Anthropometry - Typology and Personality

Typology and Personality

Intelligence testing was compared with anthropometrics. Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) collected hundreds of human skulls from all over the world and started trying to find a way to classify them according to some logical criterion. Morton claimed that he could judge intellectual capacity by cranial capacity. A large skull meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity, a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity. Modern science has since confirmed that there is a correlation between cranium size (measured in various ways) and intelligence as measured by IQ tests, although it is a weak correlation at about 0.2. Today, brain volume as measured with MRI scanners also find a correlation between cranium size and intelligence at about 0.4.

Craniometry was also used in phrenology, which purported to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head. At the turn of the 18th to 19th century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1822) developed "cranioscopy" (Ancient Greek kranion - "skull", scopos - "vision"), a method to determine the personality and development of mental and moral faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy was later renamed phrenology (phrenos: mind, logos: study) by his student Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832), who wrote extensively on "Drs. Gall and Spurzheim's physiognomical System." These all claimed the ability to predict traits or intelligence and were intensively practised in the 19th and the first part of the 20th century.

During the 1940s anthropometry was used by William Sheldon when evaluating his somatotypes, according to which characteristics of the body can be translated into characteristics of the mind. Inspired by Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropology, he also believed that criminality could be predicted according to the body type. A basically anthropometric division of body types into the categories endomorphic, ectomorphic and mesomorphic derived from Sheldon's somatotype theories is today popular among people doing weight training.