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Of Psychometric Means: Starke R. Hathaway and the Popularization of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2015

Rebecca Schilling  and
Stephen T. Casper
Rebecca Schilling
Affiliation:
West Viriginia School of Osteopathic Medicine E-mail: RSchilling@osteo.wvsom.edu
Stephen T. Casper
Affiliation:
Clarkson University E-mail: scasper@clarkson.edu
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Argument

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a highly successful and highly controversial psychometric tool. In professional terms, psychometric tools such as the MMPI transformed psychology and psychiatry. Psychometric instruments thus readily fit into the developmental history of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology; they were a significant part of the narrative of those fields’ advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the same time, the advent of such tools also fits into a history of those disciplines that records the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies in order to facilitate patterns of social control that became typical during the Progressive Era in the United States and after. It was those patterns that also nurtured the resistance to psychometrics that emerged during the Vietnam War and after.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 28 , Issue 1: Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century , March 2015 , pp. 77 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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