The Mismeasure Of Man

In Chapter 5, Gould introduces the work of Alfred Binet (1857-1911), the inventor of the intelligence scale used to measure a person’s intelligent quotient (IQ). Binet began his career as a craniometric scientist measuring the heads of school children. After three years of study, he not only concluded that differences in size were “too small to matter,” he became wary of the possibility of unconscious bias in his own research (177).

When Binet returned to intelligence measurement in 1904, he focused his efforts on developing psychological tasks to explore the “various aspects of reasoning more directly” (179). By 1911, he had published three versions of his leveled tasks, which aimed at identifying a child’s intellectual level based on the series of tasks they were able to successfully reach and complete. This number was intended to be a rough guide for identifying learning-disabled children, not a label of “inborn intelligence” or a “device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth,” which Binet did not see as a “fixed and inborn quality” (182, 184). Binet presented these three principles to avoid the misuse of IQ.

Gould then introduces three forerunners of hereditarianism in America: H.H. Goddard, who first presents Binet’s scales as a means of measuring innate intelligence; L.M. Terman, who developed and popularized the Stanford-Binet scale; and R.M. Yerkes, who managed the IQ testing of men enlisting in the Army during World War I.

At the beginning of the 20th century, mental deficiency was classified under the following labels: idiot, imbecile, and high-grade defective (a.k.a. feeble-minded). H.H. Goddard (1866-1957), the director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, called these people morons. Unlike Binet, Goddard used the IQ test to assign limits and segregate individuals in order to “prevent further deterioration of an endangered American stock” (189). Goddard viewed intelligence as a single, heritable trait that also encompassed morality, leadership, and criminality; thus, he advocated preventing “morons [from breeding] and keep[ing] foreign ones out” (195).

From 1912 to 1919, Goddard authored a number of articles advocating policies to support his positions on the feeble-minded. However, by 1928, Goddard had recanted his position and admitted 1) his original limit of feeble-mindedness had been set too high, 2) most feeble-minded could be educated to live useful lives within society, 3) feeble-mindedness was not incurable, and 4) the feeble-minded did not generally require institutional segregation.

Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) held the belief that intelligence was an innate trait that could be used to rank intelligence within groups. As a Stanford University professor, Terman revised Binet’s scale by deemphasizing the value of imaginative responses and adding items that conformed to social norms. He renamed this test the “Stanford-Binet,” which remained a standard model for all intelligence testing that followed (205).

Terman’s intention was to test everyone, not just those who were judged below or above the average, in an attempt at “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness” (209). Like Lombroso, Terman viewed immorality and criminality as the inherited byproducts of low intelligence; however, he located these measurements in IQ, rather than in the measurement of the jaw or arms. In administering the test to all young people, Terman hoped the Stanford-Binet could standardize the assignment of professional work to young students. To this end, he devised a system that reflected his own beliefs of innate intelligence and its intersection with existing social class boundaries.

In one volume of his series Genetic Studies of Genius, Terman and an associate, Catherine Cox, published a tabulation of the IQ scores of historical geniuses to satisfy popular curiosity. In addition, though his research was focused on “within-group variance” (i.e. “differences in scores within single populations”)of IQ, Terman published findings that supported arguments for the innate heritability of intelligence, correlated low IQ with low social status, and justified racially-prejudicial views (218). By 1937, however, Terman had tempered his arguments and began citing differences between groups in “environmental terms” and cautioned that mean differences are statistically too small to predict individual results.

R.M. Yerkes (1876-1956), a psychology professor at Harvard University, was another early proponent of utilizing intelligence testing to measure “human potential” (223). With the onset of World War I, Yerkes received permission to administer tests to Army recruits. In the summer of 1917, Yerkes worked with Goddard, Terman, and other colleagues to create three tests: Army Alpha (for literate recruits), Army Beta (for illiterate recruits), and a version of the Binet scale. The largest impact of this testing effort was in the screening of men for officer training, wherein 120,000 of 200,000 selected officers took the test in training camps.

In reviewing the tests’ validity, Gould points out cultural biases, test administration inconsistencies, hostility from Army officers supervising examinations, and the misadministration of tests (i.e. illiterate men were assigned to take the Alpha test). In examining the results of the Alpha and Beta tests, the frequency distribution of six of the eight Alpha tests and five of the seven sub-tests show peaks at zero, indicating test takers did not “fathom the instructions and scored zero” (243). In examining the test analysis of Yerke’s team, Gould notes that instead of accounting for known biases in test administration, Yerke’s statisticians exacerbated bias and “did just the opposite, [t]hey exacted a double penalty” (247).

By the end of the war, Yerkes had collected uniform data on 1.75 million men. In his conclusions, Yerkes consistently found support for innate intelligence noting 1) low ability may induce unsanitary living conditions, 2) native intelligence results in the continued pursuit of education, and 3) immigrants of longer residence in America (and higher test scores) originated from northern/western Europe. Yerkes also found that southern/eastern European immigrants were less intelligent than northern/western Europeans and the “Negro lies at the bottom of the scale” (227).

After the publication of these findings, policy makers found new arguments to “contain movements for social welfare,” “restrict immigration,” and “[regulate] reproduction” (253, 260). In addition, 1) IQ testing gained new respect and support for the testing and ranking of children’s intelligence, 2) the argument for racial segregation was strengthened, and 3) Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. Six years after the passage of immigration quotas, C.C. Brigham, a disciple of Yerkes, published a recanting of the Army test conclusions, recognizing that the Alpha and Beta tests could not be combined into a single scale, and that they had included cultural biases that invalidated arguments for innate intelligence.