Special Review Feature: Who wants to read foreign books?

It is well known that science is international; indeed, this is one of its most attractive features. As far as the hard sciences are concerned, this general statement is undoubtedly largely true. As far as psychology is concerned, however, one is driven to the conclusion that it is very parochial. How many American and English psychologists read the German or the French literature to say nothing of the Russian? This may be due to language difficulties, but it may also be asked: how many American psychologists read the English literature? The answer I think is undoubtedly that very few do so. Do we miss anything by not reading the German and French authors? Should we insist that our students show some proficiency in these languages, as used to be the case when a university education was still supposed to produce people who were educated, rather than force-fed a particular subject in the minimum amount of time? Having had the good fortune (or the misfortune, depending on how you look at it) to have been brought up trilingual, and to have studied in Germany and France, as well as in England, I usually get sent all the German and French books from the various journals with which I am associated, and it seemed a good idea to go over the latest crop with a view to telling English readers about them and seeing whether they really miss anything at all. Let us start with one particular advantage that reading foreign books gives you, namely that it clarifies ideas very widely held, but which are nevertheless quite wrong. We tend to believe, for instance, that the Marxist position on the inheritance of intelligence is that so loudly proclaimed by our own militant students, namely that intelligence differences are caused entirely by environmental causes. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to readers of Guthke’s (1978) book on the measurement of intelligence, which is published in East Germany under the auspices of the government, to find that he has the following to say: ‘Marxist psychology does not deny the importance of genetic determinants for the differentiation of intelligence, as has sometimes been said by critics not properly informed of the facts, who rely on the extreme utterances of a few Marxist scientists. Both Marx and Lenin have always emphasized the biological and psychological inequality of human beings. ’ Altogether Guthke’s book on the measurement of intelligence does not come to conclusions which in essence are very different to those Jensen or I myself would come to. The emphasis is not always the same, but this is far from that caricature of scientific writing which opponents of the Soviet regime so often present us with. Much the same might be said of other recent books on intelligence, selection, and psychodiagnostics emerging from the DDR (Bottcher et al. 1974; Guthke, 1974; Gutjahr, 1974; Gutjahr et al. 1974; Rosler, 1976); these are all essentially acceptable to scientists in capitalist countries, and they often contain interesting material not always available elsewhere. Thus a book by Gutjahr (1974) contains the best exposition of the Rasch model which I have come across, and altogether as a textbook of the measurement of psychological qualities it ranks with the very best. The book by Gutjahr et al. (1974) is concerned with an evaluation of a special test (Lerntest) by Roether which is designed to measure concrete thinking. The test bears a striking similarity to ordinary non-verbal IQ tests and has about the same kind of reliability and validity as would, say, the Raven Matrices. The book helps to set at rest the minds of those who were worried that in communist countries the benefit of IQ testing may not be experienced; the term may be denigrated, but the reality persists! Even the problems which we experience seem to be very similar in communist countries, as becomes obvious from looking at the other books mentioned above.