The history of psychological testing is a fascinating
story and has abundant relevance to
present-day practices. After all, contemporary tests
did not spring from a vacuum; they evolved slowly
from a host of precursors introduced over the last
one hundred years. Accordingly, Chapter 1 features
a review of the historical roots of present-day psychological
tests. In Topic 1A, The Origins of Psychological
Testing, we focus largely on the efforts
of European psychologists to measure intelligence
during the late nineteenth century and pre–World
War I era. These early intelligence tests and their
successors often exerted powerful effects on the
examinees who took them, so the first topic also
incorporates a brief digression documenting the
pervasive importance of psychological test results.
Topic 1B, Early Testing in the United States, catalogues
the profusion of tests developed by American
psychologists in the first half of the twentieth
century.
Psychological testing in its modern form originated
little more than one hundred years ago in laboratory
studies of sensory discrimination, motor
skills, and reaction time. The British genius Francis
Galton (1822–1911) invented the first battery of
tests, a peculiar assortment of sensory and motor
measures, which we review in the following. The
American psychologist James McKeen Cattell
(1860–1944) studied with Galton and then, in 1890,
proclaimed the modern testing agenda in his classic
paper entitled “Mental Tests and Measurements.”
He was tentative and modest when describing the
purposes and applications of his instruments: