The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention

Alfred Binet and the original purpose of the Binet scale

Binet flirts with craniomerty

When Alfred Binet decided to study the measurement of intelligence, he used an age old method of measuring skulls, and flavored the conclusion set forth by his countryman Paul Broca. He collected his data by going to various schools and measuring the heads of pupils designated by the teachers as their smartest and stupidest. After three years and several publications, Binet was no longer sure of the conclusion that intelligence is correlated with head size. Binet’s research found that larger head sized favored the “good” student, but the difference between the “good” and “poor” student amounted to mere millimeters. Secondly, Binet didn’t observe a large difference in anterior region of the skull, where higher intelligence was supposedly found. It is where Broca in his analysis found the greatest disparity between superior and less fortunate people (177). Binet concluded that even those most of the results pointed in the right direction it was still useless to asset the intelligence of an individual, because the differences between the smart and poor student was too small. He also found that poor students varied more than their smart students, because the smallest and largest value usually belong to the poor pupil.
Furthermore, Binet become aware of his own unconscious bias. “I feared,” Binet wrote, “ that in making measurements on heads with the intention of finding a difference in volume between an intelligence and less intelligence head, I would be led to increase, unconsciously and in good faith, the cephalic volume of intelligence heads to decrease that of unintelligence heads (177).” Binet was able to confirm his unconscious bias by re-measuring the heads of “idiots and imbeciles” in a hospital; where he found an average diminution of 3mm, a good deal of more average difference between the skulls of smart and poor students. In the end, Binet did recalculate his work and found an extreme average of 3 to 4 mm, but it still didn’t exceed the average potential bias. Thus, Craniometry, the jewel of nineteenth-century objectivity, was not destined for continued celebration (178).

Binet’s scale and the birth of IQ

Binet in 1904 was commissioned by the minister of public education to develop techniques for identifying children who had problems learning. Binet decided to reject the use of craniomerty and Lombroso’s anatomical stigmata and focus more on psychological methods. He decided to bring together a series of short tasks. Some of these task were: counting coins, reasoning “ordering”, comprehension, invention, and censure. Each task was assigned an mental age and a child would begin his test by starting at the youngest mental age tasks, and proceeded until they could go no further. The last task completed would be their mental age, and their general intellectual level was calculated by subtracting the mental age from their true chronological age. Binet test was concerned with separating the natural intelligence and instruction. Binet stated, “ We give him nothing to read, nothing to write, and submit him to no test in which he might succeed by means of rote learning (180-181).” Furthermore, Binet would decline to discuss the meaning of the score he assigned the children for he reminds us that intelligence isn’t a single, scalable thing like height.
What Binet feared most about an IQ number was its negative uses in society. He thought that it could be used as an indelible label rather than a tool to identify the needs of the child. Therefore, Binet declined to label IQ as inborn intelligence and refused to regard it as device for ranking individuals based on the mental capacity. Binet’s statement on the issue was, “ Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded. We should therefore study his condition at the time and that only. We have nothing to do with his past history or with his future… we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy… and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable (182).” It is clear that Binet is an antihereditarian. The major difference between Hereditarians and Antihereditarians are a matter of social policy and educational practices. Hereditarians believed that measures of intelligence are markers of inborn limits and children should be sorted and trained according to their inheritance and channeled into a profession. Antihereditarians believed the so-called “slow” children through special classes can increase their knowledge. Intelligence, in any meaningful sense of the word, can be augmented by good education; it is not a fixed and inborn quantity (184).

The dismantling of Binet’s intentions in America

Binet insisted upon three cardinal principles for using his test.
1. The scores are a practical device. They do not measure intelligence or any other
reified entity.
2. The scale is rough and used as a guide for identifying learning-disabilities; not a
device for ranking normal children.
3. Emphasis on improvement through special classes, and low scores shall not mark the
child as innately incapable.

However, his cardinal principles were overturned by American hereditarians who translated his scale into written form as a routine device for testing all children. The misuse of his test came from two fallacies: reification and hereditarianism, both were eager to use his test to maintain social ranks and distinctions. This chapter will only focus on the hereditarian theory and analyzes the major works of the three pioneers of hereditarianism in America: H.H. Goddard, L.M. Terman, and R.M. Yerkes (reification will be discussed in the next chapter). The hereditarian theory simply states, “ That inherited IQ scores marked people and groups for an inevitable station in life. And they assumed the average differences between groups were largely the products of heredity, despite manifest and profound variation in quality of life (187).”

Binet argued his work to be antihereditarian, but why was it so easy for the hereditarians to overturn his test and cardinal principles, and turn it into a device for testing all children?

H.H. Goddard and the menace of the feeble-minded
Intelligence as a Mendelian Gene

H.H. Goddard was the first to popularize the Binet scale in American. He translated Binet’s articles into English, applied his ideas to the test, and argued for their general use. He agreed with Binet on the idea that the tests worked to identify people just below the normal range, which Goddard christened the name morons. He used a scale unilinear scale of mental deficiency to identify intelligence as a single entity, which assumed intelligence was inborn and inherited in family ties. He stated that, “ The intelligence controls the emotions and the emotions are controlled in proportion to the degree of intelligence (190).” The rediscovery of Mendel’s work helped support Goddard’s idea that intelligence was a single entity. Mendel’s peas enabled the eugenicists to believe that the most complex parts of the body might be built by a single gene. A single gene for normal intelligence help support Goddard’s notion of an unilinear scale that marked intelligence as a single measurable entity. “For, Goddard had broken his scale into two sections at just the right place: morons carried a double dose of the bad recessive; dull laborers had at least one good copy of the normal gene and could be set before their machines. Moreover, the scourge of feeble mindedness might be eliminated by schemes of breeding easily planning. One gene can be traced, located, and breed out (193).” As for the situation of morons, Goddard did not oppose sterilization, but was more interested in housing morons in exemplary institutions were their reproduction can be curtailed.
After identifying the single gene for feeble-mindedness. It seemed simple enough for him not to allow morons to breed and keep foreigners out, who were also morons. He raised enough funding to conduct a for study in Ellis island, which was to administered his version of the Binet-scale to immigrants. The evaluation of the data suggested that between 40 to 50 percent of the immigrants were feeblemindedness. However, there were several problems with administering the Binet-test to immigrants. One reasons was most immigrants were poor and never gone to school let alone held a pencil in their hand. By 192,8 Goddard has changed his mind about his work and agreed that he had set the upper limit of moronity too high, and agreed most or not all morons could be trained and led useful lives, but he still retained his belief of inherited mentality.

Why do you think Goddard changed his mind? Did it have to do with political or social pressure or did he really feel he was wrong about his theory?

Lewis M. Terman and the mass marketing of innate IQ
Mass testing and the Stanford-Binet

Goddard introduced Binet’s scale to American, but Terman was the first to published the test. Terman’s revision of the 1911 Binet’s test in 1916 extended the scale to include “superior adults” and increased the number of task from fifty-four to ninety. Terman then a professor at Stanford University, gave his revision a name that has become part of our vocabulary, the Stanford-Binet test. He test stressed conformity with expectation and downgraded original responses. For example the question about the Indian’s respond to the white man walks sitting down. What was the white man riding? The only correct answer was ‘bicycle: and any other original answer was downgraded.
Binet’s test was meant to be administered by a train professional working with one child at a time, and could not be used as a general ranking. Terman wanted to test everyone in hopes of establishing a gradation of innate ability that could sort all children into their proper station in life. “What pupil should be tested? The answer is, all. If only selected children are tested, many of the cases most in need of adjustment will be overlooked. Some of the biggest surprises are encountered in testing those who have been looked upon as close to average in ability. Universal testing is fully warranted (206-207).” The Stanford-Binet test remained a test for the individual, but it became the model for all the written versions that followed. Terman adjusted the scale so that the average children would score 100 at each age, and established the standard deviant of 15 points. His test became the standard judgment and approval for all mass marketed written tests that followed. The argument was that the Stanford-Binet test measured intelligence; therefore, any test correlated with Stanford-Binet also measured intelligence.
Terman agreed with Binet on the grounds that the test was needed to identify children with learning disabilities, but differ in how Binet’s desired to help the disabled children. Terman states, “… in the near future intelligence test 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 (209).” He thought to plea for mass testing with the removal of the feeblemindedness and the criminals from society, intelligence tests will be able to place people in their respective professions. For IQ of 75 or lower should be the realm of unskilled labor, 75 to 85 semi-skilled labor, and above 85 more specific judgments could be made; however, this is merely establishing ranks, and Terman took the hereditarian stance and proclaimed class and race distinctions. In the end, Terman used several reasons for supporting hereditarianism. One example, is the IQ test he administered on twenty orphans. He relates the low scores must reflect the biology of the children. He moves easily from individuals, to social, classes to races, and proclaims do we need to prove what common sense already tells us. Terman proclaims, “… does not common observation teach us that, in the main, native qualities of intellect and character, rather than chance, determine the social class to which a family belongs? From what is already know about heredity, should we not naturally expect to find the children of well-to-do, cultured, and successful parents better endowed than the children who have been reared in slums of poverty (221)?” In the end just like Goddard, Terman recants his ideas to a degree. For in later works he mentions a few words of caution for heredity, and state that we also do not know how to partition the average differences between genetic and environmental influences.

Do you think Terman’s explanation of class and race distinction is bias, and if so, is there any other better explanations to support his claim scientifically, or was he already hinting toward pass theories of craniometry, recapitulation, criminal anthropology, and his own work to support his distinction?

R.M. Yerkes and the Army Mental Tests: IQ comes of age
Psychology’s great leap forward

“We must learn to measure skillfully every form and aspect of behavior which has psychological and sociological significance (223).” The preceding quote by R.M. Yerkes states his goal of turning psychology into a science, and he proclaimed through mental testing that psychology had potential to become a rigorous science. Yerkes obtained his chance to compile a sufficient amount of data to support his hereditary IQ theory, with help from the army. During the outbreak of World War I, the military allow Yerkes and his men to administered 1.75 million IQ tests to all new recruits.
Yerkes assembled the great hereditarians of America, which included Terman and Goddard, to create three types of IQ test for the army. Literate recruits took the written Army Alpha test. While the illiterate recruits and the soldiers who failed the Alpha test took the pictorial Beta test, and any individuals who failed the Beta test were called in separately to be administered a formal Binet scale test. These test could now rank and stream everybody; thus, the era of mass testing had begun.
The results from the test stated three major facts. The first is the actual mental age of white American adults was 13 and not the standard age of 16 suggested by Terman. The second factor is that European immigrants can be graded by their country of origins. Again, stating that the Southern and Eastern Europeans are less superior than the Nordic Europeans. The third factor stated that Negros were at the bottom of the scale with an average mental age of 10.41. Yerkes supported that all tests were constructed to measure innate intelligence.
However several problems arose from administering the test. Some of these downfalls in testing was: procedures varied so much from camp to camp that the results could scarcely organized and compared, high levels for poor anxiety, poor conditions for seeing and hearing, inexperience with taking test, recruits taking the wrong test, and many were not called back to retake a test or receive individual Binet-scale tests. Other errors found that a bias that lowered the mean scores of blacks and immigrants, and a bias for interpreting the zero on test scores as evidence of innate stupidity, which many of the zeros should have been interpreted as many men didn’t understand the instruction and should have been invalid.
A serious problem with Yerkes test is the treasure-trove for anyone seeking environmental correlates of performance on “test of intelligence” (247). Yerkes found a relationship between intelligence and amount of schooling. Additionally, he found test scores for foreign-born recruits rose consistently with years of residency in America. Yerkes army test measured the education and familiarity with American culture not innate intelligence. How many people actually know who Christy Mathewson is? Again and again all his tests pointed to a correlation with environment, but Yerkes his ground in hope for a hereditarian salvation. C.C. Brigham, a disciple of Yerkes, and translated the army testing to support the views of hereditarianism. Brigham article became a source used by all propagandists for supporting restriction on immigrants and eugenically regulation of reproduction. In the end, Brigham recant his published work and stated that the army data was worthless in measuring innate intelligence, but the damage was done. His work along with the other three hereditarians, slowed the immigration for southern and eastern Europe. During the outbreak of World War II, more than 6 million southern and eastern, and central Europeans were barred from America. “We know what happened to many who wished to leave but had nowhere to go. The paths to destruction are often indirect, but ideas can be agents as sure as guns and bombs (263).”

How much impact to do you think the hereditarians had on limiting the restriction of immigrants into America? Do you think there were other important factors influencing the Restriction act of 1924, and is so what were these factors?

How much influence do you think Yerkes IQ army test have on the rest of the nation, in terms of mass producing written test? Why do you think the military regarded his test as being useless and a waste of time?

Do you think hereditarians had the better argument for ranking class, gender, or race, or do you think the previous theories were better?