Sir Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton

A. Sir Francis Galton was born into a wealthy English family in the year 1822. He was an extremely bright child and could read and write by the age of three. He was a bit of a trouble child in school, however, because he was too smart for his own good and felt it was a waste of time. After high school he went on to medical school and got a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University at the age of 21. Shortly afterwards, he received a large family fortune that allowed him to pursue his scientific interests. Galton passed away in the year 1911. Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin.

B. Sir Francis Galton's main focus in the field of Psychology was in genetics. His research helped bring the nature vs. nurture debate alive. He began working in this field in the late 1800's. Galton also worked with the development of regression analysis. This is a statistical technique forming the basis of prediction in widely ranging fields, such as economics and human resource management. Many of Galton's studies and research didn't lead him to the desired conclusions but it was later realized that this was due to a lack of technology. Many other psychologists that have come about after Galton's time and continued his research using the new technology came to the conclusion that Galton was on the right track in a lot of different areas.

C. Sir Francis Galton used many techniques and approaches while studying psychology. He was the first to clearly formulate the nature-nurture question. This question is the relative contributions of heredity and environment to individual and group differences in human traits, abilities, and talents. He was also the first to note the methodological importance of monozygotic and dizygotic twins for estimating the effects of genetics and environment on human variations. Galton founded the genetics movement, which was aimed at having those who are able and gifted have larger families and those that aren't as fortunate should have smaller families. The overall goal was to better humanity through genetics.

E. Sir Francis Galton conducted a number of experiments while studying psychology. He studied the inheritance of general mental ability by looking at nearly 1000 men who had achieved intellectual eminence and tabulated the frequency of eminent men among their relatives. By doing