Anne Anastasi

Introduction

Anne Anastasi (19 December 1908 – 4 May 2001) was the American psychologist who wrote Psychological Testing, the book that defined how several generations were taught to construct and interpret tests — and who used that authority to insist, repeatedly, on how little a test score means on its own.

She was known as the "test guru," which she disliked, partly because it suggested enthusiasm where she had mostly caution. Her actual position was that a test reveals what a person knows or can do at the moment of testing, and nothing more: not why, not what caused it, and not what it will be next year. Ability, she argued, is context-dependent, and the person administering the test carries responsibilities that are routinely ignored.

She held this position from inside the field rather than against it. She did not think intelligence tests should be abandoned; she thought the discrimination they produced came from the people using them, not from the instruments. That is a harder position to hold than either celebration or rejection, and it is why her textbook is still in print.

Early Life and Education

Anastasi was born in New York City to Anthony and Theresa Anastasi. Her father died when she was an infant and his family did not stay in contact; she was raised by her mother, a maternal uncle, and her grandmother, her mother supporting the household by working for the Italian-language newspaper Il Progresso.

She was educated at home by her grandmother until the sixth grade — the grandmother was a dominant figure who considered the family to be of noble Sicilian descent and did not think the neighbourhood children were suitable company. After brief periods at public and then preparatory school, she entered Barnard College at fifteen.

She intended to study mathematics. A psychology course changed that, and two things fixed the decision: a course with Harry Hollingworth, and a paper by Charles Spearman which convinced her that psychology and mathematics could be combined. That combination — quantitative method applied to the study of individual differences — is a fair description of her entire career.

She graduated from Barnard in 1928, at twenty, and completed her doctorate at Columbia in 1930, at twenty-one. Her training there was unusually broad: she studied with H.E. Garrett, A.T. Poffenberger, C.J. Warden, and Robert Woodworth, and with the visiting professors R.M. Elliott and Clark Hull — which means she was trained in the behaviourist and statistical traditions that were then competing for the field.

In 1933 she married John Porter Foley Jr., an industrial psychologist. The following year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium; the treatment cured the cancer and left her unable to have children. During the Depression she and her husband could only find work in different cities.

Academic and Professional Career

Anastasi began teaching at Barnard in 1930 and stayed until 1939 — she had been hired by Harry Hollingworth, whose wife Leta Hollingworth was then doing the work on women's abilities that Anastasi's own career would extend.

She moved to Queens College, City University of New York, in 1939 and became chair of its psychology department. In 1947 she joined Fordham University, where she remained for thirty-two years, chairing the department from 1968 to 1974 and retiring as a full professor in 1979.

Her professional honours were extensive: president of the Eastern Psychological Association (1946–47), president of the American Psychological Foundation (1965–67), and in 1972 president of the American Psychological Association — the third woman elected to that position, and the first in more than fifty years. She received the American Psychological Foundation's gold medal in 1984, the National Medal of Science in 1987, and the APA's Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology in 1994.

Fordham later established the Anne Anastasi Chair in Psychometrics and the annual Anastasi Lecture in her memory.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Psychological Testing

First published in 1954 and reaching a seventh edition in the 1990s, Psychological Testing set the terms on which test construction and interpretation were taught. Its distinctive emphasis was not on technique but on the responsibilities of the tester: to select an instrument appropriate to the purpose, to administer it properly, and above all to interpret the score in the light of everything else known about the person.

Anastasi's recurring argument was that a score is a description, not an explanation. Two people can arrive at the same score by entirely different routes, and the score does not distinguish them. This sounds uncontroversial stated plainly, and it is violated constantly in practice — in school placement, personnel selection, and clinical assessment, where the number routinely becomes the conclusion.

Differential psychology

Her 1937 Differential Psychology, running to nearly nine hundred pages, defined the field as "the scientific study of differences between groups" — with "groups" understood broadly to include age, education, family, gender, religion, and social class alongside race and ethnicity.

She was also direct about the abuses the field enabled. Reviewing the 1930s literature on Aryan supremacy, she wrote that the supporting evidence was "incomplete and one-sided at its best, and fantastic and mythical at its worst." Between the methodological difficulties and what was being done in the name of the research, differential psychology largely ceased to exist as a field; by 1954 Anastasi herself had moved from the study of group differences to individual differences.

Heredity, environment, and "how?"

Her 1958 paper "Heredity, Environment, and the Question 'How?'" was an intervention in the most polarised argument in the discipline. Rather than asking which contributes more — a question she regarded as badly posed and unanswerable — she argued for investigating the mechanism by which the two interact to produce a given outcome. The shift from "how much" to "how" redirected a literature that had been going in circles.

The contextual view of ability

Across her later work she pressed the point that aptitude is not a fixed quantity carried around by a person but a property of the person in a situation and at a time. Test performance is affected by the testing situation itself, by familiarity with the format, by cultural context, and by the individual's history of experience — and abilities change with experience, which limits what any single measurement can predict.

She also argued, against the critics of testing, that the problem was not the instrument. Low scores do not cause discrimination; the uses to which scores are put do. Discarding tests, she thought, would remove a useful tool without touching the thing that needed changing.

Major Publications

Differential Psychology (1937; 4th ed. 1981) — the founding text of the field
Psychological Testing (1954; 7th ed. 1997, with Susana Urbina) — the standard reference
"Heredity, Environment, and the Question 'How?'" (1958, Psychological Review)
Fields of Applied Psychology (1979; 2nd ed.)
"Psychological Testing: Basic Concepts and Common Misconceptions" (1985)

Impact and Legacy

Anastasi's textbook shaped the training of essentially everyone who has been taught psychological testing in the English-speaking world since the 1950s, and her framing of the tester's responsibility is now embedded in professional standards for test use. Fordham's psychometrics programme, which she built, became one of the leading centres for quantitative psychology in the United States.

She is also part of a specific lineage worth noting: hired by Harry Hollingworth, influenced by Spearman, working on the measurement of individual differences at precisely the moment when the field's findings were being used to rank groups of people. Her response was to keep the measurement and reject the ranking — which is the same move Leta Hollingworth had made a generation earlier with the variability hypothesis.

Criticism. The central tension in her position has never been fully resolved. She argued both that test scores are contextual, limited, and non-explanatory, and that tests are sound instruments that should not be discarded because of their misuse. Both can be true, but holding them together requires the user to exercise judgement that institutional settings — schools, employers, clinics — are structurally poor at exercising. The critique of testing does not need the instrument to be invalid; it only needs the context of use to be consequential and the interpretation to be crude.

Her early differential psychology work has dated in ways she recognised. The project of cataloguing group differences turned out to be both methodologically treacherous and politically available for use in ways she found abhorrent, and she effectively abandoned it by the 1950s. The 1937 book remains impressive in scope and is now mostly of historical interest.

There is also a question about whether her optimism about reforming test use was warranted. Her argument was that tests are neutral tools and the abuse lies with users. But instruments designed for one purpose get used for another, and a tool whose outputs are easily mistaken for verdicts is not fully neutral with respect to that mistake. The last seventy years of educational and employment testing have produced a great deal of evidence on this point.

Learn More

Charles Spearman — whose paper turned her from mathematics to psychology
Leta Hollingworth — her mentor Harry Hollingworth's wife, and the origin of the position Anastasi occupied
Alfred Binet — who built the first intelligence scale and issued the same warnings about its use
Intelligence Testing — the practice she spent her career regulating from within
Rodney L. Lowman — who argues that testing standards have to be written differently for organisational settings

References

Anastasi, A. (1958). Differential Psychology (3rd ed.). Macmillan.