We will cover briefly how it all started, key people who contributed to it and concepts that influenced the psychometric models we use now. So let’s begin.

Here are some key points :

//Charles Darwin : our traits could be passed down through family bloodlines which makes our traits different from each other

// Frances Galton : on the differences between human “mental capacity” aka intelligence, measuring human behaviour, and the word “psychometrics” was born

//William James Cattel : mental measurements, like time to name a color, time judgment; judgment of line length; recall of numbers and letters after hearing them

//Charles Spearman : introduced the first measurement of general intelligence to explain performance of any mental task along with a statistical method called Factor Analysis

//Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon : measure intelligence with other things like your attention, judgment, knowledge, and memory, mental levels - if you perform lower than another person your age, you have a lower mental level. If you over perform, then you have a higher mental level

//Lewis Terman : Stanford-Binet Test, used in schools.

//American Psychological Association : SATs

//Single factor theory focusing on general intelligence to multiple factor analysis focusing on associative memory, general reasoning, number ability, perceptual speed, spatial ability, verbal comprehension, and word fluency

//World War I : Tests were developed further as part of the recruitment process to know whether soldiers would develop PTSD

//World War II : Psychometric tests were used to find out which soldiers were eligible for officer ranks

//Galton's Lexical Hypothesis : personality traits can be encoded from language

//Allport and Odbert : took out all personality-related words (18,000 in total!) in attempt to explain human behavior

//Cattel : Simplified Allport & Odbert's work and came up with a way to group all 18,000 words. He constructed the Clinical Analysis Questionnaire (CAQ) Part 1 that measures the 16PF factors, While Part 2 measures an additional 12 abnormal (psychopathological) personality trait dimensions.

//Hans Eysenck : said there were three, and used that in personality tests to recruit soldiers in World War II

//Big Five Model : focus on 5 dimensions to predict work-related outcomes

//Learning from the history : our traits are not fixed; so our personalities can be activated in certain situations and at different times in our lives, this dynamic play between personality affecting work and work affecting personality just shows that work can have a profound impact on our quality of life

//Psychometric tests in organizations : used to understand their teams’ motivations and values and so they can have the team culture best suited for them to drive performance and develop potential