Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [412]
If that reasoning were correct, such testing and placement would be not only fair but in the best interests of the individuals and of society. But what if the test scores reflect the influence of environment? What if poverty and social disadvantage prevent children and adults from developing their latent abilities, causing them to score lower than those from favored backgrounds? If that is the case, the use of test scores to measure supposedly innate ability and to determine each individual’s educational and employment opportunities is a grave injustice and a major source of social inequity.
Time and again, for more than sixty years, controversy has raged over the extent to which the scores of IQ and other cognitive ability tests measure innate abilities and the extent to which they reflect life experience . But it became clear in recent decades that the data used by both hereditarian and environmentalist psychologists, chiefly derived from cross-sectional samples (samples of people of different ages), did not adequately explain the processes observed by Piaget and other developmental psychologists. Longitudinal studies tracing the course of development in individuals revealed that nature and nurture are not static, fixed components but are interactive and highly variable over time. At any point in life, an individual’s intellectual and emotional development is the product of the continuing interaction of his or her experiences and innate capabilities.
Then, too, most developmentalists have come to believe that different genotypes are affected to different degrees by environment; each has its own “reaction range.” As Irving Gottesman, emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has explained, an individual with mongolism may, in an enriched environment, attain a level of intellectual development only modestly higher than he would in a restricted poor environment; an individual with the hereditary equipment of a genius may, in an excellent environment, reach a level of development very much higher than he would in a poor environment.45 Thus, at low levels of innate ability the influence of environment is far less than it is at high levels.
Such generalizations, however, tell us only about categories, not about the relative influences of nature and nurture on any one person; there are too many idiosyncratic and incalculable factors in each person’s history to permit analysis of the relative roles of heredity and environment on the individual’s development. It is therefore impossible, at least at present, to precisely determine innate intellectual ability from an individual’s test scores.
That being so, how can testing be used to determine schooling and job placement without unfairly benefiting privileged middle-class persons and unfairly penalizing the disadvantaged? The answer, so far, has been to control testing by political and legal means. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its amendments gave minority and other disadvantaged groups a legal toehold from which to attack testing as discriminatory and to demand remedial action. They challenged educational and employment tests in court, sometimes successfully, on the grounds that some of the materials are familiar to whites but not to most minority groups and, more broadly, that minority groups, particularly blacks and Hispanics, grow up under such social disadvantages that any test, even one based on symbols rather than words and ostensibly “culture fair,” is unfair.
The radical remedy demanded by some activist groups at the height of the civil rights ferment in the 1960s was the abandonment of testing, and, as mentioned earlier, in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles city administrations actually banned intelligence testing in the elementary schools.46 But the opponents