THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQracial and nadonal stereotypes. Of tests for invention, he wrote:
"We have only to compare the negro with the Eskimo or Indian,
and the Australian native with the Anglo-Saxon, to be struck by an
apparent kinship between general intellectual and inventive abil-
ity" (1906, p. 14). Of mathematical ability, he proclaimed (1906, p.
29): "Ethnology shows that racial progress has been closely paral-
leled by development of the ability to deal with mathematical con-
cepts and relations."
Terman concluded his study by committing both of the fallacies
identified on p. 185 as foundations of the hereditarian view. He
reified average test scores as a "thing" called general intelligence
by advocating the first of two possible positions (1906, p. 9): "Is
intellectual ability a bank account, on which we can draw for any
desired purpose, or is it rather a bundle of separate drafts, each
drawn for a specific purpose and inconvertible?" And, while admit-
ting that he could provide no real support for it, he defended the
innatist view (1906, p. 68): "While offering little positive data on
the subject, the study has strengthened my impression of the rela-
tively greater importance of endowment over training as a deter-
minant of an individual's intellectual rank among his fellows."
Goddard introduced Binet's scale to America, but Terman was
the primary architect of its popularity. Binet's last version of 1911
included fifty-four tasks, graded from prenursery to mid-teen-age
years. Terman's first revision of 1916 extended the scale to "supe-
rior adults" and increased the-number of tasks to ninety. Terman,
by then a professor at Stanford University, gave his revision a name
that has become part of our century's vocabulary—the Stanford-
Binet, the standard for virtually all "IQ" tests that followed.*
I offer no detailed analysis of content (see Block and Dworkin,
1976 or Chase, 1977), but present two examples to show how Ter-
man's tests stressed conformity with expectation and downgraded
original response. When expectations are society's norms, then do
"Terman (1919) provided a lengthy list of the attributes of general intelligence
captured by the Stanford-Binet tests: memory, language comprehension, size of
vocabulary, orientation in space and time, eye-hand coordination, knowledge of
familiar things, judgment, likeness and differences, arithmetical reasoning,
resourcefulness and ingenuity in difficult practical situations, ability to detect
absurdities, speed and richness of association of ideas, power to combine the dis-
sected parts of a form board or a group of ideas into a unitary whole, capacity to
generalize from particulars, and ability to deduce a rule from connected facts.