Psychometric Wunderkammern: Word-Association Testing and the Aesthetics of Creative Genius

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, psychology was dominated by behaviorist approaches. The study of genius was isolated, accordingly, from any form of artistic expression and subjected instead to the pursuit of a nomothetic standard or general law about human creativity that could be tested and analyzed through a battery of exercises. Many of these were weighted for verbal aptitude, among them the Word Association Test or WAT. WATs were devised and interpreted through the new science of psychometrics, which treated word association not as a tool for probing the unconscious, but as an exercise in reflex physiology. Focused on a subject's single response to a series of trigger words, this so-called objective measure did not nullify older nonscientific representations of genius, however, for psychometrics actually validated an aesthetic deployment of language. Such language was aesthetic not only in the Kantian sense, evading or exceeding conceptual thought, but also more particularly in the resemblance, noticed by psychometrists and the literary community alike, between remote word associations and the modernist poetry then in ascendance. Statistical interpretation of the WAT thus harbored an aesthetic bias in this double sense. Moreover, the psychometric emphasis on nonstereotypical or remote responses as a possible marker of creative genius perpetuated the long popular notion of the artist as a lunatic. So although psychometrics and literature seemed secure in their respective domains, they secretly were in sync, joined by a notion of creativity as a specific cognitive style captured in an equally specific verbal unit.