Semester:
Offered:
Marla Eby (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 49N 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
For well over a century, psychologists have worked with schools, corporations, immigration officers, the military, and psychiatrists to sort the American population into groups in order to make a number of key judgments. Special tests – designed to measure everything from intelligence to vocational aptitudes to personality – have been at the center of that effort. In this course, we will explore the at times controversial story of psychological testing, and its larger implications. We will pay attention to the creativity within psychology in the making of such tests, and examine their potential benefits, as well as the drawbacks and dangers of the misuses of these instruments – particularly as tools of social control. Topics covered will include the use of tests in the eugenics movement, testing of immigrants at Ellis Island, academic and military sorting through cognitive tests, the use of personality tests in psychiatric and forensic settings, and the cross-cultural use of personality tests by anthropologists. Since Harvard psychologists have made significant contributions to the history of psychological testing, we will use materials uniquely available on this campus in the course of our work together.