Chapter 11 – historical uses and abuses of intelligence testing

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Chapter 11 historical uses and abuses of
intelligence testing

• Dr. Nancy Alvarado

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Motivation for Intelligence Testing

• In schools, the first intelligence tests were
  developed in France to enable public schools to
  measure children for proper grade placement.
• Rural schools were primarily one-room with all
  ages taught by a single teacher.
• Schools in cities were stratified by academic
  accomplishment (not age as is now done).
• Children moving to large cities needed to be
  placed.
• Other, concurrent efforts focused on measuring
  intelligence as an individual difference.

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Brocas Craniometry

• Broca measured the body to understand its
  functions, including the head.
• He equated a larger head with greater
  intelligence and concluded that men were more
  intelligent than women because their heads were
  larger.
• He concluded that the sex difference was greater
  in contemporary people than in the past.
• His assumptions exemplified the biases of the
  times, against women, the elderly, primitive
  people he believed differences in brain sizes
  supported them.

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Broca and Darwin

• Broca used ideas from Darwins evolutionary
  theory to support his thinking.
• I would rather be a transformed ape than a
  degenerate son of Adam.
• Broca believed that men struggle to survive
  whereas women are protected, so bigger brains are
  selected for in men but not women.
• Brocas work was cited to justify denying
  education to women.

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Criticisms of Broca

• Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that brain weight
  decreases with age the women studied were older
  than the men, introducing a confound.
• Taking cause of death into account, Gould
  concluded that there is probably no difference in
  brain weight between men and women.
• A man of the same height would have the same size
  brain as a woman of that height.
• The sample size for prehistoric brains is too
  small (7 male and 6 female brains).

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Alfred Binet (1857-1911)

• Binet developed the first psychological scales to
  measure intelligence, supplanting earlier
  attempts using physical measures and subjective
  judgments.
• Informal, subjective assessments may be correct
  or wrong, but are prone to prejudice and cause
  trouble when people place excess confidence in
  them.
• An important result of Binets work was
  replacement of these haphazard and prejudiced
  methods with standard, uniform, objective methods
  of assessment.

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Alfred Binet
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Binets Early Education

• Binet read Darwin, Galton John Stuart Mill he
  was a self-taught library psychologist.
• This deprived him of interaction with others and
  training in critical thinking.
• Binet accepted a staff position at La Salpetriere
  working with Charcot as his mentor.
• Charcot used circular reasoning people who
  could be hypnotized had unstable nervous systems
  as evidence of this, they could be hypnotized.
• Binet accepted Charcots reasoning without
  question.

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Studies of Hypnosis

• Binet and Fere claimed that hypnotic phenomena
  could be transferred from one side of the body to
  the other using magnets.
• They also reported polarization in which a red
  hallucination would turn green with use of a
  magnet.
• They believed the magnetic field was responsible.
• Patients had full knowledge of what was expected
  so the expts were poorly controlled and
  carelessly conducted. Ultimately they had to
  admit their errors.
• Hypnotizability was not necessarily linked to
  hysteria.

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Binets Research on Cognition

• Binet was humiliated and became obsessively
  concerned with suggestibility in experiments.
• He became increasingly withdrawn and more shy.
• Studying his own children, he published 3 papers
  describing their cognitive development.
• He devised a number of tests of their thinking.
• These studies anticipated Piagets work Piaget
  later worked with Binets collaborator, Simon,
  analyzing the wrong answers children gave on
  intelligence tests.
• In 1891 at the Sorbonne, he did a variety of
  studies

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Binets Test of Intelligence

• In 1882, a law established mandatory primary
  education for children from 6 to 14 years old.
• A national system of exams had been established
  to select students for secondary and university
  education and vocational schooling.
• Competition was intense, with 969 applicants to 1
  opening at university (compared to 290 to 1 in
  the US).
• Concern about retarded children in the schools
  (children unable to learn in school) motivated
  interest in a systematic way of identifying them.

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Test Questions

• Binet Simon developed 20 subtests and
  investigated a variety of other measures and
  relationships between them.
• They concluded craniometry had little value.
• Tests included association tests, sentence
  completion, themes on a given topic, picture
  descriptions and memory tests, object drawing and
  description, digit repetition and other memory
  and attention tests, tests of moral judgment.
• They carefully specified controlled testing
  conditions.

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Revised Binet-Simon Scale

• They administered their tests to larger numbers
  of schoolchildren and a small number of retarded
  children, to develop norms.
• In 1908, they developed a revised scale
  consisting of 14 of the original tests, 7
  modified, 33 new tests.
• Tests were arranged according to age levels from
  3-13
• The average 5 year old should score at a mental
  level of 5. If a majority (75-90) passed a test
  it was assigned to that age level.
• Binet and Simon rejected the concept of mental
  age.

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IQ Scores

• They believed that even retarded children could
  raise their mental levels and devised a system of
  training for the retarded (like Montessoris).
• Louis Stern introduced the concept of mental
  quotient as a ratio of chronological age to
  mental age.
• A score below 1 indicated retardation, a score
  above 1 indicated superior intelligence, x 100
  IQ score.
• Binet and Simon strongly opposed this concept of
  IQ.
• Despite their objections, IQ became the standard
  way of depicting performance on intelligence
  tests.

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Testing Spreads

• The Binet-Simon scale was easy to administer and
  reasonably brief, so was quickly in wide use.
• By WWI in 1914 the tests were being using in a
  dozen countries, often simply translated without
  any attempt to standardize them for the new
  setting.
• Before the end of WWI, 1.7 million inductees to
  the US Army had been tested.
• Terman revised the scale for use in the US and 4
  million children were tested.

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Henry H. Goddard (1866-1957)

• In 1984, the editors of Science named development
  of the IQ test as one of the 20 most significant
  discoveries in science, technology medicine of
  the 20th century.
• Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman were the two men
  primarily responsible for introducing the IQ test
  to America.
• Goddard earned a doctorate at Clark University,
  then was appointed research director of a New
  Jersey home for 230 feeble-minded children.

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Goddards Studies

• Goddard became convinced of the need for a way to
  distinguish between normal and feeble-minded
  children, and a reliable way to identify levels.
• He was given a copy of the Binet-Simon test in
  Europe.
• He translated the scale into English, with some
  minor changes, such as names of coins.
• He administered the test to 400 children at
  Vineland and 2000 in NJ public schools. The
  scores at Vineland agreed with their records.
• The scores of public school kids varied widely.

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Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)

• Hothersall reviews Mendels work to put the study
  of the Kallikaks into perspective.
• Mendel did the first systematic experiments
  studying genetics and heritability of
  characteristics.
• First Mendel bred wild mice with albinos to see
  what color coats they would have, then bred bees.
• Next he bred peas to study blossom color, smooth
  or wrinkled seeds, green or yellow seeds, tall or
  dwarf plants 10,000 plants, 300,000 peas.
• His work established valid principles of
  inheritance.

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Mendels Findings

• First he bred tall short plants the resulting
  hybrids were all tall.
• Next he bred hybrids with each other most were
  tall, a minority were short.
• He guessed that height was controlled by two
  genes (one from each parent).
• Tall height was dominant, short recessive.
• His ideas did not catch on and hispapers were
  burned.

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Example Using Pea Blossom Color
Results across multiple generations
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Mendel is Rescued from Obscurity

• William Bateson published Mendels Principles of
  Heredity A Defence (1902). Dutch botanist Huge
  de Vries also described Mendels work.
• Goddard read De Vries report and applied it to
  intelligence a major leap influenced by
  Galtons reports of hereditary genius.
• Goddard discovered that many of the siblings of
  the inmates of his institution had themselves
  been evaluated as feeble-minded.

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The Kallikak Family

• Deborah Kallikak was found to have a mental age
  of 9 (at age 22). Goddard traced her ancestry
  back to Martin Kallikak Sr. in the Amer.
  Revolution.
• Deborah was descended from an illegitimate
  liaison with a feeble-minded barmaid, starting
  the bad side of the family tree, full of
  riff-raff.
• Later Martin married a Quaker woman and founded
  the good side of the family tree, which was
  found to have little feeble-mindedness.
• He concluded that feeble-mindedness is genetic.

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Family Tree
Good side 496 descendants, 3 degenerate (2 A, 1
Sx) 15 infant deaths
Bad side 480 descendants, 143 feeble-minded, 33
Sx, 3 E, 24 A, 36 illegitimate, 82 infant deaths
AAlcoholic, SxSexually Immoral,
EEpileptichttp//psychclassics.yorku.ca/Goddard/
chap4.htm
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Criticisms of Goddards Study

• The study took 2 years, which seems short.
• Conducted by untrained staff, perhaps biased.
• Little objective testing of the relatives
  reliance on reports by family associates.
  Position in society used to infer intelligence,
  etc.
• Criminal behavior and feeble-mindedness were
  equated.
• Assumption of a single gene for IQ is
  implausible.
• Influence of environment was totally ignored.

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Pictures of Kallikaks
Stephen Jay Gould claimed that Goddard tampered
with photos to make them appear less normal.
Fancher suggested the publisher perhaps tried to
eliminate blank, staring expressions. Goddard
believed the feeble-minded look normal, so he
would have been less likely to modify them
undercutting Goulds claim.
Pictures of Deborah are attractive.
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Eugenic Sterilization

• Similar studies of the Jukes, the Hill Folk, the
  Nams, the Ishmaelites, and the Zeros, reportedly
  showed reproduction rates twice those of normal
  families.
• Goddard spoke about practical methods for
  eliminating defective people from the US
  population.
• Mainstream psychologists supported eugenics,
  including Yerkes, Thorndike, Cannon, Terman.
• US involuntary sterilization laws were upheld by
  the courts stayed in place until the 1960s.

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Goddard at Ellis Island

• In 1910, one-third of the US population was
  foreign born, raising fears that the US was being
  swamped.
• Teddy Roosevelt appointed a commission to study
  this.
• More recent immigrants were from East So
  Europe.
• It was feared that immigrants would be an impetus
  for development of unions (to keep them out),
  which would threaten the US economic system.
• New immigrants were Catholic not Protestant.
• It was claimed that many immigrants were mentally
  defective 2 were denied entry and sent back.

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Goddards Innovations

• Goddard began using psychological methods and the
  number of feeble-minded increased dramatically
  350 in 1913, 570 in 1914.
• Goddard claimed that 83 of Jews, 80 of
  Hungarians, 79 of Italians, 87 of Russians were
  feeble-minded, based on culturally biased
  testing.
• Restrictive immigration quotas were enacted.

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Some people were considered too inferior to
become citizens such as the Irish.
"Now the fact is, that workmen may have a 10 year
intelligence while you have a 20.  To demand for
him such a home as you enjoy is as absurd .......
How can there be a thing such as social equality
with this wide range of mental capacity?" -
Goddard, before a group of Princeton
undergraduates, 1919
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Eugenics Demonstrators
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Goddard and Gifted Children

• In 1918, Goddard left Vineland for a position as
  director of Ohio State Bureau of Juvenile
  Research, then became professor at Ohio State
  University.
• Goddard was hired as consulting psychologist to
  help establish classes for gifted children.
• Those with IQs above 120 were included.
• Goddard advocated enrichment, not rapid
  promotion.
• The program produced long-lasting, positive
  results.

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Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956)

• Terman grew up on a farm in Indiana, then was
  sent to Central Normal College in Danville to
  become a teacher. He earned an M.A. from Univ. of
  Indiana.
• A former student of G.S. Hall helped him obtain a
  fellowship to Clark Univ to work with Hall.
• Hall disapproved of mental tests so Terman
  switched to Edmund Sanford to direct his thesis.
• After becoming a high school principal in San
  Bernardino, he taught at CSULA (formerly LA
  Normal School), then joined Stanford University.

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Termans Stanford-Binet IQ Test

• At Stanford, Terman revised the Binet-Simon, as
  described in The Measurement of Intelligence.
• He used a large standardization sample (2300,
  including 1700 children, 200 defective and
  superior, and 400 adults.
• His goal was to make the median chronological and
  mental ages coincide, to prevent IQs from
  changing across different ages, with an average
  of 100.
• This became the standard measure of intelligence,
  with a standardization sample in 1916 of 10,000
  people.

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Termans Studies of Genius

• In 1921, Terman began an ambitious longitudinal
  study of children with exceptionally IQs of 140.
• The study was continued after his death.
• Those participating in the study were called
  Termites.
• His findings contradict the stereotype of
  geniuses as sickly weaklings interested in
  nothing but books, early ripe, early rot.
• Exceptional performance continued in adult
  careers.
• The sample was unrepresentative, admittedly.

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Robert Mearns Yerkes (1876-1956)

• Yerkes worked his way through college, then
  worked with Munsterberg for this doctorate in
  comparative psychology, publishing The Great
  Apes.
• He was offered a job and remained at Harvard for
  his whole career.
• He replaced photos of James, Royce Palmer with
  pictures of great apes his philosophers.
• He also worked at Boston State Psychopathic
  Hospital, which focused him on the need for
  better ways of measuring mental abilities.

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Army Alpha Beta Tests

• At the start of WWI, Yerkes organized a meeting
  to figure out how psychologists might aid the
  war.
• Yerkes traveled to Canada to study their war
  experiences.
• They decided to focus on adapting mental
  measurement to military needs IQ testing in the
  Army.
• 40 psychologists prepared tests for the Army, to
  identify mentally incompetent, classify men by
  mental ability and select individual for special
  training and extra responsibility.

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Test Requirements

• Group administration.
• Measuring native wit not education.
• Steeply graded in difficulty hard enough to tax
  those with high ability but easy enough for those
  of lesser ability.
• Could not take more than an hour and be simple to
  score objectively.
• Alpha test for those who are literate, Beta
  test for those illiterate or non-English speaking.

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Results of Army Testing

• Only a minute percentage of inductees were
  discharged due to low test scores.
• A 900-page report concluded that the average
  mental age was 13 years, much lower than assumed
• Racist, antidemocratic conclusions were part of
  popularized versions of this report.
• Goddard proposed a meritocracy based on IQ to
  replace our democracy.
• Studies blamed non-Nordic immigrants for the low
  scores (Brigham). Quotas were established.

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Dissenting Voices

• In The New Republic, Lippmann lambasted Terman,
  Goddard Yerkes, criticizing the assumption that
  IQ tests measure intelligence mental age is 13.
• He stressed differences in early environment and
  experiences making comparisons across class/race
  meaningless.
• Logically impossible for the intelligence of an
  adult to equal that of a child. Labeling of kids
  is contemptible.
• Termans reply was sarcastic and hostile.

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Later Controversies

• Cyril Burts twin studies did he fake his data?
• No way to know for certain, but Burts findings
  have been replicated by other researchers.
• Debates over social bias in testing arose in the
  1940s 1950s (working class vs upper class).
• Debates over racial bias arose in the 1960s with
  Arthur Jensens claim that IQs cannot be raised.
• The Bell Curve (Herrnstein Murray) in 1994
  reignited debates about racial differences.

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Current Trends

• Earl Hunt, Robert Sternberg Howard Gardner have
  proposed cognitive approaches studying the
  knowledge structures underlying intelligent
  behavior
• Hunt developed the cognitive correlates
  approach, correlating response times with scores
  on cognitive tasks.
• Sternberg proposed a cognitive components
  approach decomposing performance on analogies
  into a series of cognitive processes.

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Current Trends (Cont.)

• Gardner proposed a theory of multiple
  intelligences based on a decomposition of
  factors contributing to performance.
• This recapitulates the debate between Spearman
  and Thurstone over g a single factor
  correlating performance across multiple tests,
  versus specific skills.
• There remain few alternatives to objective,
  group-administered standardized tests and
  intelligence testing remains controversial today.