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.

    362/474 page 348
    value, approximating as it does to unity, was taken to indicate that the whole of the correlation in the table derives from one and the same factor.1 Having thus established that such a new general factor exists, the author’s next step was to discover for it some valid psychological explanation. With this in view, he re¬ marked that all the eight traits could be subsumed under one or other of the following : (a) moral qualities and deeper social virtues (3, 4, 5) ; (b) persistence of motives (1, 2) ; (c) instability of emotions (6) ; and (d) the lighter side of sociality (7, 8). Thence he argued as follows : “ The nature of our general factor must obviously be sought in these four headings. ... We therefore ven¬ ture to suggest (tentatively and with much desire for further evidence) that the nature of the second factor, whose generality would appear to extend so widely in character, is in some close relation to ‘ persistence of motives.’ This conception may be understood to mean consistency of action resulting from volition or will.” For this general character-factor, he proposes the symbol of w. Correlation of “ Profoundness ” and “ Common Sense.” Assisted by this far-reaching theorem of w, let us return to the problem of analyzing the six kinds of intelligence whose inter-correlations so decidedly failed to be explicable by any single common factor. We will begin with a pair of them, Profoundness of Apprehension and Soundness of Common Sense. Let us consider what these terms were intended to signify. 1 This criterion of incolumnar correlation has, indeed, now been super¬ seded by that of tetrad differences. But here—indeed almost everywhere when properly applied—the two lead to concordant results (see ch. x.). The conclusion of Webb was in the following year supported by the finding of Burt, that the correlations between different emotional tendencies “suggest the presence of a general factor” (Proc. Brit. Ass., 1915). Quite recently, Webb has been further corroborated by Allen’s work on Temperamental Tests (see thesis in Library of the University of London).
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image