|
|
In Defense of IQ Testing: Lewis M. Terman Replies to Critics
“There is nothing about an individual as important as
his IQ,” declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent
that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and
the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of
intelligence testing. The army’s use of intelligence tests lent new
credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked
public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for
American democracy. The idea that experts could confidently assign a man
to his proper place in the army—and by extension, his place in
life—suggested a kind of determinism that some found profoundly at odds
with American democracy and its credo of upward mobility through hard
work. In “The Great Conspiracy,” Lewis Terman replied with acid
commentary to a series of articles by Walter Lippmann criticizing IQ
tests. Terman portrayed Lippmann as a sentimental humanist whose
democratic dogma prevented him from accepting plain facts. According to
Terman, Americans clearly exhibited a range of different intellectual
endowments and the new science of psychology made it possible to measure
and classify those differences.
After Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan had confounded the evolutionists,
and . . . the astronomers, it was only fitting that some equally fearless
knight should stride forth in righteous wrath and annihilate that other
group of pseudo-scientists known as “intelligence testers.” Mr. Walter
Lippmann, alone and unaided, has performed just this service. That it took
six rambling articles to do the job is unimportant. It is done. The world
is deeply in debt to Mr. Lippmann. So are the psychologists, if they only
knew it, for henceforth they should know better than to waste their lives
monkeying with those silly little “puzzles” or juggling IQ’s and
mental ages.
What have intelligence testers done that they should merit such a fate?
Well, what have they not done? They have enunciated, ex cathedra, in the
guise of act, law and eternal verity, such highly revolutionary and absurd
doctrines as the following; to wit:
(1) That the strictly average representative of the genus homo is not a
particularly intellectual animal;
(2) that some members of the species are much stupider than others;
(3) that school prodigies are usually brighter than school laggards;
(4) that college professors are more intelligent than janitors,
architects than hod-carriers, railroad presidents than switch-tenders; and
(most heinous of all)
(5) that the offspring of socially, economically and professionally
successful parents have better mental endowment, on the average, than the
offspring of said janitors, hod-carriers and switch-tenders.
These are indeed dangerous doctrines, subversive of American democracy.
The crime of the “intelligence testers” is made worse by the fact that
they have attempted to gain credence for their nefarious theories by
resort to cunningly devised statistical formulae which common people do
not understand. It is true that some of these doctrines had been voiced
before, but as long as they were expressed in ordinary language they
passed as mere opinion and did little harm. But to talk about mental
differences in terms of IQ’s, or to reckon mental inheritance in terms
of a “.50 coefficient of resemblance between parent and offspring,” is
a far more serious matter. In the interest of freedom of opinion there
ought to be a law passed forbidding the encroachment of quantitative
methods upon those fields which from time immemorial have been reserved
for the play of sentiment and opinion. For example, why should not one be
allowed to take his political or social theory as he takes his religion,
without having it all mixed up with IQ’s, probable errors and
coefficients of correlation?
At any rate, it will not do to let the idea get abroad that human
beings differ in any such vital trait as ability to think, comprehend,
reason; or, if such difference really exist, that there is the remotest
possibility of anyone ever being able to measure them. If the
psychologists should succeed in getting the intelligentsia to swallow this
vanity-satisfying doctrine, who knows what they would not next succeed in
putting over a system of plural voting based upon intelligence indices (to
be determined by these self-same psychologists)? Absurd? By no means.
Suppose, for example, they should somehow manage to give a test to the
members of Congress (it should be done without their knowing it) and
should then shrewdly award to each and every one a flatteringly high IQ.
Sheer instinct on the part of the recipients could be depended upon to do
the rest.
Let there be no misapprehension; the principle of democracy is at
stake. The essential thing about a democracy is not equality of
opportunity, as some foolish persons think, but equality of mental
endowment. Where would our American democracy be if it should turn out
that people differ in intelligence as they do in height; especially if the
psychologists could make it appear that he had discovered a method of
triangulating everybody’s intellectual altitude? The argument of the
psychologists that they would use their method in the discover and
conservation of talent, among rich and poor alike, is brazen camouflage.
They don’t care a twirl-o'-your-thumb about the conservation of talent.
Their real purpose is to set up a neoaristocracy, more snobbish, more
tyrannical and on every count more hateful than any that has yet burdened
the earth. Insomuch as the psychologists know their little “puzzle”
stunts better than anyone else can hope to know them, they are doubtless
entertaining ambitious visions of themselves forming the cap stone of this
new political and social structure. As Mr. Lippmann well says, “if the
tester could make good his claim that his tests test intelligence he would
soon occupy a position of power which no intellectual has held since the
collapse of theocracy.” In short, the whole thing is motivated by the
Nietzschean Impulse Imperious.
It is high time that we were penetrating the wiles of this crafty cult.
We have been entirely too unsuspecting. For example, the innocent-minded
Germans are being shamefully taken in at this very moment. Hardly had the
old government of Germany crashed, when the educational authorities of the
newly established republic allowed the psychologists to launch a wild orgy
of intelligence testing in the schools. The orgy continues unabated. The
ostensible purpose is to sift the schools for superior talent in order to
give it a chance to make the most of itself, in whatever stratum of
society it may be found. The psychologists pretend that they are trying to
break up the old Prussian caste system. They are not. It is the Impulse
Imperious. If the German people don’t wake up they will soon find
themselves in the grip of a super-junker caste that will out-junker
anything Prussia ever turned loose. England and the other European
countries are in similar danger. The conspiracy has even spread to
Australia, South Africa and Japan. It is world-wide.
Now it is evident that Mr. Lippmann has been seeing red; also, that
seeing red is not very conducive to seeing clearly. The impassioned tone
of these six articles gives their case away. Clearly, something has hit
the bulls-eye of one of Mr. Lippmann’s emotional complexes. From the
concentration of attack upon me one would infer that I had caused all the
trouble, even to the point of seducing an eminent psychologist as William
McDougall. If such is the case, my responsibility is very great, for a
majority of the psychologists of America, England and Germany are now
enrolled in the ranks of the “intelligence testers,” and all but a
handful of the rest use their results.
The six articles are introduced by the editors of the New Republic as a
critical “analysis and estimate of intelligence tests.” As it turns
out; the estimate is considerably more in evidence than the analysis. The
former rings out clearly in every paragraph; the latter, when it is not
downright loco, is vague and misleading. One gathers, however, that Mr.
Lippmann thinks he has a mission to perform and that the end justifies the
means. This is not an accusation; it is a charitable way of explaining his
misuse of facts and quotations.
The validity of intelligence tests is hardly a question the
psychologist would care to debate with Mr. Lippmann; nor is there any
reason to engage in so profitless a venture. It is only necessary to
examine casually a few samples of his allegations in order to show what
weight they should carry.1
Sample No. 1. The belief that our draftees in the war had an average
mental age of only fourteen years rests entirely upon the mental age
standards embodied in the Stanford Revision of the Binet test. These
standards were based upon a mere handful of samplings and are entirely
overthrown by the army results. The army tests have “knocked the
Stanford Revision into a cocked hat.”
As a matter of fact, the belief in question does not rest at all upon
the correctness of the Stanford mental age norms. Independent age norms
have several times been derived for the army tests by applying them to
large groups of unselected school children. I have presented some of these
norms in the very report from which Mr. Lippmann quotes a few of the facts
he is unable to interpret.2 Such independently derived norms for the Alpha
test, for the Beta test and for the Yerkes-Bridges Point Scale (all used
in the army), agree with the Stanford-Binet in the verdict as to average
mental age of our drafted soldiers. On every kind of test that was
employed, even the most non-verbal, the average scored earned by draftees
was less than that earned by average fourteen-year-old school children.
Psychologists are not entirely agreed as to how this fact should be
interpreted, but that is beside the point. Those who accept the army data
at their face value think that the “Fourteen-Year” tests of the
Stanford-Binet should be renamed “Average Adult” tests. The possible
desirability of such renaming has no bearing whatever on the average
mental age of soldiers or, for that matter, on the validity of the
Stanford tests as a measure of intelligence.
Sample No. 2. The intelligence rating earned by a soldier was
determined chiefly by the time limits used in giving the tests.
The effects of increased time limits were thoroughly investigated by
the Division of Psychology, Surgeon General’s Office. The results of the
experiment, which was carried out under my direction by Dr. Mark A. May,
are stated in the following words: “In general, then, we have no reason
to assume that an extension of time limits would have improved the test or
have given an opportunity to many individuals materially to alter their
ratings.”3 In fact, scores earned by 510 men on regular time correlated
with scores earned by the same group on double time to the extent of .965.
This means, of course, that the top five percent by one method included
almost exactly the same men as were in the top five percent by the other
method, and similarly for a cross section in any range of the score
distribution. These facts are to be found just three pages from a
statement which Mr. Lippmann takes out of its setting and quotes in a
manner certain to mislead.
Sample No. 3. The symmetrical distribution of IQ’s resulting from
application of the Stanford-Binet to unselected children is no proof
whatever of the validity of the test.
Perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant. I have never made such a
claim, although Mr. Lippmann tries to give the impression that I have. It
is true, as he asserts, that coin-tossing gives an even more symmetrical
curve of distribution. Mr. Lippmann uses this illustration in order to
suggest that intelligence score distributions, like those for
coin-tossing, are mainly a product of chance. (He does admit they are
“not quite as chancy as that.”) What are the facts? Over and over
again the experiment has been made of testing a large group of children
twice, with an interval of several days, or months, or even years between
the tests. Each pupil’s original score is then paired with his later
score, and a correlation coefficient is computed for the two series of
tests. If the scores were due to chance, the resulting correlations would
of course be .00. Actually they are nearly always above .80, and
occasionally above .90. If Mr. Lippmann will make two one-thousand series
of coin-tosses and then correlate the results of the two series by pairing
first toss with first toss, second toss with second toss, etc., he will
get, not .80 or .90, but .00, plus or minus a small probable error.
Sample No. 4. The tests are doubtless useful in classifying school
children, but this is no evidence that they test intelligence.
Possibly it is not; or possibly it depends upon one’s definition of
intelligence. Most of us have uncritically taken it for granted that
children who attend school eight or ten years without passing the fourth
grade or surmounting long division, are probably stupider than children
who lead their classes into high school at twelve years and into college
at sixteen. Mr. Lippmann contends that we can’t tell anything about how
intelligent either one of these children is until he has lived out his
life. Therefore, for a lifetime at least, Mr. Lippmann considers his
position impregnable!
Sample No. 5. Although intelligence tests are capable of rendering
valuable service in classifying school children, they are in great danger
of becoming an “engine of cruelty” by being turned into “a method of
stamping a permanent sense of inferiority upon the soul of the child.”
Nothing could be more contemptible than to—etc., etc.
Mr. Lippmann does not charge that the tests have been thus abused, but
that they easily could be. Very true; but they simply aren’t. That is
one of the recognized rules of the game. Isn’t it funny what horrible
possibilities an excited brain can conjure up? I recall a patient who had
worked himself into a wretched stew from thinking how terrible it would be
if butchers by concerted action all over the country, should suddenly take
it into their heads to slaughter their unsuspecting customers. He was
actually determined to get a law passed that would deprive these potential
murderers of their edged and pointed tools.
Sample No. 6. There is no proof that mental traits are inherited.
Goddard thought he had proved it for mental deficiency, but Cattell
questions his evidence. Galton thought he had proved it for genius, but
Cattell doesn’t seem to think much of that proof either.
Note how cleverly Mr. Lippmanmn strives for effect by playing off one
psychologist against another. He resorts to this frequently. The trick is
very simple; all you do is to take an isolated statement out of its
original setting and quote it in a setting made to order. In that way you
can have an expert opinion on your side. Mr. Bryan is said to use this
method with telling effect against the evolutionists. Not that
psychologists don’t sometimes disagree, even as doctors do. It would be
a sorry outlook for their young science if they did not. But when the
outsider comes along and tries to make capital out of such differences, it
is well to be on one’s guard. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it
means that an unfair advantage is being taken both of the reader and the
author quoted. Think, for example, of Mr. Lippmann’s quoting Cattell in
support of his tirade against intelligence testing—Cattell, the pupil of
Galton, the father of mentality testing in America, the inventor of new
methods for the study of individual differences, the author of important
studies (in progress) on the inheritance of genius!
Sample No. 7. (Main Allegation, asserted at least three times in every
paragraph, always with signs of greatly increased blood pressure.) The
intelligence tests don’t test pure intelligence. Any appearance to the
contrary is due to “a subtle statistical illusion.” The
psychologist’s assumption “that his questions and puzzles can in fifty
minutes isolate abstract intelligence is vanity.” It is worse than
vanity; it is an attempt to restore the “doctrine of predestination and
infant damnation” in favor of an “intellectual caste system,” etc.,
etc.
It is evident that Jack has prepared an imposing giant for the
slaughter. No matter that it is stuffed with straw or that it is set up in
a fashion to make it the easy victim of a few vigorous puffs of
super-heated atmosphere. As a matter of fact, all the “intelligence
testers” will readily agree with Mr. Lippmann that their tests do not
measure simon pure intelligence, but always native ability plus other
things, with no final verdict yet as to exactly how much the other things
affect the score. However, nearly all the psychologists believe that
native ability counts very heavily. Mr. Lippmann doesn’t. He prefers to
believe that more probably an individual’s IQ is determined by what
happens to him in the nursery before the age of four years, in connection
with the “creative opportunities which the parents and nurse girls
improved or missed or bungled”! After all, if our experiences in the
nursery gave us our emotional complexes, as the Freudians say, why
shouldn’t they have determined our IQ’s at the same time?
One wonders why Mr. Lippmann, holding this belief, did not suggest that
we let up on higher education and pour our millions into kindergartens and
nurseries. For, really and truly, high IQ’s are not to be sneezed at.
The difference between 150 IQ and 50 IQ is the difference between an
individual who will be able, if he half tries, to graduate from college
with Phi Beta Kappa honors at twenty, and an individual who at that age
can hardly do long division, make change for four cents out of twenty-five
or name the months of the year. Even the difference between 100 IQ and 75
IQ is the difference between the ability to graduate from high school or
possibly from college, and inability to do even first year of high school
work satisfactorily.
And just to think that we have been allowing all sorts of mysterious,
uncontrolled, chance influences in the nursery to mould children’s
IQ’s, this way and that way, right before our eyes. It is high time that
we were investigating the IQ effects of different kinds of baby-talk,
different versions of Mother Goose, and different makes of pacifiers and
safety pins. If there is any possibility of identifying, weight and
bringing under control these IQ stimulants and depressors, we can well
afford to throw up every other kind of scientific research until the job
is accomplished. That problem once solved, the rest of the mysteries of
the universe would fall easy prey before our made-to-order IQ’s of 180
or 200.
Does not Mr. Lippmann owe it to the world to abandon his role of critic
and to enter this enchanting field of research? He may safely be assured
that if he unravels the secret of turning low IQ’s into high ones, or
even into moderately higher ones, his fame and fortune are made. If he
could guarantee to raise certified 100’s to certified 140’s, or even
certified 80’s to certified 100’s, nothing but premature death or the
discover and publication of his secret would keep him out of the
Rockefeller-Ford class if he cared to achieve it. I know of a certain
modern Croesus who alone would probably be willing to start him off with
ten or twenty million if he could only raise one particular little girl
from about 60 to 70 to a paltry 100 or so. Of course, if this man had only
understood the secrets of “creative opportunity” in the nursery, he
might have had all this and more for nothing. Who knows but if the matter
were put up to him in the right way he would be willing to endow for Mr.
Lippmann a Bureau of Nursery Research for the Enhancement of the IQ?
If Mr. Lippmann gets this Bureau started there are several questions I
shall want to submit to it for solution. Some of these have been bothering
me for a long time. One is, why both high and low IQ’s are so often
found in children of the same family and of the same nursery. To be sure,
parental habits change more or less as children come and grow up; nurse
girls arrive and depart; toys wear out. The problem admittedly is complex,
but by successive experiments in which one factor after another is kept
constant while the others were varied, the evil and beneficent influences
might gradually be sorted out.
Next, I should want to propose a minute comparative study of the
influences operative in our California Japanese nurseries and those of our
California Portuguese. Here is mystery enough to challenge any group of
scientists Mr. Lippmann can get together, notwithstanding the apparent
similarity of nursery environment in the two cases, the IQ results are
markedly different. Our average Portuguese child carries through school
and into life an IQ of about 80; the average Japanese child soon develops
an IQ not far below that of the average California white child of Nordic
descent. In this case the nurse girl factor is eliminated; one might
almost say, the nursery itself. But of course there are the toys, which
are more or less different. It is also conceivable that the more liquid
Latin tongue exerts a sedative effect on infants' minds as compared with
the harsher Japanese language, which may be stimulating in comparison.
Another problem would relate to the IQ resemblance of identical twins
as compared with that of fraternal twins. The latest and most extensive
investigation of this problem4 indicates a considerably greater IQ
resemblance for the former than for the latter. This is a real poser;
which I leave to Mr. Lippmann without attempting an explanation.
Notes:
1 His allegations are here stated in highly condensed form, as the text
is much to verbose for literal quotation.
2 Psychological Examining in the United States Army. Vol. 15, National
Academy of Science Memoirs, p. 536 ff.
3 Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army, p. 416
4 By a Stanford student not yet published.
Source: Lewis M. Terman, “The Great Conspiracy or the
Impulse Imperious of Intelligence Testers, Psychoanalyzed and Exposed by
Mr. Lippmann,” New Republic 33 (December 27, 1922): 116–120.
This article believed to be in the public domain.
|
