documented which measure things from how clever the person is, to team spirit in a basketball team.

1990s: Over 8,000 instruments in existence with two-three new instruments being added every day to this inventory.