On not "giving psychology away": The Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory and public controversy over testing in the 1960s.

Abstract

Psychological tests, especially the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, became the center of public controversy and Congressional scrutiny during the 1960s. This unwanted attention actually helped American psychologists more than they imagined. Assisted by those on Capital Hill, psychologists were able to defend their science in a manner that avoided imposed forms of public accountability. Social questions were reformulated as technical problems. The need to adjust intelligence and aptitude tests reinforced psychologists' control over them. Conversely, personality tests were not made more transparent and nonintrusive, unless psychologists thought these changes were scientifically necessary. This episode prompted tighter regulation of test use and demonstrated that traditional forms of testing were far too important to popularize and "give away".

Roles of Instruments in Psychological Research.

“…See, for example, Rand B. Evans's work on Edward B. Titchener (http:// vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/art11/index.html). , 2002Rogers, 1995;Sokal, 1987;Zenderland, 1998) and focused more closely on the ways in which apparatus and the research practices centered around them have in certain important respects constituted psychology's history (e.g., Albert & Gundlach, 1997;Benschop, 1998;Benschop & Draaisma, 2000;Danziger, 1990;Derksen, 2001;Gigerenzer, 1992). Nonetheless, the number of such studies has remained relatively small.…”

Legislative warriors: American psychiatrists, psychologists, and competing claims over psychotherapy in the 1950s

“…In contrast, psychologists' earlier development of standardized tests gave clinical psychologists a clear identity and a fall-back expertise when challenged by encroachment. Testing came to be included in every licensing act defining psychological practice (Buchanan, 1997(Buchanan, , 2002. Likewise, somatic procedures such as psychosurgery and shock therapy promised a core expertise for American psychiatrists midcentury.…”

Of Psychometric Means: Starke R. Hathaway and the Popularization of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

“…The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (hereafter MMPI), according to the Billings Gazette , was the most popular psychiatric test the world-over and the article's author had no wish to laud that achievement (Clawson 1975). The Billings Gazette Sunday Magazine had, however, arrived rather late to the debate about psychometric testing and its role in promoting a psychology of adjustment in American society (Buchanan 1994; Buchanan 1997; Buchanan 2002). Indeed, the rapid uptake of psychometric testing and adjustment psychology, and the anti-expert reaction that testing eventually engendered, appeared throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the pages of The New York Times , The Washington Post , and sundry other media outlets.…”