Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (50 page)

2. Most annoying aspect of aging?

3. What physical activities have you given up?

4. Cold—what do you do?

5. Days of sick leave?

6. Hospital days total since 1970?

7. Medications?

APPENDIX B

THE INNER CITY MEN AND THE TERMAN WOMEN

In the late 1960s, another important longitudinal study became available to the Harvard Study of Adult Development as a foil for the homogeneous sample of privileged and intelligent white men that made up the College cohort. This study allowed us to compare the College men with a group of white men who were far less privileged, and (at least on IQ testing) less intelligent. A second study became available in the 1980s and offered a comparison with intellectually gifted, but not particularly privileged, women. These opportunities allowed us to draw conclusions about biology versus environment in some of our outcomes, and also, more specifically, about certain kinds of sociological influences. I refer to these two studies throughout the text in contexts where they shed light on, or in some cases expand, the Grant Study findings.

The Inner City Cohort (The Glueck Study of Juvenile Delinquency)

The second cohort joined us in 1969, through the generosity of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. Sheldon Glueck was a professor at Harvard Law School and his wife, Eleanor, a groundbreaking social worker there; both were world-famous criminologists. In the 1940s they began an intensive prospective study of 500 white male teenagers from inner-city Boston who had been remanded to reformatories—the Glueck Study of Juvenile Delinquency. They carefully matched them for IQ (their average Wechsler-Bellevue score, based on careful individual testing, was 95) and ethnicity to a control group of 500 boys who had no history of serious delinquency, but who came from the
same
high-crime neighborhoods, the same minority identifications, and the same impoverished urban classrooms as the youths who had ended up in reform schools. The Gluecks included no African Americans and no women, and they excluded any boys who by age fourteen had manifested any serious delinquency.

The initial phases of data collection for the Glueck Study were similar to the Grant Study’s, with psychiatric interviews, anthropometric measurements, medical examinations, family histories, socioeconomic assessments, and even complete Rorschach tests. But the Gluecks stopped their follow-up in 1962, when their subjects were 32. Thanks to a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, I was able to integrate the two studies in 1970. The control cohort of Inner City men, renamed the
Glueck Study,
is now a part of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, enriching it by the contrast it provides with the socially privileged and high-IQ Harvard men. Like the Grant Study men, the Inner City men deserve great credit for their loyalty to the Study.

Since the integration, the College and Inner City cohorts have been followed in an identical manner, except for the years between 1962 and 1974, when the Inner City men were not followed.

Most of the Inner City men, who were born between 1925 and 1932, had early memories of discrimination and deprivation. But they too were beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill and of America’s postwar economic boom. By the 1950s, they, children of once-devalued Irish and Italian immigrant parents, had become the voting majority and political masters of Boston. Their previous distinction as the most disparaged of city minorities had been passed on to recent African-American arrivals from the South. While only one in ten of their fathers belonged to the middle class, at age forty-seven half of the Inner City men had achieved middle-class status. In this achievement the Inner City men were a subsample of underclass “no hope” youth who became
solidly middle class—certainly another reasonable definition of “success.”

The Terman Women Cohort

In 1920, Lewis Terman, a renowned Stanford psychologist, started a study of roughly 1,500 grammar-school children. They were mostly 4th graders of a 1906–1911 birth cohort, and they represented all the children in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles with (carefully tested) IQs of over 140. They have been followed by questionnaires every five years since then, with little attrition, except by death, to this day. Of the Terman group, 672 are women, most of whom went to college.

In 1987, through the generosity of Stanford professors Robert Sears and Albert Hastorf, Caroline Vaillant and I spent a full year reviewing the records of the the 78-to 79-year-old women, and interviewing a representative surviving sample of 40. We used a similar interview to the one we used with the Grant Study men to facilitate comparison. This sample of women who were the Grant Study men’s intellectual peers (or superiors) is the cohort that appears in this volume as the Terman women, and it allowed us to study some of the sociological effects of gender.

In the 1920’s, California was still a young state. One Study member could recall watching the last sailing ships glide through the Golden Gate before the bridge was built. The population of Los Angeles was 500,000. The Terman women were descendants of pioneers. One woman’s grandmother had saved her own life by killing an intruder with a tomahawk. One woman’s father, a high school teacher, used routinely to disarm his students before class. Another father won a stagecoach line to Arizona in a poker game.

Twenty percent of the Terman women’s fathers were in blue-collar
occupations; thirty percent were in “the professions.” Only one Terman woman’s father was an unskilled laborer; he worked as a janitor at the University of California at Berkeley, so that his five bright children could all go to college for free.

The Terman women were physically and intellectually precocious as children. But their high intelligence—they had a mean IQ of 151—did not handicap them psychologically. On the contrary, their mental health was demonstrably better than their classmates’.

After following them until they were 75, Terman and his co-workers observed that the women showed significantly more humor, common sense, perseverance, leadership, and even popularity than their classmates. They were as likely as their classmates to marry, but their physical health was better. At age eighty, the mortality of the Terman women, like the College men’s, has been only half the expected rate for white American women in their birth cohort. As in the Harvard sample, more than half of the Terman women have survived past eighty.

The career situation for these highly intelligent women was full of paradox, however. They grew up with mothers who did not yet have the right to vote. College tuition in California at the time was cheap enough ($25 to $50 a term at both Stanford and Berkeley) that a college degree was a realistic expectation for a bright woman. And the Depression, which began when they were twenty, and World War II, which began when they were thirty, put pressures on these women to enter the work force. But the jobs on offer were limited in scope, compensation, and opportunity. When asked what occupational opportunities World War II had opened for her, one Berkeley-educated woman replied dryly, “I finally learned to type.”

Almost half of the Terman women held full-time jobs for most of their lives. Most had gone to college and many to graduate school. Nevertheless, their mean maximum annual income ($30,000 in 1989
dollars)
was identical to that of the Inner City men, who had a mean IQ of 95 and an average of ten to eleven years of education. Wartime demands for Rosie the Riveter and her like might have been an economic boon for high school dropouts, but they were an economic millstone for the gifted Terman women.

For the Terman
men,
it is worth noting, the war really did create great opportunities. The G.I. Bill paid for their graduate schooling and allowed some of them to create the Los Alamos and Livermore laboratories and, ultimately, Silicon Valley. Some of the Terman men gave their brilliance to the Los Angeles entertainment industry. Lewis Terman’s own gifted children, a boy and a girl, were both included in his study. Both graduated from Stanford and worked for the university for much of their lives. The son served as provost, and was mentor to many of the founders of Silicon Valley; the daughter was a secretary in one of the dormitories.

Thus, of our three samples, it was the college-educated middle-class Terman women, most of whose relatives had been in the United States for generations, who most clearly illustrated the negative effect of social bigotry upon development.

APPENDIX C

ASSESSMENT OF CHILDHOOD SCALES

1. Child Temperament Scale (Age 0–10)

1 = very shy, tics, phobias, bedwetting beyond age 8, dissocial, severe feeding problems, other noted problems.

3 = average.

5 = good-natured, normally social, an “easy child.”

2. Childhood Environmental Strengths Scale (Age 5–18)

1. Global Impression (rater’s overall hunch)

1 = a negative, non-nurturing environment.

3 = neither negative nor positive feeling about subject’s childhood.

5 = a positive, intact childhood; good relationships with parents, siblings, and others; environment seems conducive to developing self-esteem. A childhood that rater would have wanted.

2. Relationship with Siblings

1 = severe rivalry, destructive relationship, sibling undermines child’s self-esteem or no siblings.

3 = no good information, not mentioned as good though not particularly bad.

5 = close to at least one sibling.

3.
Home Atmosphere

1 = any noncongenial home, lack of family cohesiveness, parents not together, early maternal separation, known to many social agencies, many moves, financial hardship that impinged greatly on family life.

3 = average home: doesn’t stand out as good or bad; or lack of information.

5 = warm, cohesive atmosphere, parents together, doing things as a family, sharing atmosphere, maternal and paternal presence, few moves, financial stability or special harmony in spite of difficulties.

4. Mother/Child Relationship

1 = distant, hostile, blaming others (such as father, teachers) for wrong methods of upbringing, overly punitive, overprotective, expecting too much, mother absent, seductive, not encouraging feeling of self-worth in child.

3 = mostly for lack of information or lack of distinct impression about mother.

5 = nurturing, encouraging of autonomy, helping boy develop self-esteem, warmth.

5. Father/Child Relationship

1 = distant, hostile, overly punitive, expectations unrealistic or not what son wants for himself, paternal absence, negative or destructive relationship.

3 = lack of information, no distinct impression about father.

5 = warmth, encouraging of autonomy in child, helping to develop self-esteem, do things with son, discusses problems, interested in child.

APPENDIX D

ADULT ADJUSTMENT SCALES

I.
Scale for Objective Mental Health from Age 30–50