From Papers to Programs: Courts, Corporations, Clinics, and the Battle Over Computerized Psychological Testing

This paper examines the role of technology firms in computerizing personality tests from the early 1960s to late 1980s. It focuses on the National Computer Systems (NCS) and their development of an automated interpretation for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality inventory (MMPI). NCS trumpeted their computerized interpretation as a way to free up clerical labor and mitigate human bias. Yet psychologists cautioned that proprietary algorithms risked obscuring decision rules. I show how clinics, courtrooms, and businesses all had competing interests in the use of computerized personality tests. As I argue, the development of computerized psychological tests was shaped both by business concerns about intellectual property and profits and psychologists' concerns with validity and access to algorithms. Across these domains, the common claim was that computerized psychological testing could provide a technical fix for bias. This paper contributes to histories of computing emphasizing the importance of IP, the relationship between labor, technology, and expertise, and to histories of algorithms.