Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The dire consequences of not understanding the influence of immigration and cultural differences on performance on intelligence tests


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.

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