I think this is one of psychology's most
fascinating stories.
The story's two heroes are Robert Yerkes, who was
president of the American Psychological Association during World War One and
was a researcher at Princeton University, and Carl Campbell Brigham, a doctor of psychology and
researcher in Princeton University and one of the creators of the SAT test.
Robert Yerkes, 1876-1956
Carl Campbell Brigham, 1890 –1943
Yerkes was an active person who took
initiative to establish psychology's status as a scientific discipline. He saw the opportunities opened to psychology
by the massive draft to the U.S army during World War One. In 1917 he proposed ways in which psychologists could
assist the military effort. The military
accepted assistance in mental examination of all recruits and selection of men
for tasks demanding special skills.
Yerkes and his colleagues adapted the
Stanford Binet test to group administration.
They turned it into two tests: the Alpha test, which contained oral and
written instructions, that was taken by draftees who could read English, and
the Beta test, which had instructions by pantomime and demonstrations, and was
taken by draftees who did not read English (for example, immigrants). The Alpha and the Beta tests eventually
became the blueprints for the Wechsler tests which were developed later (the
Alpha test evolved into the "verbal tests" and the Beta test – into the
"performance" tests). Yerkes
and his colleagues did not consider the effects of cultural differences on
nonverbal tests. These effects can have no
lesser significance than the effects of cultural differences on verbal tests.
The American psychologists must have
worked diligently, because by the end of the war they'd tested about 1,750,000 men.
That was indeed a large database for
intelligence tests.
After the war Brigham processed the data
and published his findings in 1923 in a book called "A Study of American
Intelligence". Yerkes was enthusiastic
about this book, and wrote its preface.
Brigham divided the tested population
into four groups according to country of origin and race. The "Nordic" group included people
from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Scandinavia, England, and Scotland; the
"Alpine," group included people from Germany, France, Northern
portions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland; "the
Mediterranean," group included people from Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland,
Wales and Asian Turkey; and the "Negro group."
Brigham argued that the data show that
people from the "Nordic" group have a higher IQ than people from the
other groups, and that the "Alpine" and "Mediterranean"
groups are intellectually inferior compared with the "Nordic" group
as well as the native born Americans. Brigham
presented evidence that the intelligence of immigrants had declined
consistently in the years since 1887. He
noted that the years of residence in the United States correlated positively
with scores on the army scale. However he
neglected the possibility that years of living in the U.S have enriched the
draftee's familiarity with the test's items.
He did not consider that people
of "Nordic" descent consisted the first wave of immigration to the
U.S, have lived in the U.S longer and thus know the language and culture
better. He did not consider that immigration
waves from "Alpine" and "Mediterranean" stated occurred much
later (in the 1920's, 70% of immigrants to the U.S came from these
countries). Brigham thought that the
correlation between length of stay in the U.S and intelligence results from the
higher "quality" of the "Nordic" immigrants.
As for the Blacks, he came to the
conclusion that they are intellectually inferior, without taking into
consideration the extent of their familiarity with the mainstream "white"
American culture (to which the test's developers belonged), as a minority group
that didn't get a fair chance to be integrated into the American society (to put
it mildly).
Brigham concluded that "if the four
types blend in the future into one American type, then it is a foregone
conclusion that future Americans will be less intelligent than the present
native American." Yerkes wrote
that those who sought general public decay should "work for unrestricted
and non-selective immigration."
"A Study of American Intelligence"
became a foundation of a new restrictive immigration law passed in May 1924. This legislation, by establishing
"national origin quotas" based on the 1890 census (a period prior to the
influx of non-"Nordic" groups), drastically restricted the
immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans.
In 1930, in what was characterized "as
gallant an exhibition of scientific integrity as one is likely to find"
and as "an apology with an abjectness rarely encountered in scientific
literature," Brigham
repudiated virtually all of his earlier conclusions. Following a statement that there had been
major flaws in his methodology, Brigham noted that the "study, with its
entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences, collapses
completely." But to many people,
the damage had already been done.
Brigham passed away in 1943.
My main source for this story was:
Hubin, D. R. (1988). The
Scholastic Aptitude Test: its development and introduction, 1900-1948. http://pages.uoregon.edu/hubin/
This is a doctoral thesis about the SAT. the information presented here is from the
third chapter:
A NEW TOOL TO ASSESS
APTITUDE--PSYCHOLOGISTS CREATE THE INTELLIGENCE TEST
I recommend reading the whole interesting
chapter. The story brought here is only
one anecdote out of this chapter.
