Psychometrics and Personality Tests with Dr. Nathan Thompson

Psychometrics is the the art and science of intellectual and cognitive measuring. It has heavily influenced our academic, military and corporate performance prediction practices but it also has a deep, dark past related to the practice of Eugenics. I had a very insightful conversation with guest Nathan Thompson, PhD , CEO/Co-founder of Assessment Systems. Did you know Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and other personality tests may not have much scientific substance in the field of Psychometrics? They also may be poor predictors of job performance. Let's learn how this field has evolved.

1879 Sir Francis Galton

Galton is known has the O.G. of Psychometrics in the Western world and he's described as a polymath of his time. From 1869 to 1879 he writes a few essays about measuring the mind's ability to recognize objects by association of ideas. The 1879 paper is titled Psychological Experiments. In his experiments, he took walks in the streets of London paying attention to objects on the way and documenting how to remember them. Here's an excerpt:

The processes of thought fall into two main categories: in the first of these, ideas present themselves by association either with some object newly perceived by the senses or with previous ideas; in the second process, such of the associated ideas are fixed and vivified by the attention, as happen to be germane to the topic on which the mind is set. 

Galton and Eugenics?

Turns out Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin and after reading the Origin of the Species, Galton took a dark turn into applying psychometric testing to capture hereditary traits. Based on this research, he developed the philosophy Eugenics which sadly enough was adopted around the world having catastrophic inhumane treatment of many populations.

In 1907, the USA was the first country to undertake compulsory sterilization programs for eugenics purposes. The principal targets were the “feebleminded” and the mentally ill, but also included under many state laws were people who were deaf, blind, epileptic, and physically disabled. - Rust, Kosinski & Stillwell, 2021

1916 U.S. Army Alpha and Beta Testing

The American Psychologic Association is hired by the U.S. Army to create admission tests for literate and illiterate and/or foreign language speaking draftee selection. If we can remember from previous episodes, illiteracy was a challenge for recruiting/drafting during the first and second World Wars. The result of this effort which only took six months to implement was the Alpha and Beta tests. Alpha tests were given to literate folks and Beta to the rest.

The entire process was completed in less than six months. By the end of the war, these tests, known as Army Alpha and Army Beta, had been administered at the rate of 200,000 per month to nearly two million American recruits. - Rust, Kosinski & Stillwell, 2021

1926 Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT

Another outcome of the US Army Alpha and Beta tests was the SAT which was first adopted by the Universities of Harvard and California in 1926. By 1940, all major colleges had adopted the SAT.

1984 The "Flynn Effect"

Hard to believe, but the crude remnants of Galton's eugenics remained active until the publishing of James Flynn who advocated for ability testing rather than intellect.

As well as being an interesting phenomenon in its own right, it was clear that the average IQ of African-Americans in the 2000s was higher than the average IQ of white Americans in the 1970s. Further research by Flynn extended this work beyond the USA and found similar results in many other countries across all the continents. This evidence of the equally enormous impact of environmental factors on IQ scores of all groups rendered unnecessary any need to explain group differences in terms of genetics. - Rust, Kosinski & Stillwell, 2021

Learn More

Check out the latest episode of the podcast to learn more and hear Dr. Thompson answer questions on test writing efficacy and how corporations should really be testing for job performance predictors.

Sources

Galton, F. (1879). Psychometric Experiments

Rust, J., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. (2021). Modern Psychometrics: The Science of Psychological Assessment

*** A free version of the Rust, Kosinski and Stillwell book is available in Google Scholar***

Sackett, P., et al. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range.

About Alex

Alexander Salas is a US Navy veteran, award-winning Learning Experience Designer, Storyline expert and creator of StyleLearn Courses the online upskill academy for corporate learning professionals. Alex specializes in the integration of eLearning design with popular authoring tools, custom web design, game design, virtual and augmented realities for L&D purposes. Among his professional achievements, Alex is a Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+) and Agile Certified ScrumMaster. He has been a regular speaker and contributor at major ATD, eLearning Guild and Training Magazine conferences and publications.