Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [154]
—Pierce Arrow.
The Beta was similarly far from impartial: in it, illiterates had to complete certain pictures such as a face without a mouth—fair enough—but others, such as a lightbulb without a filament or a tennis court without a net, made many lower-class men and immigrants seem stupid.54
The same criticism was made, and rightly so, as far as the Stanford-Binet scale was concerned. Many or most of the items in it measure a combination of inherent ability and acquired information or skills, but a person who has had little chance to acquire the information or skills will do poorly with the questions, no matter what his or her inherent mental power.
At the twelve-year-old level, for instance, the Stanford-Binet asked for definitions of “charity” and “justice.” If a Mexican-American child from a rural southwestern shanty town gave inadequate answers, did that indicate a lack of innate intelligence or the child’s failure to learn the meanings of those concepts in white, middle-class America? Again, at the eight-year-old level Stanford-Binet asked, “What’s the thing for you to do when you have broken something which belongs to someone else?” If the eight-year-old lived in a city slum where children struggled to survive, was his or her answer a gauge of innate intelligence or of the mores and folkways of the slum subculture?
Binet had left moot the extent to which mental development, measured by his scale, was due to heredity and to experience. But the tenor of Terman’s comments in The Measurement of Intelligence (the Stanford-Binet instruction manual), despite the disclaimer quoted above, was that intelligence is largely hereditary and that poor scores reveal mental deficiency—which, he said, was a genetic and a racial trait:
[Low intelligence] is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… The writer predicts that… there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.55
In 1922, the respected columnist and pundit Walter Lippmann launched a critical attack in The New Republic on Terman, Yerkes, and others who claimed that intelligence testing measured innate mental ability. Lippmann sounded the theme, repeated from that time until now, that such testing stamped a permanent label of inferiority on children, especially the underprivileged, and served the purposes of the prejudiced and the powerful.56
He and others who shared his views had even stronger grounds for objecting to the Army Alpha and Beta than to the Stanford-Binet, and for disputing Yerkes’ claim that tests modeled on the Alpha “measure native intellectual ability.” The answers to many Alpha questions clearly required learned information rather that intelligence, as Stephen Jay Gould later made plain in his polemical study, The Mismeasure of Man, in which he cited these examples:57
Washington is to Adams as first is to…
Crisco is a: patent medicine, disinfectant, toothpaste, food product.
The number of a Kaffir’s legs is: 2, 4, 6, 8.
Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian.
Beta, for illiterate subjects, in the choice of pictures to be completed was similarly unfair, as already mentioned.
The result was to give a distorted assessment of the population and the effects on it of immigration. The Army Testing Program, as presented by Yerkes in his 1921 report, portrayed a society whose population was being degraded by increases in poor genetic stock. According to the Alpha and Beta, the average mental age of white American males was only thirteen, just above the level of moronity, although Terman had previously put the figure at sixteen. Gould said that this shocking datum lent power to xenophobic, racist, and elitist elements in America:
The new figure became a rallying point for eugenicists who predicted doom and lamented our declining intelligence, caused