Education as psychology's primary market

Thus far, we have traced the development of some of psychology's investigative practices in terms of the general knowledge interests pursued by psychologists. This may be adequate for the more general features of these practices but when we turn to more specific features it becomes necessary to take into account a broader social context. The fact is that almost from the beginning of the twentieth century psychology ceased to be a purely academic discipline and began to market its products in the outside world. That meant that the requirements of its potential market were able to influence the direction in which psychology's investigative practices were likely to develop. Practices that were useful in the construction of specific marketable products were likely to receive a boost, whereas practices that lacked this capacity were henceforth placed under a handicap.

Of course, the requirements of the market did not act on a passive discipline. Not only did many psychologists actively court practical application, but these efforts would have led nowhere if the discipline did not have at its disposal certain techniques that lent themselves to the development of a socially useful product. In the present chapter we will analyze two such techniques in terms of their significance for a socially relevant investigative practice: the Galtonian approach to individual differences and the experimental use of treatment groups. Both of these methodological innovations assumed enormous importance in the subsequent development of modern psychology, but it is doubtful whether this would have been the case had they not played a crucial role in the constitution of psychology as a socially relevant discipline.

Extension of the mental test model

American psychologists, as we noted in chapter 7, had set about redefining the psychological problem of individual differences in terms of a comparison of performances against a competitively defined standard. This redefinition appeared to be perfectly adapted to the administrative requirements of social institutions whose efficient functioning depended upon some kind of selection process that was rationally defensible. The kinds of tasks that best lent themselves to the measurement of individual differences in this sense were tasks with answers that were unambiguously right or wrong. Performance on such tasks could be readily arithmetized by counting right and wrong answers, a procedure that had long been conventionalized in the institution of school examinations. Improvements in the precision of such procedures, made possible by Galton's fundamental contributions, eventually led to the construction of normed intelligence tests.

It is hardly a cause for surprise that educational institutions provided the setting in which intelligence tests proved themselves best adapted to administrative requirements. Transferred outside their home ground, their ability to predict future performance was much diminished, often to the point where their practical usefulness vanished altogether. This problem already emerged in the first major attempt at employing intelligence tests in the service of a noneducational institution, the U.S. Army in World War I. Most of the psychologists involved appear to have been convinced of the potential applicability of intelligence tests to military selection problems. However, although they were given considerable leeway and succeeded in testing well over a million men, the army does not seem to have found the results of this exercise particularly useful.

Interpreting the professional project

The previous chapters have provided abundant evidence for the fact that the historical development of psychological research practice did not proceed along a single track. At the very least, there were two different lines of development. By the 1920s the Wundtian style of experimentation, with its roots deep in the philosophical and scientific traditions of the nineteenth-century German university, seemed to constitute a deteriorating research program within American psychology. As it was fast losing its appeal for all but a few practitioners, the Galtonian research program, strongly linked to practical rather than academic concerns from the beginning, was moving from strength to strength. Not only was it extending its appeal with every passing year, but, as we have seen, it proved itself capable of generating exciting methodological innovations that promised to extend the scope of scientific psychology far beyond what had hitherto been thought possible.

We have also seen that the galloping success of the Galtonian program was in no small measure due to its very direct link to the demands of a significant extradisciplinary market for its products. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see the development of a certain style of investigative practice as an essentially passive adaptation to external social requirements. That might have been true of certain individuals, but it was not true of the response of the discipline as a whole. Even on an individual level most practitioners recognized that practical successes would be short lived if they threatened to undermine the prestige of the disciplinary enterprise they represented.