Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [152]
It is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of… 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.48
The Stanford-Binet, published in 1916, swiftly became the standard test for measuring intelligence and remained so for over two decades. It was soon being used in a number of schools, preschools, colleges, and institutions for the feeble-minded. But its influence was both broader and more profound than that; the Stanford-Binet scale (and, later, its 1937 revision) became the standard for virtually all IQ tests that followed it. What Binet, Simon, and Terman took to be the attributes making up intelligence became the model for nearly all later intelligence tests; these components included memory, language comprehension, size of vocabulary, eye-hand coordination, knowledge of familiar things, judgment, likenesses and differences, arithmetical reasoning, ability to detect absurdities, speed and richness of association of ideas, and several others.49
A subsequent test using Stanford-Binet components revolutionized the field of intelligence testing.
All versions of the Binet scale—eventually there were dozens—have to be given by a psychologist or trained technician to one person at a time. But group testing, in which subjects read questions to themselves and check off multiple-choice answers or make appropriate marks on the form, would be far quicker, simpler, and very much less expensive.
This breakthrough in mental measurement came about as a result of the entry of the United States into the First World War. Within two weeks of President Woodrow Wilson’s signing of the declaration of war, on April 6, 1917, the American Psychological Association appointed a committee to see what role psychology could play in the war effort. The committee reported that the most useful contribution of the profession would be the development of psychological examinations that could be quickly given to large numbers of military personnel so as to eliminate the mentally incompetent, classify individuals according to their abilities, and select the most competent for special training and responsible positions.
A group of psychologists—among them Terman, Goddard, and Robert Yerkes, a Harvard professor—met at Vineland and began planning the tests. In August, Yerkes was commissioned a major in the Army and was ordered to carry out the plans. He assembled a staff of forty psychologists who, in two months, produced the Army Alpha, a written test of intelligence, and the Army Beta, a pictorial test for the 40 percent of inductees who were functionally illiterate (the instructions for Beta were read aloud by an assistant). The widely used Alpha looks, from today’s perspective, like a curious mixture of scientific information, folk wisdom, and morality, as can be seen by these questions:
1. If plants are dying for lack of rain, you should
—water them,
—ask a florist’s advice,
—put fertilizer around them.
8. It is better to fight than to run, because
—cowards are shot,
—it is more honorable,
—if you run you may get shot in the back.
11. The cause of echoes is
—the reflection of sound waves,
—the presence of electricity in the air,
—the presence of moisture in the air.
Yerkes’ team began giving the tests in four camps, but within weeks the surgeon general decided to extend the program to the entire Army; by the time the war ended, in November 1918, more than 1.7 million men had taken the tests and some three hundred psychologists under Yerkes had graded each man and suggested a suitable military assignment for him.50 Although Yerkes’ psychological corps met resistance and noncompliance from professional officers, the tests resulted in the discharge of about eight thousand men as unfit and the assignment of about ten thousand