Juhee Kang
A PhD student in history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), Juhee Kang explores how testing and mass data collection evolved in 20th century Japan, where they became central across society. In her Horizons project “Numbers, Minds, and Society,” Kang charts the path of psychological tests from scientific novelty to the bulwark of “scientific management” and meritocracy.
Beginning in the early 20th century, Japanese companies and institutions used psychological tests to determine who qualified for jobs and educational opportunities. By the 1920s, Japan, like a lot of industrialized nations, was experiencing a surge in social movements. One such movement was the drive for efficiency in business operations. “‘Scientific’ management was a big force globally in the early 20th century,” Kang says. “One of its central principles was testing people based on their aptitude to perform a task and then putting them where they could be maximally productive.”
At the same time, the new education movement in Japan emphasized the innate qualities of individuals. The idea was to foreground a person’s distinctive characteristics so they could fully manifest their natural talents and growth. Scientists in the first decades of the 20th century sought to resolve the concerns by arguing for the use of psychological tests, for which, they argued, a subject could not prepare.
One of the measures Kang explores in depth is the Uchida-Kraepelin (UK) test. Inspired by the work of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, Japanese psychologist Uchida Yuzaburo in 1926 developed a new way to represent the pattern of a person’s learning process. The UK test was increasingly used to measure aptitude in a variety of settings as its commercial uses became evident.
"In the 1920s, the test was developed as an alternative to scholastic exams,” Kang says. “In the 1930s, however, it became more widely applied to occupational selections, mainly for 'modern’ jobs that required lots of repetition, such as telegraphers, train or taxi drivers, and telephone operators. In the 1940s, it then took a darker turn and was used to screen malingerers among the repatriated soldiers who worked at munitions factories to address wartime labor shortages. Sometime in the 1970s, it was exported as the human resources management tool that guaranteed ‘Japan quality’ at manufacturing factories in Southeast Asia."
Kang says the UK test matters because of its claimed ability to relieve the modern anxiety of not intuitively knowing oneself and others. “As Japan became a multiracial, multiethnic powerhouse, it also became a highly industrialized society in which people from diverse backgrounds began to live side by side,” she says. “As physical differences became more evident and ‘knowing’ a person got more complex, people sought technology that could manifest the invisible qualities. Scientific tests assured them with their purported methodological objectivity that aimed to transcend linguistic, cultural, or other environmentally induced biases in assessment.”
As with any science or technology, the benevolence or malignance of testing is a function of the value systems underpinning it. That’s why Kang believes that transparency is crucial in the formulation of these technologies—as is a thoroughgoing public conversation about their implementation. “Some things are untouchable by testing,” she says. “Some things are so uniquely personal, so uniquely valuable that statistically based judgment has no meaning in them.”