Page 30 - Community Living Issue 31-3

moments in history
The great american iQ panic of 1917

IQ testing caused widescale anxiety that the US population was rapidly losing its
intellectual powers after 1.75 million soldiers achieved alarming scores. A century
later, the consequences are still being felt, says Simon Jarrett

he iQ test was invented by were produced. For example, many
early french psychologist of the whites were recent
TAlfred Binet. His 1908 test is immigrants from southern Europe,
the prototype for those used today. Jews or eastern Europeans of
In the 1890s, Binet had tried to “lower stock” than western and
define intelligence by measuring northern Europeans. The “negro”
and comparing the skull sizes of results simply confirmed existing
clever and not-so-clever people. He racist assumptions.
abandoned this approach when the There were calls for curbs on
skulls of “idiots and imbeciles” immigration and admission of
turned out sometimes to be larger refugees to prevent the
and of better quality than those of “moronisation” of the country.
people deemed highly intelligent. These calls resonated during the
His tests, commissioned by the 1930s Jewish refugee crisis caused
French education ministry, were by Nazism, and persist today.
designed to identify children in
normal classrooms who were Robert Yerkes at his desk at Harvard University, early 1900s: debunked – but myths live on
struggling and might need special his work led to calls to prevent the ‘moronisation’ of the US In his brilliant book The Mismeasure
education. A series of short tasks of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
and questions were used to identify a into the US army, presented an dismantles and invalidates the whole
child’s mental age, which was compared unmissable opportunity to demonstrate yerkes testing programme. The tests were
to their actual age. the IQ test’s scientific validity. deeply culturally biased, inefficiently
Binet had intended his test as a general Drafted into the army as a colonel, he administered, methodologically
indication of a child’s progress, rather presided over the administration of incompetent and had no scientific merit.
than as some sort of irrefutable science. mental tests to 1.75 million men, He describes the testing as “a shambles,
However, his idea was taken up and something he called a feat of “human if not a disgrace” (Gould, 1996: 231). No
used for different purposes. The idea of engineering”. Tests were administered in credence had been given to any possible
an exact intelligence quotient was written form for the literate and in educational or environmental factors.
invented, scored by dividing mental age pictorial form for those who could not Educated northern black soldiers far
by chronological age. read. They were timed and often taken outscored their southern counterparts,
Psychologists proposed that intelligence simultaneously by large numbers of men who had been allowed no education – this
was a precise, measurable attribute that under the supervision of an examiner in was quietly ignored. Recent European
could be measured accurately across all specially commissioned buildings. immigrants with poor English struggled to
people and all cultures. This would The results came as something of a answer questions such as “Crisco is a:
support their claim that psychology – shock. According to the data, the average patent medicine/disinfectant/toothpaste/
derided by many as a mixture of white American had a mental age of 13. food product” – questions that were
philosophy and wishful thinking – was an This stood just marginally above the culturally and linguistically
exact science, like physics. designated mental age for a moron, which incomprehensible to them.
Furthermore, in line with eugenics was between eight and 12. Furthermore, yet the findings lodged in the American
theory, they claimed this thing called the results suggested that 37% of white political and public consciousness, stoking
intelligence was inherited, and not Americans and 89% of “negroes” fell fears about the feeble minded, race and
influenced by environment or education. within this category. foreignness.
This all took some explaining. It To this day, we persist in the belief that
‘moron’ mayor confirmed many of the racial and class we can precisely measure a thing we call
IQ (intelligence quotient) testing was prejudices of yerkes and his fellow intelligence. If you score 70 you have a
taken up enthusiastically in the US. early psychologists, who were all hereditarians, learning disability – if you score 71 you do
versions had already produced some believing that intelligence or a lack of it not. Psychologists continue to patrol the
interesting results – in 1915 the mayor of was inherited and lowest among non- boundaries of human belonging,
Chicago tested as a “moron” (the newly whites and the poor of all races. pronouncing who is in and who is out
invented term for a “feeble minded” However, the sheer scale of it seemed – thanks to the flawed legacy of men like yale University/Wikimedia Commons
person) on one version of the Binet scales. to suggest the whole country was rapidly Binet and yerkes. n
In 1917, Harvard psychologist Robert M degenerating, with even the white race –
yerkes decided that the world war, which God forbid – heading for mental oblivion. Gould SJ (1996) The Mismeasure of Man. New
involved the mass mobilisation of soldiers Convoluted and racist explanations york: Norton

30 Vol 31 No 3 | Spring 2018 community Living www.cl-initiatives.co.uk