Galton’s Measure of Intelligence
Name
Course
Professor
Date
Sir Francis Galton, an influential explorer as well as anthropologist renowned for his inspiration towards complex ideas such as heredity and intelligence, was an important but controversial figure. Galton studied various disciplines, including psychology. Apart from noticing individuality among fingerprints, Galton studied the topic of human intelligence. He was one of the best people known for the work on intelligence as a psychology subdiscipline. The concept of how to measure intelligence has been a topic of concern prompting numerous scientists, researchers, and psychologists to immerse themselves in finding answers on intelligence. Galton was one of these great people to explore intelligence. Over time, researchers have been analyzing various tasks that can be used to explain human intelligence. Galton has also played an essential role in this analysis.
Sir Francis Galton developed his ideas from his relative Charles Darwin. He suggested that human abilities could be studied through scientific observation. Galton had a strong notion that psychological capabilities were the building block of intelligence. Therefore, he believed that measures and tests based on various mental tasks such as musical sensitivity and weight discrimination could help to determine the measure of an individual’s intelligence. Being one of the earliest scientists to explore the measure of intelligence, Galton suggested such tests to be used to measure intelligence. Consequently, as a formal measure of intelligence, an individual was required to perform, Galton’s proposed simple tasks such as having to decide the heaviest among two weights or to show how one could squeeze another person’s hand (Patric C. Kyllomen and Jiyun Zu, 2016).
Galton believed that an individual’s intelligence score could be assigned where most people lie in the average range and that the population could decrease further from the middle the score gets. However, when this concept was taken to the United States by James McKeen Cattell, an American psychologist, it was turned down. Even though the Galtonian measure of intelligence concept formed the basis of the study of the measure of intelligence, the proposal had various underlying defects.
When Cattell presented Galton’s proposal to his students, Clark Wissler, Cattell’s student, and an American anthropologist proved that the tasks were not reliable predictors or measures of grades in college. Additionally, Galtonian tradition was utterly rejected by renowned research, Binet. Binet, who was given the mandate of developing a new test by the then minister of public instruction of France, to ensure that children with mental disorders received adequate education, refuted Galton’s test on the claim that it measured trivial abilities. Galton’s tests did not measure skills such as reasoning, judgment, and comprehension. These were, and still are, the abilities that are used even by today’s measure of intelligence. Despite Galton’s measure of intelligence proposal weaknesses, it was an important idea that created the basis for the measure of intelligence (Sternberg, 2017).
References
Patric C. Kyllomen and Jiyun Zu. (2016). Use of Response Time for Measuring Cognitive Ability. Journal of Intelligence, 2-28.
Sternberg, R. J. (2017). Measuring Intelligence. Human Intelligence, 3-29.