The abilities of man : their nature and measurement / by C. Spearman.

  • Charles Spearman
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The abilities of man : their nature and measurement / by C. Spearman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    211/474 page 197
    goes, the most eminent man measured by him did, in point of fact, easily surpass everyone else that was tried. More¬ over, an important indication has been furnished by Terman, that the children who do the tests extraordinarily well have had an extraordinarily high proportion of “ big ” fathers and grandfathers ; these are reported to have filled “ posi¬ tions of honour, trust, and responsibility,” such as those of senators, mayors, bank presidents, bishops, managers of large factories, and so forth.1 Obviously, however, g alone would never make a big man of any sort. For it measures only the cognitive aspect of mental activity, and therefore abstracts from the dominant influence of the affective and above all the conative aspects (see ch. xx.). Theorem of indifference of indicator. A corollary—more practical than theoretical—to be derived from the univer¬ sality of g is what may be called the theorem of the in¬ difference of the indicator. This means that, for the purpose of indicating the amount of g possessed by a person, any test will do just as well as any other, provided only that its correlation with g is equally high. With this proviso, the most ridiculous “stunts” will measure the self-same g as will the highest exploits of logic or flights of imagination. Another consequence of the indifference of the indicator consists in the significance that should be attached to personal estimates of “ intelligence ” made by teachers and others. However unlike may be the kinds of observation from which these estimates may have been derived, still in so far as they have a sufficiently broad basis to make the influence of g dominate over that of the s’s, they will tend to measure precisely the same thing. And here, it should be noticed, we come at last upon the secret why all the current tests of “ general intelligence ” show high correlation with one another, as also with g itself. The reason lies, not in the theories inspiring these tests (which theories have been most confused), nor in any 1 Genetic Studies of Genius, 1925, ch. i.
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