The idea of IQ / Russell Marks.

  • Marks, Russell.
Date:
[1981], ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The idea of IQ / Russell Marks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tarians in the early twentieth century, the construct of individual differences basically referred to fixed in¬ nate differences. The especially dramatic claim of psy¬ chological expertise was that human differences were virtually unaffected by the environment, for if indivi¬ dual differences were essentially innate and measurable, then the psychologist could claim enormous expertise in shaping institutions and social policy. On the other hand, the psychologist's claim of expertise was somewhat reduced if differences were in part attributable to the environment. Yet this claim also had enormous impact because fixed innate differences, oftentimes combined with deterministic environmental formulations, still set significant limits on human malleability. Third, modeling nineteenth-century science, the con¬ struct of individual differences focused on behavior. Fundamental to the new psychologists' perspective was the belief that if psychology was to advance as a sci¬ ence, it must focus purely on animal and human behavior. For the new psychologists, the success of nineteenth- century science was made possible only by abandoning altogether the category of consciousness in studying the natural and physical world. The same reasoning was ap¬ plied to understanding human beings. Within this frame¬ work, psychologists turned their attention from studies of mind and consciousness to studies of behavior and conduct. Following the model of biology and the physical sciences, they viewed heredity as biological and behav¬ ioral and hence subject to empirical and experimental investigation; they viewed environment as external and behavioral and subject to empirical and experimental in¬ vestigation. Consciousness, mind, or free will were no longer meaningful categories . Cattell provided a provo¬ cative formulation of this position in 1904 when he ob¬ served; It seems to me that most of the research work that has been done by me or in my laboratory is nearly as independent of introspection as work in physics or zoology. ... It is usually no more necessary for the subject to be a psy¬ chologist than it is for the vivisected frog to be a physiologist.' -8-