An intelligent Scotland: Professor Sir godfrey Thomson and the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947

Abstract

This article is a written version of the British Academy/British Psychological Society lecture given on 17 October 2012. In the first half the focus is historical on the work of Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson (1881-1955). In particular, new primary sources are described and illustrated. The principal new source is a collection of his public lectures from 1924 until 1954 that illustrate his interests and opinions in education and intelligence, and their place in society. The second half consists of an illustrative summary of our follow-up studies on the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947, in which Thomson played such a large part. These data are now being used in the study of cognitive ageing and cognitive epidemiology.

Ian Deary and Robert Sternberg answer five self-inflicted questions about human intelligence

“…Indeed, this clear operationalisation pretty well reduces the 'cognitive reserve theory' to the superfluous status of 'soup stone' (Navon, 1984). System integrity also has the status of suggested empirical regularity, I think (Deary, 2013). Although I devised the idea (Whalley & Deary, 2001), I dislike the fact that the idea is rather uncritically liked and cited, and sometimes called a theory.…”