Long before online quizzes and the Myers-Briggs personality test, Robert Woodworth’s “Psychoneurotic Inventory” tried to assess the recruited soldiers’ susceptibility to shell shock. Shell shock was an incident wherein a private and two other soldiers survived a shell explosion, but eventually woke up in a hospital with a cloudy memory and an irritable auditory nerves.
According to Michael Zickar, a professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University, World War I was actually a watershed moment of psychological testing. After the shell shock incident, the soldiers were observed in a hospital camp after every war exposure.
Less than two years after the United States entered World War I, around 1,727,000 would-be soldiers had received a psychological evaluation, including the first group of intelligence tests, and roughly two percent of entrants were rejected for psychological concerns. Some of the soldiers being screened, like draftees at Camp Upton in Long Island, would have filled out a questionnaire of yes-no questions that Columbia professor Robert Sessions Woodworth created at the behest of the American Psychological Association.
What about the psychological and personality tests?
The questions on what would become the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, or Psychoneurotic Inventory, started out asking if the subject felt “well and strong,” and then tried to pry into their psyche, asking about their personal life—“Did you ever think you had lost your manhood?”—and mental habits. If over one-fourth of the control (psychologically “normal”) group responded with a ‘yes’ to a question, it was eliminated.
Here are some of the questions that made the cut in the personality tests:
Can you sit still without fidgeting? Do you often have the feeling of suffocating? Do you like outdoor life? Have you ever been afraid of going insane? The test would be scored, and if the score passed a certain threshold, a potential soldier would undergo an in-person psychological evaluation. The average college student, Woodworth found, would respond affirmatively to around ten of his survey’s questions. He also tested patients (not recruits) who’d been diagnosed as hysteric or shell shocked and found that this “abnormal” group scored higher, in the 30s or 40s.
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Image Credit: US National Archives