The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (29 page)

    
In 1916, Stanford’s Lewis Terman produced a practical equivalent of
g
with his Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales
.

Excerpt from an excellent article by Mitchell Leslie:

In 1916, Terman sprang his test on America. He released
The Measurement of Intelligence
, a book that was half instruction manual and IQ test, half manifesto for universal testing. His little exam, which a child could complete in a mere 50 minutes, was about to revolutionize what students learned and how they thought of themselves.

Few American children have passed through the school system in the last 80 years without taking the Stanford-Binet or one of its competitors. Terman’s test gave U.S. educators the first simple, quick, cheap and seemingly objective way to “track” students, or assign them to different course sequences according to their ability. The following year, when the United States entered World War I, Terman helped design tests to screen Army recruits. More than 1.7 million draftees took his tests, broadening public acceptance of widespread IQ testing.

The Stanford-Binet made Terman a leader in a fervent movement to take testing far beyond the schoolhouse and Army base. Proponents considered intelligence the most valuable human quality and wanted to test every child and adult to determine their place in society. The “intelligence-testers”—a group that included many eugenicists—saw this as the tool for engineering a fairer, safer, fitter and more efficient nation, a “meritocracy” run by those most qualified to lead. In their vision of a vibrant new America, IQ scores would dictate not only what kind of education a person received but what work he or she could get. The most important and rewarding jobs in business, the professions, academia and government would go to the brightest citizens. People with very low scores—under about 75—would be institutionalized and discouraged or prevented from having children.

IQ tests and the social agenda of their advocates roused critics right from the start. To the journalist Walter Lippmann, the intelligence-testers were “the Psychological Battalion of Death,” seizing unparalleled power over every child’s future. Lippmann and Terman dueled in the pages of
The New Republic
in 1922 and 1923. “I hate the impudence of a claim that in 50 minutes you can judge and classify a human being’s predestined fitness in life,” Lippmann wrote. “I hate the sense of superiority which it creates, and the sense of inferiority which it imposes.” In a sarcastic rejoinder, Terman compared Lippmann to the creationist William Jennings Bryan and other opponents of scientific progress, then attacked Lippmann’s writing style as “much too verbose for literal quotation.” Though he could never match Lippmann’s eloquence, in the end Terman won the war: intelligence testing continued to spread. By the 1930s, kids with high IQs were being sent into more challenging classes to prepare for high-earning jobs or college, while low scorers got less demanding coursework, reduced expectations and dimmer job prospects. (Leslie, “The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman.”)

    
adapted from an earlier version by French psychologist Alfred Binet
.

   Ironically, IQ tests were not originally intended to measure a person’s intelligence at all. First invented in 1905 by psychologist Alfred Binet and physician Theodore Simon as an effort to identify French schoolchildren in need of most attention, the Binet-Simon test aimed to lift students up rather than assign them a permanent intellectual rank.

“The procedures which I have indicated will, if perfected, come to
classify
a person before or after such another person or such another series of persons,” wrote Binet. “But I do not believe that one may measure one of the intellectual
aptitudes
in the sense that one measures length or a capacity” (italics mine). (Varon, “Alfred Binet’s concept of intelligence,” p. 41.)

“With practice, training, and above all method,” Binet wrote in 1909, “we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.” (A century later, the science of motivation and expert performance would validate this.) (Binet,
Les idées modernes sur les enfants
; this work has been reprinted in Elliot and Dweck, eds.,
Handbook of Competence and Motivation;
see p. 124.)

Mitchell Leslie adds:

With questions ranging from mathematical problems to vocabulary items, the Americanized test was supposed to capture “general intelligence,” an innate mental capability that Terman felt was as measurable as height and weight. As a hardcore hereditarian, he believed that genetics alone dictated one’s level of general intelligence. This vital constant, which he called an “original endowment,” wasn’t altered by education or home environment or hard work, he maintained. To denote it, he selected the term “intelligence quotient.” (Leslie, “The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman.”)

    
the National Intelligence Test (a precursor to the SAT) was designed by Edward Lee Thorndike
:
Saretzky, “Carl Campbell Brigham, the Native Intelligence Hypothesis, and the Scholastic Aptitude Test.”

    
Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham disavowed his own creation, writing that all intelligence tests were based on “one of the most glorious fallacies in the history of science, namely that the tests measured native intelligence purely and simply without regard to training or schooling
.
”

Matt Pacenza writes:

In an unpublished manuscript which Lemann unearthed, Brigham wrote that the standardized testing movement was based on “one of the most glorious fallacies in the history of science, namely that the tests measured native intelligence purely and simply without regard to training or schooling. The test scores very definitely are a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English and everything else. (Pacenza, “Flawed from the Start”; Lemann,
The Big Test.)

    
diagram illustrating Distribution of IQ Scores
:
Locurto,
Sense and Nonsense About IQ
, p. 5.

   As Stephen Jay Gould outlines, Terman assigned a protégée, Catherine Cox, to look back in time and assign IQs to dead geniuses—a logical farce considering what the IQ is supposed to do. They assigned a score of 200 to Terman’s hero Galton. (Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man
, pp. 213–17.)

At the time it was introduced, Terman’s test filled a particular need in American schools and society. In that age of standardization and mechanization, American culture was obsessed with establishing consistent measures in all walks
of life. IQ scores provided an easy way to separate the most promising students from the least promising, to identify and nurture future leaders in business, government, the military, and so on. “Tests of ‘general intelligence,’ given as early as six, eight, or ten years,” Terman insisted with pride, “tell a great deal about the ability to achieve either presently or 30 years hence.”

Terman was correct to suggest a strong connection between academic skills and success in modern, industrialized society. Someone who performs well in school and in abstract intellectual tests is generally (albeit with many obvious exceptions) more likely to succeed in business, law, journalism, and of course academia—any profession that puts a premium on any of those same skills. For that reason, IQ scores have proven to be generally predictive of success in Western societies where success is sufficiently based on education.

Sternberg and Grigorenko add:

IQ seems to be predictive of the reaching of all steps of career life in a stable society, where Western schooling is valued and rewarded, income is scaled in rough correspondence to years of education, and highly-skilled labor is needed. (Sternberg and Grigorenko, “The predictive value of IQ,” p. 9.)

    
at its core, IQ was merely a population-sorting tool
.

Just as Binet had originally intended.

    
Lewis Terman and colleagues actually recommended that individuals identified as “feebleminded” by his test be removed from society and that anyone scoring less than 100 be automatically disqualified from any prestigious position
.

Bonnie Strickland writes:

Terman (1916) actually appealed for universal intelligence testing, believing that the enormous costs of crime and vice could be reduced by removing the feebleminded from society. Further, theorizing that employment opportunities should be determined by intelligence, Terman proposed a social order that would close prestigious and rewarding professions to people with IQs under 100. (Strickland, “Misassumptions, misadventures, and the misuse of psychology,” p. 333—citing Terman,
The Intelligence of School Children
.)

   The Terman book is fascinating reading. Although Terman’s IQ test could not really prove either fixed or innate intelligence, he maintained that it
had proved both and proceeded accordingly. Terman’s logic was simple: since his tests showed a reasonable consistency over the years, they revealed that intelligence was innate and fixed. (Terman,
The Intelligence of School Children
.)

  The French did not share this leave-them-behind approach, and to this day they largely ignore modern IQ tests. (Sternberg and Grigorenko, “The predictive value of IQ,” p. 2.)

    
“does not imply unchangeability
”:
Howe, “Can IQ Change?” p. 71.

    
“IQ scores,” explains Cornell University’s Stephen Ceci, “can change quite dramatically as a result of changes in family environment (Clarke, 1976; Svendsen, 1982), work environment (Kohn, 1981), historical environment (Flynn, 1987), styles of parenting (Baumrind, 1967; Dornbusch, 1987), and, most especially, shifts in level of schooling
”:
Ceci,
On Intelligence
, p. 73.

Ceci’s Citations

Family environment

Clarke, Ann M., and Alan D. Clarke.
Early Experience and the Life Path
. Somerset, 1976.

Svendsen, Dagmund. “Factors related to changes in IQ: a follow-up study of former slow learners.”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
24, no. 3 (1983): 405–13.

Work environment

Kohn, Melvin, and Carmi Schooler. “The Reciprocal Effects of the Substantive Complexity of Work and Intellectual Flexibility: A Longitudinal Assessment.”
American Journal of Sociology
84 (July 1978): 24–52.

Historical environment

Flynn, J. R. “Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: what IQ tests really measure.”
Psychological Bulletin
101 (1987): 171–91.

Styles of parenting

Baumrind, D. “Child care practices anteceding three patterns of preschool behavior.”
Genetic Psychology Monographs
75 (1967): 43–88.

Dornbusch, Sanford M., Philip L. Ritter, P. Herbert Leiderman, Donald F. Roberts, and Michael J. Fraleigh. “The relation of parenting style to adolescent school performance.”
Child Development
58, no. 5 (October 1987): 1244–57.