There are a variety of accreditation schemes for psychology degrees around the world. The British Psychological Society has requirements for institutions that want to offer psychology degrees, and so does Australia.
We don’t have anything quite like this in Aotearoa. The New Zealand Psychologists Board accredits delivery of vocational psychology programmes that lead to registration as a psychologist, but not bachelor’s psychology programmes.
If you teach psychology in Australia or the UK, part of the requirements for accreditation is to have a curriculum that hits all the content bases – a bit of developmental psychology, a bit of social psychology, a bit of brains and rats, etc.
One of those bases is personality and individual differences. When I was at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington I learnt about these in PSYC 221 – Social Psychology and Individual Differences, and PSYC 321 – Personality and Abnormal Psychology. But over time, these became just Social Psychology and Abnormal Psychology (now Clinical Applications of Psychology).
This year, I’ve been developing a bunch of new lectures around personality and individual differences so that PSYC 221 can once again be Social and Personality Psychology. This means I’ve had to remind myself of things I must have known before. I vaguely remember AUT Professor Richard Siegert teaching me about intelligence and intelligence testing but, for the life of me, I can’t find my notes. Plus, things have moved on.
Intelligence, like personality, is an idea we take for granted – we “feel” what it means.
But what would you say if I asked you what it means to be intelligent? You can’t say “intelligence is being smart” because I’m just going to ask you to tell me what you mean by “smart”. This has been a somewhat vexed question for most of the 20th century.
In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, reckoned being smart was a combination of energy (he thought intelligent people were more industrious) and sensitivity (intelligent people were better at attending to and detecting changes in their senses). For a fee, you could head along to his London laboratory and see how good you were at telling the difference between two weights, or sounds, and by extension, how intelligent you were.
The problem is that this might measure something but it isn’t what we think of when we think of intelligence. Sure, people can be better or worse but how good you are at these psychophysical tasks isn’t related to how well you do at school or university. This is a problem of convergent validity – Galton’s tasks don’t predict something they should if he’s actually measuring this aptitude.
Nowadays, thanks in no small part to Frenchman Alfred Binet, intelligence tests involve complex cognition, or how we think. Binet’s early efforts were commissioned by educationalists to try to identify youngsters who wouldn’t benefit from conventional schooling because of their, ahem, lesser cognitive faculties. But later, they were standardised and packaged, and they laid the foundation for tests to decide who should enter the army, or be allowed to migrate to the US.
These were not proud moments in psychometric testing, because the tests also relied on cultural knowledge that discriminated against people from non-English speaking nations, but with a thin veneer of credibility.
These days, we have a more varied appreciation of what “intelligence” is, and how to measure it in more valid ways.
Galton may have been wrong about what constitutes intelligence, but something of his legacy remains – he was an early psychological entrepreneur making a penny or two from satisfying our desire to confirm we’re as smart as we think we are. Just google “online intelligence test” to see what I mean. l
