Psychological assessments, such as vocational interest, personality, and IQ tests have certain features in common. They consist of a series of questions focusing on one or more psychological variables. These variables may involve abilities, aptitudes, interests, values, dispositions, well, you name it.

In some tests, the questions may follow a true/false format, others are multiple choice, and still others provide ratings along some scale, like a 7-point Likert scale that goes from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." Psychometrics is the subdiscipline of psychology devoted to the creation and application of such tests (Rudy, 2007). The word literally means "mind measurement."

The British scientist Francis Galton was a pioneer in this field. For instance, he devised various tests that assessed how people vary in reaction times, visual and auditory acuity, and color perception as well as height, weight, arm span, and strength. These anthropometric (or human measurement) assessments were thought to gauge important individual differences in abilities (Galton, 1883).

Galton also invented the questionnaire and quickly applied the new method to the study of eminent scientists and artists. For example, one questionnaire asked great scientists — including Galton's cousin Charles Darwin — about their attitudes toward school and education (Galton, 1874).

Not only was Galton the first psychometrician to study genius, but he himself was a genius. Most psychologists today have to struggle to recruit research participants. Either they have to pay participants in hard cash or else they have to offer them extra credit in an introductory psychology course. Probably many of my readers have served as subjects in laboratory experiments in this way — as I did when I became a psychology major. In contrast, Galton was able to convince participants to pay him for subjecting them to anthropometric instruments. At the 1884–1885 International Health Exhibition, 9,337 visitors paid him 3 pence each for the privilege!

Unfortunately, Galton's early psychometric measures were either inaccurate or irrelevant. In the former category was his assessment of mental imagery. The potential utility of the measure was undermined by its highly qualitative rather than quantitative nature. In the latter category was his measure of the highest pitch that a person can hear. Although this trait can be assessed with much more accuracy than mental imagery, it is, unlike mental imagery, not pertinent to anything particularly interesting — and certainly not to anything germane to genius.

Hence, psychometric research did not make much headway until instruments emerged that provided fairly accurate assessments of highly relevant variables. In this area the real pioneer was Lewis M. Terman, a professor at Stanford University. Terman's starting point was an early version of an intelligence measure developed in France by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1905).

In 1916, Terman revised and extended this test to produce the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. A few years later he began a longterm study of 1,528 children who received very high IQ scores (mostly 140 and above) on the Stanford-Binet test. The results of this longitudinal inquiry were published in a series of volumes, the first appearing in 1925. The title of this series was Genetic Studies of Genius (Terman, 1925–1959). Terman studied his young geniuses from every possible aspect, including their family background, scholastic performance, physical health, personality traits, interests and values, and later their achievements in adulthood.

Although Terman conducted the first classic psychometric study of genius, he was by no means the only psychologist to employ this specific approach. Perhaps most notable among other contributors was Leta Hollingworth. She began her career making significant contributions to the psychology of women, but her interests eventually turned to young budding geniuses. In 1922, she began a 3-year study of 50 children with IQs that surpassed 155, publishing her findings in the 1926 work, Gifted Children.

In 1916, she had actually begun investigating children with even higher IQs, starting with a child with an IQ of 187! Her conclusions, based on a dozen extremely bright kids, were published posthumously in a book entitled Children Above IQ 180 (1942). Hollingworth's two works have become minor classics in the field. In any case, by the middle of the 20th century, psychometric studies of genius had become well established. 💡

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Next: Who first studied genius?

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Copyright ©2009 Dean Keith Simonton. Reprinted with permission of Springer Publishing Company www.springerpub.com.

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