Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

80 PRETEND INTELLIGENCE

par tic u lar social classes. But adding up the results into scores made dif-
ferences look scientifi c and biological, as well as socially just and fair. It
was the scientifi c credibility badly needed by a new discipline like psy-
chol ogy. Aft er conversion to pencil- and- paper tests for administration
to groups rather than to individuals, the IQ test was soon ready for mass
application in school, job se lection, and in the army.

THE GROWTH OF IQ TESTING

Armed with such biological “truths,” followers of Galton inspired infl u-
ential campaigns, and Eugenics Socie ties sprang up on both sides of the
Atlantic in the early 1900s. Observing the higher birth rates among the
working class, its members were soon warning about the degeneration of
the “race” in popu lar seminars, magazines, and the pages of national
newspapers. Recognition of the innateness of intelligence was also
good for the individual, they argued. In 1919, famous statistician Karl
Pearson— who considered himself a socialist as well as a eugenicist—
explained in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that “it is cruel to the indi-
vidual, it serves no social purpose, to drag a man of only moderate intel-
lectual power from the hand- working to the brain- working group.”^7
Under the persuasive touch of Cyril Burt, the logic eventually pen-
etrated educational policy as I described earlier. Abroad, of course—
especially in Nazi Germany— essentially the same assumptions were
aff ecting lives in more tragic ways.

CONSTRUCTING THE TESTS TO REVEAL

DIFFERENCES PRESUMED

Terman’s test (the Stanford- Binet, as he called it in 1916) subsequently be-

came the model for other tests, and is still, aft er many revisions, one of the

most- used individual tests on both sides of the Atlantic. But it was (and

is) constructed using basically the same method that Binet had devised.

Terman introduced many more items (ninety in all). And a greater variety

of items was used. Some are school- type general knowledge tests (“Can

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