Early Psychotechnics and the role of personality in intellectual assessment in the Netherlands and Beyond

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a new kind of occupational and educational testing was developed by psychologists in Groningen. It consisted of a personality and capacity assessment that would trigger the interest by teachers. While some were skeptical, many would not hesitate to learn and use it for the assessment of school-children. Thus, the first research question guiding this research asks whether these mental testing techniques did really take on among teachers in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, a second aspect I will take into account in my research is the relation between the kind of typologies and psychotechnics developed in Groningen and the psychological methods and test that were circulating on an international scale (Mülberger, 2020).

Psychology arrived at Groningen thanks to Gerardus Heymans (1857-1930). From 1890 to 1927 he worked in the North of the Netherlands, while entertaining a wide network of contacts, especially with German philosophers and psychologists. While C.G. Jung was proposing his introversion-extroversion typology, Heymans developed a temperamental typology with the purpose to aid in the assessment of personality. Such an assessment seemed useful when it comes to orient a person with regard to decisions in life as choosing an occupation, professional training or a work area.

In 1919 Heymans’ former student, Henri J.F.W. Brugmans (1884-1961), was appointed as the first lector in pedagogy at the same university. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of psychodiagnostics in the Netherlands. From 1928 to 1954 he was professor of psychology and its applications, pedagogy and psychotechnics. Thus, his tasks included to train teachers in psychology. Following Heymans lead, he developed tests to check the fitness of persons for certain occupations and work places.

While Heymans and Brugmans’s contributions have been assessed by historians such as Dehue (1995), Dehue, Jansz & v. Strien (1992) and Draïsma (1992), the effect their work had more broadly in society inside the Netherlands. How were their psychological tests received by teachers and educators? To answer this question I use digitalized educational journals such as “Paedagogische Studiën” to show how the methods were presented to pedagogues and how teachers reacted to and used this new psychological technology.
The examination of the sources shows that, despite some criticism, teachers were highly interested in the application of such tests. If we compare the methodology used by Heymans and Brugmans with the typologies and psychotechniques that circulated at that time in Europe, we can see that there is an intensive exchange and many parallels. Nevertheless, some of the Groninger projects such as the Bosstichting was, in the long run, not successful. After its closure it would take several decades until industrial psychology and personality assessment achieved wider acceptance in the Netherlands