Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use It

by Marion Rex Trabue; Frank Parker Stockbridge

“The trouble with the observational method is its lack of a universal standard of judgment. One observer may use a high, another a low standard of comparison. A four-story building in the midst of New York’s ‘sky-scrapers’ looks very low; placed in the midst of a wide expanse of one-story structures it would look very tall.

“Moreover, we are easily misled by appearances. The writer knows a young man who looks so foolish that he is often mistaken by casual acquaintances for a mental defective. In reality he is one of the half dozen brightest students in a large university. Another man who in reality has the mentality of a ten-year-old child is so intelligent looking that he was able to secure employment as a city policeman.

“Language is a great deceiver. The fluent talker is likely to be overrated, the person of stumbling or monosyllabic speech to be underrated. Similar errors are made in judging the intelligence of the sprightly and the stolid, the aggressive and the timid, etc. Our tendency is also to overestimate the intellectual quality of our friends and to underestimate that of persons we do not like.

“If the method of offhand judgment were reliable, different judges would agree in their ratings of the same individual. When the judges disagree it is evident that not all can be correct. When intelligence is rated in this way wide differences of opinion invariably appear. Twenty-five members of a university class who had worked together intimately for a year were asked to rate the individuals of the class from 1 to 25 in order of intelligence. The result was surprising. Almost every member of the class was rated among the brightest by someone, and almost every member of the class among the dullest by someone. Doubtless the judges were misled by all sorts of irrelevant matters, such as personal appearance, fluency of speech, positiveness of manner, personal likes and dislikes, etc.

“The method of personal estimate is much better than the method of external signs (phrenology), but to be reliable it must be supplemented by a method which is objective, that is, a method which is not influenced by the personal bias of the judge or by such irrelevant factors as the appearance, speech, or bearing of the one to be rated. Such is the method of intelligence tests.”

It would, of course, as Professor Terman points out, be absurd to contend that it is impossible to arrive at a rough estimate of an individual’s capacities and character by observation, as it is absurd to pretend that accurate measurements of an individual’s capacities can be made by the same method. There are men who have by long experience learned to judge on very brief contacts the possibilities of applicants for positions. Actually, what such employers do is to apply, though crudely and unscientifically, a limited number of tests which might fairly be classed as psychological. Out of a long experience they have accumulated an accurate knowledge of the work to be done and of the general type of individual who has been found best qualified to perform that work. This sort of ability, however, is acquired solely through long experience, and even then it can only be acquired by men or women who themselves possess certain mental qualities, which might easily be gauged and classified, the possession of which enables them to accumulate and utilize experience in this manner.

This sort of ability can by no means be transferred from one individual to another by description or by mere training. It is precisely like the ability which an experienced automobile repair man possesses, that enables him to tell by a quick inspection and after only a few minutes of observation what are the principal things the matter with a car and what service it is probably able to perform. But a repair man cannot tell anybody else how to size up an automobile at a glance, because the only way any one can learn to do it is by going through the same process of taking automobiles apart and putting them together again for a period of years. And as everyone who has ever had occasion to deal with automobile repairs is aware, the most experienced repair men are seldom positive that they know just what is wrong and all that is wrong without applying precise measurements and painstaking tests.

It is easy enough to determine that a delicate, small-boned, slender person is not the best type to employ for digging coal, loading freight cars, or other arduous manual labour. There are, of course, many classes of occupations the fitness or unfitness for which of a particular individual must be determined in the first place by that individual’s physical characteristics. So far the observation method suffices. But the very fact that every industry and business is full of misfits and that it is a matter of common knowledge that the most difficult problem the employer has to face is that of finding the right person for each particular job that calls for anything more than mere physical strength, is the best evidence that even the most experienced and accurate observers are far from infallible in their judgments of individual capacities.

For that matter, there is no infallible test. No true scientist claims infallibility. The possibility of error is always present wherever the human element is involved. It is a safe assumption that any method or estimate that purports to be infallible is fraudulent. There is in almost every human mind a lurking, subconscious belief in the possibility of perfection. It is this which makes humanity credulous when claims of infallibility are plausibly presented.

It is extremely difficult to satisfy by logic and reason the type of mind that is strongly influenced by glittering generalities and emphatic, though unsupported, assertions. It is equally difficult to convince the skeptic whose mind is closed to the introduction of new thoughts and who, in his self-satisfaction with his own mental limitations, rejects every fact that does not tally with his preconceived ideas.