Psychometry has two very different meanings depending on context. In psychology, it refers to the science of measuring mental attributes like intelligence, personality, and aptitude through standardized tests. In paranormal circles, it describes the claimed ability to sense information about an object’s history through physical touch. Both uses share the same Greek roots: “psukhē” (spirit or soul) and “metron” (measure), literally meaning “measuring the soul.” Here’s what each one involves.
Psychometry as a Science
In its mainstream scientific sense, psychometry (often called psychometrics) is the branch of psychology dedicated to developing, validating, and applying tests that quantify human traits. These traits fall into three main categories: personality, which reveals how someone behaves and interacts; interests, which capture what motivates a person; and aptitudes, which measure how easily someone can learn new skills, solve problems, and adapt to changing demands.
A vocabulary test, for instance, is one of the strongest predictors of overall intelligence, which is why it often appears first in cognitive assessments. Personality inventories like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) measure how much a person’s behavior patterns differ from the general population. These tools aren’t opinion-based. They’re built on statistical models and held to strict quality standards.
What Makes a Test Valid
Two properties determine whether a psychometric test is worth anything: reliability and validity.
Reliability means the test produces consistent results. If you take the same test two weeks apart and get wildly different scores, it’s not reliable. Psychometricians measure this with correlation coefficients on a 0 to 1 scale. A test scoring below 0.6 is considered unreliable. Between 0.6 and 0.7 is marginally reliable. At 0.7 or above, a test is considered relatively reliable for research purposes. Consistency also needs to hold across different items within the test (internal reliability) and across different people scoring it (inter-rater reliability).
Validity means the test actually measures what it claims to measure. A personality test that secretly just reflects how well someone reads English isn’t valid as a personality measure. There are no hard cutoffs for validity the way there are for reliability, but correlation coefficients of at least 0.3 with related measures are a commonly accepted minimum. For predicting real-world outcomes, a stricter threshold of 0.6 is typical.
How Psychometric Testing Started
The field traces back to the late 1800s, when Sir Francis Galton became one of the first researchers to apply statistical methods to human differences. He established a statistical laboratory at University College London, collected data on physical and mental traits, and helped develop the concept of the normal distribution, the bell curve that remains foundational in statistics today.
In 1905, French psychologist Alfred Binet and his colleague Théodore Simon created the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon Scale. It used a series of tasks to assess cognitive abilities in children and became the basis for modern IQ testing. Around the same time, British psychologist Charles Spearman proposed the idea of general intelligence, a single underlying factor he called “g.” His analysis found that roughly 80% of the variation in test scores across different subjects could be explained by this one factor, meaning people who did well in one cognitive area tended to do well in others.
Where Psychometric Tests Are Used Today
Psychometric tests show up in two major areas of daily life: hiring and clinical diagnosis.
In employment, companies use these assessments to screen candidates before interviews even begin. Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Tesla, and many others include psychometric testing in their hiring process. Some of these pre-screening tests take about 20 minutes. One platform, Pymetrics, uses game-like exercises to measure around 90 cognitive and emotional traits. Another, Koru, generates scores on seven skills: grit, ownership, curiosity, polish, teamwork, rigor, and impact. If you’re applying to a company that uses Pymetrics, your results are locked in for 12 months, meaning any other employer using the same platform will see the same scores.
In clinical settings, psychometric instruments help diagnose learning disabilities, cognitive impairment, personality disorders, and mental health conditions. They’re also used in disability determinations, where standardized scores provide objective evidence of a person’s functional limitations.
AI and the Future of Testing
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how psychometric tests are built, administered, and scored. A growing field called Psychometric AI uses machine learning algorithms at nearly every stage: designing test questions, adapting tests in real time to match a test-taker’s ability level, and scoring open-ended responses with reliability that matches human raters.
Some of the most striking applications involve indirect measurement. Rather than asking someone to fill out a questionnaire, researchers have used eye-tracking data fed into machine learning models to predict personality scores with accuracy as high as 90%. Other research has found that machine learning models can judge personality traits more accurately than a person’s own friends can. These approaches reduce the bias that comes with self-reporting and could eventually replace traditional questionnaires for some purposes.
The Paranormal Meaning
The word “psychometry” was actually coined in 1842 by Joseph Rodes Buchanan, decades before the scientific field of psychometrics took shape, and he meant something entirely different. Buchanan proposed that all objects give off an “emanation” and that certain people could touch an object and perceive its history. He called this “measuring the soul” and envisioned it as a kind of mental telescope that could reveal the past.
In parapsychology, this concept is also called token-object reading. The idea is that objects carry an energy field containing information about their owners or their history, and a sensitive person can access that information through physical contact. Proponents describe the experience as receiving flashes of imagery, intense emotions, or a sudden sense of knowing something from another person’s perspective.
Scientific Evidence for Paranormal Psychometry
Researchers have investigated paranormal psychometry claims since the late 1800s, when the Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart studied self-professed mediums. Early studies, like those by Pagenstecher in 1920, documented a Mexican medium who reportedly entered a trance-like state while touching objects and described visual impressions, sounds, and emotions. Her information was reported as accurate, though these studies lacked the controlled conditions modern science requires.
Research continued sporadically through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s but never produced consistent, replicable results under rigorous conditions. A more recent survey published in Frontiers in Psychology took a different approach, examining the psychological profile of people who report psychometry experiences rather than testing whether the experiences are “real.” The study found that people who experience psychometry scored higher on measures of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), the tingling sensation some people get from certain sounds or textures. However, there was no significant link to synesthesia, a condition where senses overlap. The subjective experiences people described, such as vivid imagery and emotions that felt like they belonged to someone else, suggest that what people call psychometry may be a real perceptual experience, even if the explanation isn’t a paranormal one.
No controlled study has demonstrated that touching an object actually transfers factual knowledge about its history. The phenomenon remains outside the boundaries of accepted science, though the subjective experiences people report are themselves a subject of legitimate psychological inquiry.