Character and Intelligence

THE British Journal of Psychology has published as a monograph supplement (Cambridge University Press) the results of a research by Mr. Edward Webb on character and intelligence. The subjects of the inquiry were ninety-eight men students at a training college in 1912, ninety-six students at the same college in 1913, and four groups of schoolboys, amounting in all to 140. At the training college the prefects (second-year students), and at the schools the class-masters were utilised as judges, a pair of independent judges being employed in each case. Very careful instructions were given and detailed lists of qualities supplied. Examination results and experimental tests of intelligence were also used. All the assessments; were ultimately translated into a scale of marks from +3 to −3. The “reliability coefficients” (correlations,between the estimates of the same quality in the same individual by the two judges) were in many cases very low, the average being rather under 0.5, and nearly one-seventh of the qualities marked were rejected on the ground of unreliability. For those retained the average reliability coefficient is 0.55. The lowness of the “ reliability coefficient” is held in part to be due to the care taken to secure independence between the estimates of the two judges. For intelligence-qualities the results are held to give a “ strikingly thorough support” to the theory of a general factor. The deduced correlations of the general factor with the various estimates are discussed in detail, and give some interesting and unexpected results. Amongst the latter may be mentioned the fact that sense of humour, which has little correlation with the general factor, is fairly highly correlated with the estimates, the prefects' judgments being apparently biased by this quality. The character-qualities are discussed in the same way, and here again there is held to be evidence of a central factor, and this factor is in some close relation to “persistence of motives.” This general factor markedly dominates all the correlations yielded by the estimates of moral qualities, the deeper social virtues, perseverance and persistence; also, negatively, qualities related to instability of the emotions and the lighter side of sociality.