128 CHAPTER 6 PSYCHOLOGISTS AS TESTERS: APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY, ORDERING SOCIETY
positions. Whereas the involvement of women psychologists in the applied efforts of the war was practically nonexistent, this changed as the field continued to professionalize in the postwar years. As historian of science Margaret Rossiter noted in the first volume of her pivotal work on women scientists in America (1982), only two women, Mabel Fernald and MargaretCobb, were listed as being involved in the World War I test- ing program of Robert Yerkes (1876–1956), and although they were staff psychologists at their institution, they were listed as assistants. Thus, women did not benefit professionally from con- nections made during the war. After the First World War, as applied work took off, a separate sphere of women’s work in psychology rapidly developed. This was partly because although the number of new academic departments and po- sitions was growing in the 1920s, so too was the number of PhD psychologists, both men and women. Men generally received first considera- tion for academic jobs and quickly occupied most available posts. Women were advised to use their training in clinical, vocational, or school settings and came to outnumber men in the latter. Napoli, in his history of applied psychology (1981), noted that by 1930, men made up two-thirds of the PhDs in psychology but only a small minority of the applied branch. Thus, applied psychol- ogy was clearly considered women’s work, and women were remarkably resourceful in using their training in various settings, from juvenile courts to state reformatories, private schools, and child guidance clinics.
THE DEMISE OF MENTAL TESTS
THE DEMISE OF MENTAL TESTS AND THE RISE OF THE IQ 129
FIGURE 6.7 Alfred Binet
Madeleine and Alice and found that many tests of sensory and neurological ability could not distinguish between adults and children. But certainly, he reasoned, the intelligences of adults and children were different. The tests that did differentiate between adults and children invoked more complex abilities, such as sustained attention and sophisticated use of language. He also became convinced that intelligence came in different kinds, partly through his observations of Madeleine and Alice.
From these observations and casual experi- ments, Binet became convinced of the following:
(1) that intelligence could take many forms, (2) that individuals were unique in their kind of in- telligence, and (3) that it was impossible to sum up a person’s intelligence in a single number or score. Nonetheless, he also acknowledged the practical utility of being able to make compar- isons among people on intelligence, a concept he defined as the practical ability to adapt to one’s circumstances. And although he was convinced of the value of rich, personal case histories in revealing the uniqueness of individuals and their intelligence, he also envisioned how tests might be used as a shortcut to get at this richness in a shorter amount of time. Thus, he began collab- orating with his colleague Henri on a project he called individual psychology.
Individual psychology was a research pro- gram in which Binet and Henri sought to develop a set of tests of psychological processes that could provide a complete picture of a person’s abilities.
But which processes were important, and how could they be measured? In collaboration with
Henri, Binet came up with 10 faculties that he felt should be assessed: memory, imagery, imagi- nation, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic sentiment, moral sentiment, muscular strength and willpower, and motor ability and hand–eye coordination. Binet and Henri worked on developing tests of these 10 faculties for many years but were largely unsuccessful. Scores on various tests seemed unrelated to one another, and Binet did not feel that they gave an accurate, or complete, picture of the person’s abilities. Bi- net was then joined by a postdoctoral student named Theodore Simon who worked at a large institution for the mentally subnormal. Binet’s association with Simon gave him access to a new population. Then, in 1905, Binet was presented with a practical challenge by the French govern- ment: to identify children in the French school system who were in need of special education. In 1882, the French government had passed a law that established mandatory primary education for all children aged 6–14 years. In the course of in- dustrialization in France, higher numbers of chil- dren were already attending school, and the new law extended this trend. This meant that many children who previously would not have attended school or stayed as long were now in classes, and many were not served well when placed in classes among their higher-achieving peers.
Binet and Simon began work on this challenge by trying various tests on children already identified as developmentally delayed and those identified as normal, ages 2–12, to see which tests would differentiate the two groups. In conducting the tests, Binet had an important insight: Although both groups of children were able to pass the same kinds of tests, the normal children did so at a younger age than the subnormal children. With this insight, Binet and Simon developed a set of 30 tasks of increasing levels of difficulty, starting with simple tasks that almost all children of a certain age could pass, such as shaking hands with the tester, up to complex tasks that even the oldest children had difficulty with, such as imagining the design that would be formed if a piece of paper were folded
130 CHAPTER 6 PSYCHOLOGISTS AS TESTERS: APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY, ORDERING SOCIETY
in quarters, cut, and unfolded. Children would then progress through the tests, stopping at the point they could no longer pass them. Their achievement would be noted and compared to the age corresponding to that level. This was referred to as the child’s ‘‘mental level,’’ later referred to as ‘‘mental age.’’ Any children who fell two years or more behind their age peers in performance were identified as subnormal.
The Binet-Simon test underwent revisions in 1908 and 1911 to extend the age range for which the test was appropriate (the 1911 test extended to adults) and to develop norms. However, Bi- net continued to believe that intelligence could best be conceptualized as multifaceted and mal- leable. He intended the test to be a time-specific snapshot of the child’s current state of function- ing, not a device that would be used to predict future ability or potential. Developmentally de- layed children, he believed, could improve their scores and change their level of intelligence by doing various exercises he called mental orthope- dics. He also believed that the tests were fallible and imprecise and that it was advisable to report scores as levels, not absolute numbers. This last intention was forever obscured when, in 1912, German psychologist William Stern originated the practice of dividing the mental age of in- dividuals by their chronological age to obtain a precise measure of their retardation or advance.
Thus, the intelligence quotient, or IQ, was born.
The ensuing development and use of the intelligence test in the American context, where it was most readily and pervasively adopted, distorted or disregarded many of Binet’s original intentions. In 1908, psychologist Henry Herbart Goddard (1866–1957; seeChapter 4) traveled to Europe. Goddard had recently been appointed director of research at the Vineland Training School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New Jersey, and was traveling to England and France to learn about the research with the feebleminded that was being conducted there. Toward the end of his trip he learned about the Binet- Simon scale. Intrigued, he returned to the United States, translated the 1908 version of the test
and tried it on the children at Vineland. He discovered that, inasmuch as ranked scores on the tests appeared to corroborate clinical opinions of residents’ abilities, it did a remarkably good job of classifying the various levels of retardation.
Goddard became an enthusiastic proponent of the test and translated Binet’s termd´ebileinto
‘‘moron,’’ which referred to the highest grade and most common form of mental deficiency.
However, he did not adopt Binet’s conceptual- ization of intelligence as multifaceted, individual, and changeable. Goddard, like Galton, was a hereditarian and a eugenicist. He believed that, if allowed to breed, people of low intelligence would produce generations of mentally deficient offspring who would taint the ‘‘stock’’ of Amer- ica (i.e., lower the quality of the gene pool). He also believed that feeblemindedness was directly related to various social ills, including delin- quency, crime, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, and poverty. Although he personally considered forced sterilization of the feebleminded an effec- tive solution to the problem of degeneracy, he realized it might upset people’s sensibilities. In- stead, he recommended institutionalization and segregation of the sexes.
In 1912, Goddard wrote a book called The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble- Mindednessin which he reported the results of his study of the genealogy of the Kallikak family, conducted with his assistant Elizabeth Kite.
Kallikak was a pseudonym given by Goddard to a family that had two distinct lines of descent from a common father. In one line, the father had coupled with a woman of ‘‘ill repute’’
and low social standing, who was presumably feebleminded. In the other line, the father had produced offspring with a respectable woman of good genetic stock. Goddard used this case study to argue that the two lines showed marked differences in ability and thus suffered markedly different fates. Around 1900, Mendelian genetics was becoming familiar to English readers. A classic paper by Gregor Johann Mendel, showing that genetic transmission could control the color of a rabbit’s coat or the height of a garden pea
LEWIS TERMAN AND THE AMERICANIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE TESTING 131
plant, led Goddard to believe that there must be a gene for feeblemindedness and that it could be passed from parents to children. In the case of the ‘‘bad’’ line of the Kallikak family, the bad genes from the unfortunate coupling produced a whole line of degenerates. Goddard felt that people in the highest grade of the feebleminded (i.e., morons) were a particular menace because they were not immediately identifiable by facial characteristics. They could pass as normal and were likely to procreate prolifically. He thought that a test that could identify such a menace to the American gene pool was needed, and in Goddard’s view, the Binet test proved to be just such a tool.
Soon after he published the Kallikak study, Goddard became engaged in the testing of immigrants at Ellis Island. There, he concluded that a sizable proportion of Eastern European
immigrants qualified as feebleminded and sug- gested that unrestricted immigration could have deleterious consequences for the American stock.
The practical value of intelligence testing for identifying subnormality was seductive in an era riddled with eugenicist concerns. But as long as IQ tests were used solely for the purpose of diagnosing mental deficiency, their impact, al- though profound, could not be widespread. For the tests to achieve cultural prominence, they would have to have value, not only at Vineland and Ellis Island but in the educational system more generally. Here, testers encountered chil- dren of normal and above-normal capacities. The range of the test needed to be extended, and the norms recalculated, on an American sample.