ABSTRACT
When modern psychology first became established in the academy by Wundt and his students, the study of human behavior became both standardized and often artificial. For example, the procedures of early introspection experiments on sensation and perception required that observers mentally decompose an image into its components and not simply say that “I perceive a chair.” When intellectual assessments were introduced (to some degree first by Galton, and then later by Binet), standardization was a key ingredient to the methodology. Although one may argue whether Binet’s assessments of intellectual abilities were more or less artificial, it is clear that Binet was interested in obtaining the child’s maximal performance. That is, Binet instructed examinees to do whatever was appropriate (whether encouragement for one child, or admonishment for another) in order to obtain the child’s best performance on the test (e.g., see Binet & Simon, 1916; see also Ackerman, 1996, for a review). This paradigm for assessing intellectual abilities has been passed down through succeeding generations of assessment instruments, under the heading of ‘establishing rapport with the examinee.’ In the developed world, testing is so ubiquitous, and the consequences of poor performance so well entrenched, that by the time a high school student attempts the SAT, or a
college student attempts the Graduate Record Examination, it is almost certainly superfluous to verbally encourage the examinee to attempt to perform well on the test.
