Summarize Galton’s contributions to psychology.

Measurement of Intelligence: Galton predicted that the more acute the senses of a person are, the more intelligent the person is. Assuming that high intelligence runs in famous families, he tried to measure the eminence or high intelligence, which runs in the eminent families. He went on to measure the intelligence of the offspring of people with high intellectual ability, statesman, commanders, poets, judges, painters, musicians, literary men, among others. He published the results in “Its Laws and Consequences” (1869) that the offspring of illustrious men were more likely to be illustrious than the offspring of non-illustrious people.

Eugenics: It means selective breeding in human beings, that is, humans try to improve their genetic build by mating with people having desirable traits (positive eugenics). Galton advocated that genetic makeup of human beings could be perfected through selective breeding and he advocated this practice.

Nature-Nurture controversy: A scientist, Alphonse de Candolle published a book in response to Galton’s Eugenics concept. He emphasized on the role of the environment in shaping up a human being. Galton responded to the criticism positively. He wrote a book, which was based on the findings regarding two hundred of his fellow scientists at the Royal Society. He had framed a questionnaire and asked his fellow scientists to fill them up. The observations were striking. The Scottish scientists praised their liberal education system whereas the English scientists said unpleasant things about their English education system.

Thus, he urged that the English schools be made more liberal like the Scottish schools. Galton revised his position regarding high intelligence that though intelligence is inherited from intelligent parents, it must be nurtured by a proper and education-friendly environment.

Word Association test and Mental Imagery: Galton devised the first word association test. He found out that this procedure reveals much about the psychology and childhood experiences of a person. This procedure of Galton was later used by many psychologists.

Galton was the first to study imagery. He told people to imagine a scene as they sat for their morning breakfast. He observed that though most people had the ability to imagine a picture, some individuals were almost incapable of imagery. Interestingly, they included some scientists as well.

Anthropometry: It means the measurement of individual differences among humans. Galton created an “anthropometric laboratory” and measured 9337 humans in one year. The measurements included size of the head, height of the person, arm span, length of the middle finger, breathing capacity, strength of hand squeeze, weight, visual and auditory senses, among others. These data were analyzed and human differences were calculated.

The Concept of Correlation: Galton’s article “Co-Relations and Their Measurement” and a book called “Natural Inheritance” written in 1889 described the concepts of correlation and regression. This was a major concept discovered and is still widely used in the field of psychology and statistics.