5.3 An advertisement for mass mental testing using an examination written by, among others, Terman and Yerkes.
National Intelligence Tests for Grades 3–8
The direct result of the application of the army testing methods to school needs.… The tests have been selected from a large group of tests after a try-out and a careful analysis by a statistical staff. The two scales prepared consist of five tests each (with practical exercises) and either may be administered in thirty minutes. They are simple in application, reliable, and immediately useful in classifying children in Grades 3 to 8 with respect to intellectual ability. Scoring is unusually simple.
Binet, had he lived, might have been distressed enough by such a superficial assessment, but he would have reacted even more strongly against Terman’s intent. Terman agreed with Binet that the tests worked best for identifying “high-grade defectives,” but his reasons for so doing stand in chilling contrast with Binet’s desire to segregate and help (1916, pp. 6–7):
It is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is most important for the State to assume.
Terman relentlessly emphasized limits and their inevitability. He needed less than an hour to crush the hopes and belittle the efforts of struggling, “well-educated” parents afflicted with a child ofIQ 75.
Strange to say, the mother is encouraged and hopeful because she sees that her boy is learning to read. She does not seem to realize that at his age he ought to be within three years of entering high school. The forty-minute test has told more about the mental ability of this boy than the intelligent mother had been able to learn in eleven years of daily and hourly observation. For X is feeble-minded; he will never complete the grammar school; he will never be an efficient worker or a responsible citizen (1916).
Walter Lippmann, then a young journalist, saw through Terman’s numbers to the heart of his preconceived attempt, and wrote in measured anger:
The danger of the intelligence tests is that in a wholesale system of education, the less sophisticated or the more prejudiced will stop when they have classified and forget that their duty is to educate. They will grade the retarded child instead of fighting the causes of his backwardness. For the whole drift of the propaganda based on intelligence testing is to treat people with low intelligence quotients as congenitally and hopelessly inferior.
Terman’s technocracy of innateness
If it were true, the emotional and worldly satisfactions in store for the intelligence tester would be very great. If he were really measuring intelligence, and if intelligence were a fixed hereditary quantity, it would be for him to say not only where to place each child in school, but also which children should go to high school, which to college, which into the professions, which into the manual trades and common labor. If the tester would make good his claim, he would soon occupy a position of power which no intellectual has held since the collapse of theocracy. The vista is enchanting, and even a little of the vista is intoxicating enough. If only it could be proved, or at least believed, that intelligence is fixed by heredity, and that the tester can measure it, what a future to dream about! The unconscious temptation is too strong for the ordinary critical defenses of the scientific methods. With the help of a subde statistical illusion, intricate logical fallacies and a few smuggled obiter dicta, self-deception as the preliminary to public deception is almost automatic. —WALTER LIPPMANN, in a debate with Terman
Plato had dreamed of a rational world ruled by philosopher-kings. Terman revived this dangerous vision but led his corps of mental testers in an act of usurpation. If all people could be tested, and then sorted into roles appropriate for their intelligence, then a just, and, above all, efficient society might be constructed for the first time in history.
Dealing off the bottom, Terman argued that we must first restrain or eliminate those whose intelligence is too low for an effective or moral life. The primary cause of social pathology is innate feeble-mindedness. Terman (1916, p. 7) criticized Lombroso for thinking that the externalities of anatomy might record criminal behavior. Innateness, to be sure, is the source, but its direct sign is low IQ, not long arms or a jutting jaw:
The theories of Lombroso have been wholly discredited by the results of intelligence tests. Such tests have demonstrated, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the most important trait of at least 25 percent of our criminals is mental weakness. The physical abnormalities which have been found so common among prisoners are not the stigmata of criminality, but the physical accompaniments of feeble-mindedness. They have no diagnostic significance except in so far as they are indications of mental deficiency (1916, p. 7).
Feeble-minded people are doubly burdened by their unfortunate inheritance, for lack of intelligence, debilitating enough in itself, leads to immorality. If we would eliminate social pathology, we must identify its cause in the biology of sociopaths themselves—and then eliminate them by confinement in institutions and, above all, by preventing their marriage and the production of offspring.
Not all criminals are feeble-minded, but all feeble-minded persons are at least potential criminals. That every feeble-minded woman is a potential prostitute would hardly be disputed by anyone. Moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence. Morality cannot flower and fruit if intelligence remains infantile (1916, p.11).
The feeble-minded, in the sense of social incompetents, are by definition a burden rather than an asset, not only economically but still more because of their tendencies to become delinquent or criminal.… The only effective way to deal with the hopelessly feeble-minded is by permanent custodial care. The obligations of the public school rest rather with the large and more hopeful group of children who are merely inferior (1919, pp. 132–133).
In a plea for universal testing, Terman wrote (1916, p. 12): “Considering the tremendous cost of vice and crime, which in all probability amounts to not less than $500,000,000 per year in the United States alone, it is evident that psychological testing has found here one of its richest applications.”
After marking the sociopath for removal from society, intelligence tests might then channel biologically acceptable people into professions suited for their mental level. Terman hoped that his testers would “determine the minimum ‘intelligence quotient’ necessary for success in each leading occupation” (1916, p. 17). Any conscientious professor tries to find jobs for his students, but few are audacious enough to tout their disciples as apostles of a new social order:
Industrial concerns doubtless suffer enormous losses from the employment of persons whose mental ability is not equal to the tasks they are expected to perform.… Any business employing as many as 500 or 1000 workers, as, for example, a large department store, could save in this way several times the salary of a well-trained psychologist.
Terman virtually closed professions of prestige and monetary reward to people with IQ below 100 (1919, p. 282), and argued that “substantial success” probably required an IQ above 115 or 120. But he was more interested in establishing ranks at the low end of the scale, among those he had deemed “merely inferior.” Modern industrial society needs its technological equivalent of the Biblical metaphor for more bucolic times—the hewers of wood and drawers of water. And there are so many of them:
The evolution of modern industrial organization together with the mechanization of processes by machinery is making possible the larger and larger utilization of inferior mentality. One man with ability to think and plan guides the labor of ten or twenty laborers, who do what they are told to d
o and have little need for resourcefulness or initiative (1919, p. 276).
IQ of 75 or below should be the realm of unskilled labor, 75 to 85 “preeminently the range for semiskilled labor.” More specific judgments could also be made. “Anything above 85 IQ in the case of a barber probably represents so much dead waste” (1919, p. 288). IQ 75 is an “unsafe risk in a motorman or conductor, and it conduces to discontent” (Terman, 1919). Proper vocational training and placement is essential for those “of the 70 to 85 class.” Without it, they tend to leave school “and drift easily into the ranks of the anti-social or join the army of Bolshevik discontents” (1919, p. 285).
Terman investigated IQ among professions and concluded with satisfaction that an imperfect allocation by intelligence had already occurred naturally. The embarrassing exceptions he explained away. He studied 47 express company employees, for example, men engaged in rote, repetitive work “offering exceedingly limited opportunity for the exercise of ingenuity or even personal judgment” (1919, p. 275). Yet their median IQ stood at 95, and fully 25 percent measured above 104, thus winning a place among the ranks of the intelligent. Terman was puzzled, but attributed such low achievement primarily to a lack of “certain emotional, moral, or other desirable qualities,” though he admitted that “economic pressures” might have forced some “out of school before they were able to prepare for more exacting service” (1919, p. 275). In another study, Terman amassed a sample of 256 “hoboes and unemployed,” largely from a “hobo hotel” in Palo Alto. He expected to find their average IQ at the bottom of his list; yet, while the hobo mean of 89 did not suggest enormous endowment, they still ranked above motormen, salesgirls, firemen, and policemen. Terman suppressed this embarrassment by ordering his table in a curious way. The hobo mean was distressingly high, but hobos also varied more than any other group, and included a substantial number of rather low scores. So Terman arranged his list by the scores of the lowest 25 percent in each group, and sunk his hobos into the cellar.
Had Terman merely advocated a meritocracy based on achievement, one might still decry his elitism, but applaud a scheme that awarded opportunity to hard work and strong motivation. But Terman believed that class boundaries had been set by innate intelligence. His coordinated rank of professions, prestige, and salaries reflected the biological worth of existing social classes. If barbers did not remain Italian, they would continue to arise from the poor and to stay appropriately among them:
The common opinion that the child from a cultured home does better in tests solely by reason of his superior home advantages is an entirely gratuitous assumption. Practically all of the investigations which have been made of the influence of nature and nurture on mental performance agree in attributing far more to original endowment than to environment. Common observation would itself suggest that the social class to which the family belongs depends less on chance than on the parents’ native qualities of intellect and character.… The children of successful and cultured parents test higher than children from wretched and ignorant homes for the simple reason that their heredity is better (1916, p. 115).
Fossil IQ’s of past geniuses
Society may need masses of the “merely inferior” to run its machines, Terman believed, but its ultimate health depends upon the leadership of rare geniuses with elevated IQ’s. Terman and his associates published a five-volume series on Genetic Studies of Genius in an attempt to define and follow people at the upper end of the Stanford-Binet scale.
In one volume, Terman decided to measure, retrospectively, the IQ of history’s prime movers—its statesmen, soldiers, and intellectuals. If they ranked at the top, then IQ is surely the single measure of ultimate worth. But how can a fossil IQ be recovered without conjuring up young Copernicus and asking him what the white man was riding? Undaunted, Terman and his colleagues tried to reconstruct the IQ of past notables, and published a thick book (Cox, 1926) that must rank as a primary curiosity within a literature already studded with absurdity—though Jensen (1979, pp. 113 and 355) and others still take it seriously.*
Terman (1917) had already published a preliminary study of Francis Galton and awarded a staggering IQ of 200 to this pioneer of mental testing. He therefore encouraged his associates to proceed with a larger investigation. J. M. Cattell had published a ranking of the 1,000 prime movers of history by measuring the lengths of their entries in biographical dictionaries. Catherine M. Cox, Terman’s associate, whittled the list to 282, assembled detailed biographical information about their early life, and proceeded to estimate two IQ values for each—one, called A1 IQ, for birth to seventeen years; the other, A2 IQ, for ages seventeen to twenty-six.
Cox ran into problems right at the start. She asked five people, including Terman, to read her dossiers and to estimate the two IQ scores for each person. Three of the five agreed substantially in their mean values, with A1 IQ clustering around 135 and A2 IQ near 145. But two of the raters differed markedly, one awarding an average IQ well above, the other well below, the common figure. Cox simply eliminated their scores, thereby throwing out 40 percent of her data. Their low and high scores would have balanced each other at the mean in any case, she argued (1926, p. 72). Yet if five people working in the same research group could not agree, what hope for uniformity or consistency—not to mention objectivity—could be offered?
Apart from these debilitating practical difficulties, the basic logic of the study was hopelessly flawed from the first. The differences in IQ that Cox recorded among her subjects do not measure their varying accomplishments, not to mention their native intelligence. Instead, the differences are a methodological artifact of the varying quality of information that Cox was able to compile about the childhood and early youth of her subjects. Cox began by assigning a base IQ of 100 to each individual; the raters then added to (or, rarely, subtracted from) this value according to the data provided.
Cox’s dossiers are motley lists of childhood and youthful accomplishments, with an emphasis on examples of precocity. Since her method involved adding to the base figure of 100 for each notable item in the dossier, estimated IQ records little more than the volume of available information. In general, low IQ’s reflect an absence of information, and high IQ’s an extensive list. (Cox even admits that she is not measuring true IQ, but only what can be deduced from limited data, though this disclaimer was invariably lost in translation to popular accounts.) To believe, even for a moment, that such a procedure can recover the proper ordering of IQ among “men of genius,” one must assume that the childhood of all subjects was watched and recorded with roughly equal attention. One must claim (as Cox does) that an absence of documented childhood precocity indicates a humdrum life not worth writing about, not an extraordinary giftedness that no one bothered to record.
Two basic results of Cox’s study immediately arouse our strong suspicion that her IQ scores reflect the historical accidents of surviving records, rather than the true accomplishments of her geniuses. First, IQ is not supposed to alter in a definite direction during a person’s life. Yet average A1 IQ is 135 in her study, and average A2 IQ is a substantially higher 145. When we scrutinize her dossiers (printed in full in Cox, 1926), the reason is readily apparent, and a clear artifact of her method. She has more information on her subjects as young adults than as children (A2 IQ records achievements during ages seventeen through twenty-six; A1 IQ marks the earlier years). Second, Cox published disturbingly low A1 IQ figures for some formidable characters, including Cervantes and Copernicus, both at 105. Her dossiers show the reason: little or nothing is known about their childhood, providing no data for addition to the base figure of 100. Cox established seven levels of reliability for her figures. The seventh, believe it or not, is “guess, based on no data.”
As a further and obvious test, consider geniuses born into humble circumstances, where tutors and scribes did not abound to encourage and then to record daring feats of precocity. John Stuart Mill may have learned Greek in his cradle, but did Faraday or Bunyan e
ver get the chance? Poor children are at a double disadvantage; not only did no one bother to record their early years, but they are also demoted as a direct result of their poverty. For Cox, using the favorite ploy of eugenicists, inferred innate parental intelligence from their occupations and social standing! She ranked parents on a scale of professions from 1 to 5, awarding their children an IQ of 100 for parental rank 3, and a bonus (or deficit) of 10 IQ points for each step above or below. A child who did nothing worth noting for the first seventeen years of his life could still score an IQ of 120 by virtue of his parent’s wealth or professional standing.
Consider the case of poor Massena, Napoleon’s great general, who bottomed out at 100 A1 IQ and about whom, as a child, we know nothing except that he served as a cabin boy for two long voyages on his uncle’s ship. Cox writes (p. 88):
Nephews of battleship commanders probably rate somewhat above 100 IQ; but cabin boys who remain cabin boys for two long voyages and of whom there is nothing more to report until the age of 17 than their service as cabin boys, may average below 100 IQ.
Other admirable subjects with impoverished parents and meager records should have suffered the ignominy of scores below 100. But Cox managed to fudge and temporize, pushing them all above the triple-digit divide, if only slightly. Consider the unfortunate Saint-Cyr, saved only by remote kin, and granted an A1 IQ of 105: “The father was a tanner after having been a butcher, which would give his son an occupational IQ status of 90 to 100; but two distant relatives achieved signal martial honors, thus indicating a higher strain in the family” (pp. 90–91). John Bunyan faced more familial obstacles than his famous Pilgrim, but Cox managed to extract a score of 105 for him:
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