Exploring Salmon’s claim that methods of psychological assessment ‘force subjects onto a bed of Procrustes’.

The Greek myth of Procrustes is utilised metaphorically by Salmon to describe the psychometric method associated with traditional psychological assessments (Salmon, 2003 cited Butt, 2007 p.203). Procrustes, a Greek counter-hero lured subjects to his home under the guise of hospitality only to deceive them into a macabre nocturnal violation where they were literally fitted to his iron bed. If a subject were too tall their legs would be chopped to size and if too short, they would be stretched! To imply empirical methodology achieves a similar result is harsh criticism indeed! This study describes the psychometric method beside phenomenological and discursive critiques, debating the efficacy of the former in achieving its claims of objective scientific enquiry. Issues emerge regarding ontological assumptions within psychometrics of an isolated, transparent individual, removed from the world and therefore incapable of personal agency. It will be shown how psychometric methods emerge from dualistic theorising with the knowledge produced being neither neutral nor objective but existing within society, becoming meaningful by application with grave implications for individuals. Salmon’s (2003) exploration of psychometrics within education illustrates how children are labelled, limited and ultimately disempowered by such methods. This study illustrates how psychometrics exacerbate the agency/structure dualism, maintaining inequalities of power and ignoring its own cultural embeddedness producing subjects who are indeed forced onto ‘a bed of Procrustes’.

 Theories of personality and their accompanying psychometric method are situated within time and culture having emerged to answer questions and understand behaviours such as the genocide of the Second World War. The Western world, wishing to understand what caused people to behave in startlingly different ways (Richards, 2002, p.255) asked Psychology to explore these individual differences providing concrete, authoritative answers. Psychometric testing offered such authority. Inspired by cause and effect scientific methods of enquiry, psychometrics measured individual differences such as intelligence, emotion and personality traits from wide populations, collecting data and condensing it into statistised form providing generalisations which endure through time as scientific fact! No theory however, arises in isolation and tensions exist between psychometric assumptions of enduring, objective truths waiting to be discovered and a discursive view of culturally embedded knowledge emerging from the particular historic time in which the method is situated.

 The situatedness of knowledge is eschewed however by personality theorists with Butt (2007, p.191) describing personality traits as enduring ways ‘in which one individual differs from another’, taking the form of categories existing beyond time and culture within which, subjects are cast. Eysenck (Eysenck and Rachman, 1965, cited Butt, 2007, p.192) however, sought to transcend categorisation, which he saw as presenting a ‘caricature’ of personality rather than representing individual differences. Eysenck developed a more sophisticated psychometric method utilising factor analysis to analyse correlations between traits and found that subjects conform to dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism offering successful classifications for clinical diagnosis and future interventions. He took the enduring nature of traits to heart basing his dimensions upon Galen’s four temperaments from Ancient Greece, melancholic, sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic. Eysenck furthers this argument by adopting a biological reductionist stance, which by its very nature assumes traits are biologically determined and thus consistent.

 Kelly (Stevens, 2002, p.199), although writing from a similarly clinical perspective, presents such attempts at escaping categorisation as naïve. Kelly recognised how subjects negotiate their worlds by utilising personal bipolar constructs such as ‘lively-reserved’. He developed a method called the repertory grid to plot these bipolar, personally idiosyncratic correlations arguing a humanistic critique of personal autonomy through conscious engagement with latent personal meanings. General categorisations are thus rendered meaningless and misleading, diminishing a patient’s ability for personal agency and the possibility of change from clinical interventions. 

 Salmon (Salmon, 2003 cited Butt, 2007) furthers Kelly’s research within an educational environment. Engaging a phenomenological stance concerned with learner’s intentionality (Edgar, 2002, p.31), Salmon argues the need to recognise the lived experience of students and teachers and their personal idiosyncratic meanings rather than the ‘market model of education’ presented by psychometrics where students are assessed and classified against scales of competence, constructing their boundaries of ability for learning and potential. Salmon describes how psychometric methods of intelligence testing categorise students as achievers or non-achievers, successes or failures. Salmon developed the qualitative method of the Salmon Line (2003, cited Butt, 2007) where personal meanings of learners and teachers could be plotted along a line representative of the current learning situation and the desired state. Meanings could thus emerge allowing students to engage in their own act learning rather than being defined by categories.

 Burr (2007) further supports Salmons view of the limiting and even harmful nature of psychometrics when used in education. Intelligence he argues is a variable abstracted by the psychometric method, which is then assessed using tests and questionnaires. The data collected is reconstructed to provide a classification of intelligence as low, average or high. The results however, have implications for students. For example, a student labelled an academic failure may then conform to the expectations of the category, maintaining the likelihood of continued failure. The discursive psychologist Foucault (Taylor, 2007) argues such categorisations determine meanings, maintaining inequalities of power, serving the interests not of the students and teachers but of the institution and its socio-political agenda. Students are thus disempowered with little personal agency to effect change, their future prospects determined by an empirical test!

 It has been argued therefore, that categorisation limits agency, forcing individuals into fixed, determined straightjackets or as Salmon states, a bed of Procrustes. Thorndike argued however that ‘everything which exists must exist in some quantity and can therefore be measured’ (Richards, 2002) however, as Richards argues, that which can be measured does not necessarily exist. This paradox appears true of psychometrics which test their own assumptions of separate interior entities enduring across time yet bear little resemblance to a child for example, who’s academic difficulties may be due to complexities beyond just intelligence with further exploration perhaps illuminating that intelligence isn’t the problem at all. For example, debates regarding dyslexia illustrate how classification of what constitutes ‘normal’ ability has fixed children with a ‘condition’, enduring through their lifetime. The label however, is an invention of the method, as dyslexics are emerging from qualitative research as ‘normal’ children who simply exhibit a different cognitive style (Wood et al, 2002). 

 Mischel (Butt, 2004) argues therefore, that psychometric methods reduce human complexity and meaning in order to achieve its aims of providing scientific generalisations. This is further exampled in the reduction of terms used to describe personality for the ease of operationalising the method (see Richards, 2002). Psychometrics, although looking for emergent patterns of personality, are dependant upon the questions asked and the choices of available answers, both of which are also dependant upon the researchers preconceptions of what constitutes personality and what they hope to achieve (Thomas, 2002, p.309). La Piere argued that ‘quantitative measurements are quantitatively accurate’ (La Piere, 1967 cited Taylor, 2007, p.50) and this seems an appropriate criticism of psychometric testing which deconstructs people into limiting and determining categories to suit the requirements of method, forcing subjects onto a bed of Procrustes.

 Psychometric methods of psychological assessment do not however, claim to understand either individuality or idiosyncratic meanings and such criticisms may thus be unfair. Psychometrics do not presume to do anything more than describe ‘hypothetical unobservable constructs’ which are provisional, requiring constant empirical testing to maintain their validity (Hewstone et al, 1997, cited Taylor, 2007, p.47). Constant refining of variables offers a valid and practical cycle of enquiry, testing theories of individual differences to provide generalisations pertinent to a wide population (Thomas, 2002, p.291), a strength not shared by qualitative methods (Taylor, 2007). Kelly however, argues this to be a process of ‘accumulative fragmentation’, which fails to develop any satisfactory understanding of human complexity (Kelly, 1955, cited Langdridge). Psychometrics however, do not claim to achieve understandings of human complexity. Are constructivist criticisms simply judging psychometrics against their own assumptions of what constitutes valid knowledge? Mark Forshaw (2007) has recently argued that qualitative methodology is a form of ‘loose literary criticism’, conveniently turning its back on truth to provide interpretations which are validated by the assumption of the existence of multiple viewpoints with the precious ‘meaning’ thus squeezed out of the narrative by the very act of interpretative saturation!

 Trait theorists thus argue the strength of their method lay in the refinement of variables and the common usage of personality terms within our society. Butt (2004) describes this ‘folk psychology’, where people naturally try to understand another’s behaviour through attributing dispositional categories, which are naturally comparable like honest/dishonest. People naturally use these attributions to predict future behaviours assuming therefore that such traits are consistent. Psychometrics is simply a continuation of what occurs quite naturally within human interaction and provides a way of measuring such interactions. The ‘intuitive scientist’ (Hieder, 1958 cited Langdridge, 2007) argument has however, received criticism, as attributing such dispositional cause and effect understandings of behaviour is more commonly known as the fundamental attribution error which Langdridge and Butt (2004 cited Langdridge, 2007) argue is a culturally embedded perceptual distortion and not a generalised enduring phenomena. Eysenck argues however, that traits are valuable measures of ‘dimensions of personality’ and psychometrics discover important categories of personalities which aid classifications of myriad observable phenomena like neurotic disorders and intelligence and offer wide applications unlike qualitative methods (Taylor, 2007). Such clear classification Eysenck argues is as necessary for psychology as it has been to the natural sciences which developed a clear table of elemental classification providing an important base measure for the discipline.

 Criticisms of psychometrics may be compelling but do not undermine the reality that psychometrics achieve their aims of offering generalised descriptions of personality. However, is the claim itself valid? The knowledge produced claims to be uninterested in meanings, idiosyncratic or otherwise however, knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, it exists within the world and society. By assuming objectivity, psychometrics fail to acknowledge that despite its claims, the knowledge it produces becomes meaningful through application, saying something about the subjects it studies, entering modern discourse. Knowledge is situated within culture, a production of socio-political agendas and concerns. For example, the ‘authoritarian personality type’ which emerged after the second world war (Richards, 2004, p.255) was viewed by Western theorists as closed-minded and rigid however, Nazi psychologist Jaenseh viewed this type as disciplined and clear thinking illustrating both the culturally situated production of knowledge and personal constructs of the researchers themselves. Psychometrics exist therefore, within the power relations of their time.

 Psychometrics may however, be useful as a method of data collection if for example, one wanted to know what proportion of students within a school had brown eyes (La Piere, 1967 cited Taylor, 2007), but by attempting to describe individual differences, they fail to provide either scientifically objective or qualitatively meaningful results. By assuming that all subjects possess inner, enduring personalities which all observe the same ‘object of thought’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987 cited Taylor, 2007. p.61) psychometrics ignore the reality that subjects experience different discursive realities. By ignoring context, meaning and society, psychometrics fail to explain or describe individual differences, describing only their assumed ontology to operationalise a reductionist cycle of enquiry. The categories produced are far from objective, conforming to the normative beliefs (Cherry, 1995, cited, Burr, 2007, p.177) of the scientific paradigm, becoming ‘theoretically redundant’ (Taylor, 2007). Such harsh criticism thus resolves the metaphorical debate regarding Procrustes.

 Procrustes is an accurate metaphor for psychometric testing. There exists however, a detail within the myth not often apparent within summarised or abridged versions which sheds further light on the role of psychometrics (see Wikipedia). Procrustes, before attempting to fit his victim to the bed had in fact, already sized up his subject. If his subject appeared tall, Procrustes would purposely shorten his bed in anticipation and vice versa, thus ensuring his subject would never fit and would always require mutilation. The focus of Procrustes therefore was not measurement, but mutilation in order to achieve his own personal agenda and satisfaction. This is akin to a method which claims to simply describe generalised hypotheses yet knows very well its results are meaningful, being utilised for psychological mutilation, maintaining power relations, diminishing agency and ignoring its own cultural embeddedness. Dualities provide the foundation of empirical methodology upon which, the reduction to the individual as a determined and disempowered entity stands in sharp contrast to the relational process of the Salmon line where intellect becomes a process of development through understanding meaning, inspiring change. Psychometrics do not address the complexities of individuals and provide spurious categories of intelligence and personality. Future research into individual differences would benefit from further qualitative methodology such as Salmon’s line, which explores personal meanings in a social context, positing the potential for personal agency rather than institutional power. Phenomenology offers opportunities to explore ‘extra-discursive’ meaning (Finlay and Langdridge, 2007), whilst the discursive perspective of Foucault offers illumination regarding the power of discursive categorisations. Such qualitative methods when utilised within eclectic environments such as schools, hospitals and work places thus expand and develop theoretical enquiry aiding understandings of the individual differences which make up our complex psychosocial species.

Article by Sinead Spearing. Website: www.sineadspearing.com

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