THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYand a few others, managed to convince the US military of the value of
their new-fangled intelligence tests. In the end, the psychologists tested
1.7 million men, ostensibly to help identify those too feeble-minded to
be of any use to the war effort. The war “put psychology on the map”
was how James Cattell, another pioneer in the field, put it. After the
war, Terman oversaw the rise of routine intelligence testing in schools.
By the mid-1920s, nearly four million American children took an intel-
ligence test every year.
In the UK, the educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt adapted
the Binet-Simon test and became a vocal proponent of the idea of
g and inherited intelligence. Burt believed that people often ended
up in jobs and social roles not befitting their intellectual capabili-
ties, including less intelligent people in senior positions and those
in lowly roles who weren’t fulfilling their potential. He saw intel-
ligence tests as a way of sorting people more effectively. The main
outcome of campaigning by Burt and other like-minded psycholo-
gists was the eleven-plus (11+) – an examination taken by every child
in England and Wales, the results of which determined whether they
were granted access to a superior grammar school or a less desirable
secondary modern school.
The Cyril Burt affair
Regarded as one of the world’s leading educational psychologists in
his lifetime, Cyril Burt (1883–1971) was accused of serious scientific
misconduct in the years that immediately followed his death. The
accusations concerned his research into the heritability of intelligence,
which had involved studies of identical twins reared apart. Doubts
were raised about the number of identical twins he claimed to have
studied, and detractors observed that his results were too uniform to be
true. Further suspicion was aroused by the elusiveness of two of Burt’s
research assistants. Many psychologists leapt to Burt’s defence. It was
pointed out that his assistants may have worked under pseudonyms,
and that much of Burt’s identical-twin data cited in the 1950s and 60s
actually originated from research conducted before the war, having
been lost for many years. Despite these explanations, in 1980 the British
Psychological Society formally condemned Burt’s work on the genetic
inheritance of intelligence. However, the controversy rumbled on, and
in 1992 the BPS declared that it no longer had a “corporate view” on the
truth of the allegations. Subsequent research has confirmed that a large
amount of variation in intelligence is accounted for by genetic factors,
with the upper estimate being about 85 percent.