Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [150]
Legislators were impressed by Goddard’s testimony and that of other psychologists. By 1931 twenty-seven states had laws authorizing eugenic sterilizations, and thousands of mentally and socially “defective” people were sterilized during the next three decades—nearly ten thousand in California alone. By the 1960s, however, both because the compulsory sterilization of the unfit seemed akin to Nazi policies and because an environmental view of mental and social disability had become dominant, state legislatures began repealing the laws in favor of statutes authorizing sterilization of the mentally retarded on a voluntary basis.
Goddard made an equally consequential social application of the Binet-Simon scale to the immigration question. Since the turn of the century, immigrants had been pouring into the country. Many were illiterate and socially backward, raising fears that the nation was being swamped by social and mental defectives. Congress had passed a law forbidding entry to lunatics and idiots, and immigration inspectors rejected about 10 percent of the thousands arriving each day, but it was thought that many others were slipping through. In 1913 the United States commissioner of immigration asked Goddard to study the screening procedures at Ellis Island and offer his advice. For a week, Goddard and several assistants picked out immigrants whose appearance they considered suggestive of mental defectiveness and, through interpreters, gave them the Binet-Simon. Most scored in the defective range—hardly surprising, in view of their fatigue, fear, lack of education, and the difficulties of interpretation—and Goddard thereupon recommended that immigration inspectors henceforth use brief “psychological methods” based on Binet-Simon testing. In 1913 deportations of ostensibly feeble-minded immigrants rose by 350 percent, and in 1914 half again as much.42
Goddard continued his work at Ellis Island for some months in 1914; the testing of a sample of arriving immigrants showed that about four fifths of the Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were feeble-minded. Even Goddard was incredulous; he reviewed the data, tinkered with the results, and lowered the figures, but only to the 40 to 50 percent range. These findings, along with evidence offered by other psychologists of like mind, influenced Congress in its drafting of the severely restrictive immigration law of 1924, which reduced total quotas for southern and eastern Europe to less than a fifth of that for northern and western Europe.43
Despite the acceptance of Goddard’s translation of the Binet-Simon scale, Lewis M. Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, saw certain flaws in it, and felt that he could correct them and make the scale more accurate. Like Goddard and many others who subscribed to the hereditarian view of intelligence, Terman believed there was a social need for such an instrument. He also saw a scientific need for it: although he was a hereditarian, he said that the relative influences of heredity and environment would not be known until perfected intelligence tests were widely used,44 and he undertook a major revision of the Binet-Simon scale, known as the Stanford-Binet scale.
Terman himself had no personal reason to believe in the inheritance of intelligence; he was the twelfth of fourteen children of an Indiana farm family, none of whose members and none of whose ancestors on either side had ever belonged to a profession or gone to college.45 But when he was ten, an itinerant book peddler, while selling Terman’s parents a book on phrenology, felt the boy’s head and proclaimed that he had unusual abilities. The incident may have given Terman his bent