The Story of Psychology (40 page)

A
t the 1884 International Health Exhibition in London, a small fenced-off area of the hall, only six by thirty-six feet, was grandly designated the Anthropometric Laboratory. In it, on a long table staffed by three attendants, were a number of pieces of simple apparatus, among them a pendulum and a response key, a handgrip and dial, a photometer with which to compare small patches of color, and a long tube that emitted a whistle when an assistant blew through it and whose pitch he raised by turning a calibrated screw plug at the end until the visitor could no longer hear it. For threepence, the visitor could be tested and measured for thirteen characteristics: reaction time, keenness of sight and hearing, color discrimination, ability to judge length, strength of pull and squeeze, strength of blow, height, weight, arm span, breathing power, and breathing capacity.
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Why anyone thought it worth even threepence to obtain these data is hard to say, but during the run of the exhibition, 9,337 persons did so. Perhaps the activity seemed meritorious in itself; it was a time when precise measurement was becoming the hallmark of science and had great cachet even if one had no specific purpose in mind.

If the visitors to the Anthropometric Laboratory had no specific purpose in mind, its proprietor did. He was Francis Galton, a tiny bald man with white sideburns whose penetrating blue eyes, jutting nose, and slit of a mouth gave him an air of authority a larger man might envy. Galton,
an amateur psychologist, was convinced that the differences in intelligence among individuals were largely hereditary, and hence that society could advance the evolution of the human race by offering the most intelligent people rewards for procreating. But how were they to be identified? He believed that a number of hereditary physical traits or abilities, particularly acuity of the senses and reaction time, were related to intelligence and therefore were gauges of it. (Among his reasons for thinking so were two of his own observations: first, that mental retardates had poor sensory discrimination; second, that work requiring sensory acuity, such as piano tuning, wine tasting, or wool sorting, was always done by men, who, he took for granted, were far more intelligent than women.)
²

Galton’s lineage may have predisposed him to his view of intelligence. On one side, he was a grandson of the eminent physician and botanist Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin, another grandson, was Galton’s cousin), and on the other side the grandson and son of successful bankers. But he had additional grounds. Earlier, he had collected genealogies of a large number of illustrious men and shown that eminence—which he equated with intelligence—runs in families.

It was to run trials of tests measuring physical characteristics allied to intelligence and to collect the results that Galton, at his own expense, set up the Anthropometric Laboratory at the exhibition. In so doing, he initiated a form of psychological research wholly unlike the experimentation Wundt was even then conducting in Leipzig, the introspection James was practicing at Harvard, and the “talking cure” Freud was discussing with Breuer in Vienna and would shortly start using in his office.

Whatever one may think of Galton’s views, he was no well-to-do, idle, Victorian chauvinist but a scientist of extraordinary mental gifts, enthusiasm, curiosity, and dedication to work. A genuine polymath, he was a successful inventor, award-winning geographer, authoritative travel writer, meteorologist, developer of the first workable system of identifying fingerprints, pioneer in the use of twin studies to tease apart the influences of heredity and environment, and inventor of correlation analysis, one of the most valuable research tools of psychology and other sciences.

Above all, Galton was the first to use mental tests, thereby inaugurating a new form of psychological research and a new field of study: individual differences. Other psychologists, Wundtians in particular, were looking for universal psychological principles such as the difference between how long it takes to respond to a sound reflexively and how
long consciously. Galton was looking at the differences in individuals’ characteristics (such as response times) and the relationship of those differences to their other traits and abilities.

Galton’s interest in individual differences reflected the status of psychology in Britain in his time. Unlike the German universities, the British universities gave psychology no support and established no laboratories or departments of psychology; those who were interested in the field pursued it not as a subspecialty of physiology or of psychotherapy but according to their own interests and as a hobby. In a German university, Galton might well have been guided into physiological psychology; in Britain, he was free to ask what had made him a gifted person and how society could increase the number of people like himself.

Galton was born in Birmingham in 1822, well before Wundt and James and long before Freud, though his contributions to psychology, made in his middle and late middle years, were roughly contemporaneous with theirs.
³
The precocious youngest of seven children in an intellectual middle-class family, he began to read at two and a half, and before five could read almost anything in English, knew a good deal of Latin and some French, and could solve most basic arithmetic problems. At six, when he went to a local school, he was scornful of the other boys because they had never heard of
Marmion
or the
Iliad
, and at seven he was reading Shakespeare and Pope for pleasure.

This promising start was blighted in boarding school, where rote learning was stressed and natural curiosity and independence were suppressed by floggings, sermons, and punitive homework assignments. Nor did he fare well when he went to Cambridge: feeling himself under pressure to excel, he was obsessed by examinations and by his academic standing relative to other students. In his third year, failing to rank at the very top of the list and seeing no possibility of becoming a Wrangler (an honors student in mathematics), he developed palpitations, dizziness, and an inability to concentrate. “A mill seemed to be working inside my head,” he recalled late in life. “I could not banish obsessing ideas; at times I could hardly read a book, and found it painful even to look at a printed page.” In the throes of breakdown, he left school and returned home. Only after deciding not to compete for an honors degree but to settle for a pass degree was he able to return and complete his studies. His obsession with tests and the ranking of intellectual ability, though, remained for the rest of his life.

After Cambridge, Galton completed medical training (which he had begun earlier), but when his father died, in 1844, leaving him well-to-do at twenty-two, he dropped the idea of practicing medicine and for several years lived the life of a gentleman, riding, shooting, attending parties, and traveling. However, the life of pleasure proved to be thin gruel for his restless mind, and in his late twenties, after consulting the Royal Geographical Society, he led a two-year expedition, at his own expense, to the interior of southwest Africa. He brought back a wealth of cartographic information on what had been a blank area of the map and at thirty-one was awarded the society’s gold medal and recognized as a leading explorer.

In that same year, 1853, he married and thenceforth limited his traveling, keeping up his interest in exploration by writing travel books and helping to plan major expeditions. But these activities could not long content him, and he turned to invention, producing a number of useful devices, among them a printing telegraph (forerunner of the teletype), an improved oil lamp, a device for picking locks, a rotary steam engine, and a periscope to enable him to see over taller people in crowded places.

By his forties, in need of a new challenge, he took up meteorology. It had occurred to him that he could collect simultaneous weather data from many places by means of the recently developed telegraph, plot them on a map, and see whether significant patterns became apparent. When he did so and drew lines connecting points having the same barometric pressure, he discovered that they described roughly circular low-pressure and high-pressure systems (“cyclones” and “anticyclones”) whose movements across the surface of the earth were a basis for predicting weather.

At about the same time, Galton finally came upon the principal interest of his life, the inheritance of intelligence. In 1859 Charles Darwin had published his epochal
On the Origin of Species
, which vastly impressed Galton. One of Darwin’s basic assumptions was that among the members of any species there are small inheritable variations or differences and that evolution occurs through the natural selection of the fittest members. Although
Origin
was concerned chiefly with animal species, Galton applied its conclusions to humankind; he reasoned that the evolution of the human species must take place by means of the natural selection of those with better minds and the transmission of their innate mental superiority to their offspring.

This accorded with the impression he had had at Cambridge that many men winning high honors had fathers and brothers who also were honors winners. Galton now conceived of and carried out a valuable, if laborious, research project: he examined and tabulated by family, over the past forty-one years, the top-scoring students in classics and mathematics at Cambridge.
⁴
As he had expected, top honors had been disproportionately won by men in certain families. He published his findings in 1865; from then on, the hereditary nature of mental ability and the improvement of the human race by selective breeding dominated his life and work. Galton must have found it a cruel trick of fate that he and his wife never had any children; a Freudian might suggest that his fixation on the subject was compensation for his failure to reproduce.

Although Galton had been unable to win mathematics honors at Cambridge, his research method was mathematical; like Demosthenes, determined to become an orator despite a speech defect, Galton made his weakness into his greatest strength. His approach to the study of intelligence, or indeed any problem that interested him, was to find something to count so that he could calculate proportions, compare averages, and draw conclusions. In Africa he measured the figures of native women (from a judicious distance) and found them impressive compared with those of Englishwomen. Back home, in cities he visited he kept track of whether every girl he passed on the street was pretty, average, or ugly, and found that the incidence of pretty girls was highest in London, lowest in Aberdeen. At scientific meetings he counted the number of fidgets per minute in a sample of fifty members of the audience and reckoned that fidgeting decreased by more than half when the presentation interested the audience.

Galton’s plan in
Hereditary Genius
(1869), the first and most influential of his four books on the inheritance of mental ability, was to select a number of unusually gifted people and see how common talent was in their families as compared with the general population. His criterion of unusual mental ability was, at this point, public reputation:

To establish how frequent such reputation (and thus mental ability) is, he counted the obituaries in the London
Times
for 1868 and some earlier years, and found that those who merited obituaries totaled about 250 per million of the population beyond middle age, or one in four thousand.

He then undertook to compare to this the proportion of eminent persons in the families of a number of illustrious men: English judges since the Reformation, premiers of the past century, and a sampling of famous military commanders, literary men, scientists, poets, painters, musicians, and Protestant divines. These men, he calculated, were far rarer than one in four thousand; he estimated their frequency as one in one million. If genius was hereditary, he should find among their relatives a far greater proportion of eminent persons than one per million or even one per four thousand.

Galton based his estimate of the rarity of genius on the “law of deviation from an average.” That law had been worked out early in the century by mathematicians to express the distribution of errors in astronomic observations and of cards or numbers in games of chance. But it also applied to variations in human traits. In 1835 the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quételet, using information about French conscripts, reported that a few men were very tall, a few very short, and the rest in between, with by far the largest number being average or close to it. The data, when plotted on a graph, yielded a bell-shaped curve, with most individuals in the center. The farther to either side of the midline one went, the fewer there were. The concept of the “curve of normal distribution” of human traits is so familiar today that it is hard to believe that in Quételet’s time it was a revelation.

Galton assumed that what was true of height must be true of other bodily characteristics, like brain weight, number of nerve fibers, sensory acuity—and, hence, mental capacity. If so, the mental ability of individuals followed a normal curve of distribution. He divided the curve of human intelligence into sixteen equal segments—eight above average, eight below—and from the shape of the curve calculated the proportion of the population in each segment. The two highest segments, he reckoned, would total only 248 people per million, which tallied with the figure of one in four thousand for obituary-based eminence. But a very small number were even farther out at the high end of the curve. They were the one in one million who were truly illustrious and who, he hoped to show, were born that way, not made or self-made: