How to Make an Industrial Personality Test in 20th century Japan

• In Event: Assessing Data

English Abstract

This paper explores the half-century-long process of creating a standard industrial personality test manual by the Japanese psychologist Uchida Yūzaburō (1894-1966). The process involved three phases. The first phase describes Uchida's adaptation of an experimental technique developed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin "to better reflect the Japanese mind." The second phase contextualizes the test's development within the sociocultural transformations in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s, including Japan's expansion as a colonial empire, rapid urbanization, industrialization, and increasing interest in self-knowledge associated with one's occupation among laypeople. The third phase analyzes how, in the 1960s, Uchida and other human scientists categorized the data collected over four decades and turned them into a manual, and how the commercial market for mental tests shaped Uchida's personal and professional practices, including the recruitment of test-takers and the treatment of their data. With this case study of the Uchida-Kraepelin Psychodiagnostic Test, the paper sheds light on the challenging history of establishing psychological tests as one standard method of scientific inquiry in human sciences.

Author

• Juhee Kang, Harvard University