Fifty Years of Exclusionary Psychometrics: I. Q Technique

Abstract

It was known in the 1930s that factor theory in psychology and quantum mechanics in physics had the same mathematical foundations. Q technique has developed this over the past 50 years into a system for a subjective science for psychology within the framework of Spearmanian principles of noesis. the creative nexus of so-called “mind.†Spearman's search through history pointed to only one fundamental principle, that of states of pleasure-unpleasure, and this was the direction taken by Q technique. This allows an individual to measure any psychological event for its state of pleasure-unpleasure on a "forced choice" scale, by Q sorting, that gives zero score to every such measurement. It corresponds to the ground state of energy of an atom, in quantum theory. Quantization occurs when the individual performs several Q sorts about the event: which means that reality functions are reduced to quantum functions, the operant factors of Q methodology, which we now know are subject to Niels Bohr's Principle of Complementarity.