EMPLOYMENT PSYCHOLOGY
school or in a clerical position. There are abilities tapped
by the examination which undoubtedly are components of
relative success in a wide variety of activities and occupations.
Are these identities to be explained solely by the
hypothesis that all these activities and occupations present
situations which call out some of the very same specific
abilities as the examination? Or is it better to assume that
some one general ability is demanded in greater or smaller
degree by all these situations?
This question is a debatable one. Spearman and his followers,
while insisting on the importance of specific abilities,
hold that they have demonstrated the presence among these
abilities of a general common factor. Indeed they maintain
that there is not only a single common factor, intelligence,
determining in part our responses; but that other
pervasive determinants can be distinguished and measured,
such as character or perseverance. Output of energy is still
another characteristic which seems to some psychologists to
be general—to be, in other words, to some extent typical
or characteristic of a person’s behavior irrespective of the
direction of his activities.
Psychologists in developing the most dependable measures
of such characteristics as mental alertness, ability to learn,
or general intelligence, have sought to assemble a wide
sampling of varied tasks. They have included in their battery
those tests which correlate highly with the criterion
selected, but which intercorrelate least with each other. In
this way they have tried to reduce to a minimum the contribution
to the final score made by the several specific abilities.
They have aimed to disclose the more pervasive tendencies
of adjustment, the more general ability. Some of
them have called the ability measured by these tests, general
intelligence. Others call it conceptual intelligence, or memtal
alertness, or, merely, ability to do this kind of test!
It is fortunate that the investigator in vocational selection
does not have to wait until this controversy about general
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