Seeing that statistics could be very useful to know the mental characteristics of our species and the way in which individual differences are expressed in it, he decided to use it to test the validity of his hypotheses about intelligence. These studies also allowed him to see that intelligence, like physical characteristics, is statistically expressed through a normal distribution: the vast majority of people had a level of intelligence very close to the average, while people with extreme values ( due to their very low or very high intelligence) are always clear minorities.
Galton young series#
Galton designed a series of questionnaires to measure the traits and characteristics of population groups that he considered relevant, seeing that people of better social and economic position tended to show greater signs of intelligence than the rest.
For that he used tools that began to be widely used in the 19th century, partly thanks to him: statistics and tools for measuring psychological characteristics. On the other hand, it was understood that education and the influence of the environment have an impact on who we are and how we behave, and that this incidence already has an effect in our first weeks of life, being confused with the first forms of expression of our genes.įrancis Galton counted on the fact that both heredity and learning mix in shaping not only our physical but also psychological characteristics, but he wanted to know which of the two elements explained a greater part of the variance in the human population. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin, who decades later would lay the foundations of biology by refuting creationism and Lamarck's theory of the evolution of species. Galton was born in England in 1822 into a wealthy family, which allowed him to be surrounded by an intellectually very active environment. This researcher, in addition to being a pioneer in various branches of science (including meteorology), designed some of the first tools for measuring intellectual abilities, which allowed him to reach interesting conclusions about human intelligence and its relationship with inherited characteristics. The study of individual differences, which today occupies one of the most important areas of psychology, has its roots in Francis Galton's theory of intelligence.
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