Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Alfred Binet The rise of psychometrics
• Goodenough (1949): The Galtonian approach was like • Lewis Terman (1916) produced a major revision of
“inferring the nature of genius from the the nature of Binet’s scale
stupidity or the qualities of water from those • Robert Yerkes (1919) convinced the US government to
of….hydrogen and oxygen”. test 1.75 million army recruits
• Alfred Binet (1905) introduced the first • Post WWI: Factor analysis emerged, making other
modern intelligence test, which directly aptitude and personality tests possible
tested higher psychological processes (real
abilities & practical judgments)
• i.e. picture naming, rhyme production, weight
ordering, question answering, word definition.
• Also motivated IQ (Stern, 1914): mental
‘age’ divided by chronological age
Psychometrics: An intro Psychometrics: An intro
2
Clinical versus actuarial judgment Meehl (1954): Results
• Paul Meehl (1954) first addressed the question: • He looked at between 16 and 20 studies
Which is better? (depending on inclusion criteria)
• His ground rules for comparison: “…it is clear that the dogmatic, complacent assertion
sometimes heard from clinicians that ‘naturally’ clinical
– Both methods should draw from the same
prediction, being based on ‘real understanding’ is
data set (this was relaxed by others, with
superior, is simply not justified by the facts to date”.
no changes in results)
– Cross-validation should be required, to • In all but one case, predictions made by actuarial
avoid using variation specific to the data means were equal to or better than clinical
set methods
– There should be explicit prediction of – In a later paper, he changed his mind about the one.
success, recidivism, or recovery
Psychometrics: An intro Psychometrics: An intro
3
Where are clinician’s strengths? IV Where are actuarial strengths? I
iv.) Able to re-weight utilities in real-time i.) Immunity from fatigue, forgetfulness,
- For ethical, legal, or humanitarian reasons, hang-overs, hostility, prejudice, ignorance,
we might decide to do things differently false association, over-confidence, bias, and
than usual in particular cases. random fluctuations in judgment.
Psychometrics: An intro