Antecedents of personality measurement

Humans have always needed to size each other up in view of selecting mates, protecting themselves, engaging in commerce, and furthering their collective and private interests. Such assessment activity never reached the scientifically formal levels that it did in the twentieth century. We know that the Chinese have used formal tests for over 2,000 years for selecting candidates for their civil service, but there was something inherent to contemporary large-scale industrial societies, both Western and Eastern, that necessitated this explosion of interest in instrumentation for measuring humans. As modern society has become a testing society, it will be useful to examine this appetite for testing, which has spawned both a science and an industry.

Virtually no one in our post-industrial society will not have been measured countless times, in mind and body, in the course of his or her growth to maturity. Most of this assessment is done using formal tests. The pioneer of formal testing who is given the greatest credit for launching this social revolution in our modern era is Alfred Binet. He was commissioned in 1904 by the Ministry of Education in Paris to develop a methodology for triaging those children whose lack of success in the public schools of the time suggested that they might be aided by special education programs.