TL;DRAbstract
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.
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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.
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