Charles Spearman

Few would dispute the claim that Charles Edward Spearman (1863-1945) is Britain’s premier psychologist and indeed one of the enduring figures in the history of behavioral science. Some twenty years ago, I asked a number of psychologists to list the names of whomever they considered to be the five or six most important persons in the history of psychological testing. Among all the nominations, only three names were common to everyone’s list: Galton, Binet, and Spearman. If Galton was the father of psychometrics, Spearman was its chief developer, architect, and engineer. He is far more famous today and much more frequently cited in the literature than any of his contemporaries in academic psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, citations of Spearman’s works in the technical journals have steadily increased since his death in 1945 and markedly so since about 1970. And the number of references to Spearman’s major contributions continues to climb. This accelerated rate of citations is an exceptionally rare phenomenon, as the annual number of citations of most scientists’ publications typically decline rapidly after they deaths. Their individual contributions are either forgotten or are amalgamated with the accumulated empirical background of their special field without any lasting personal identity.