gold 1982 a nation of moron's bias in iq testing background in the early 20th century two french psychologists named theodore simon and alfred bennett were commissioned by the french government to create a test of intelligence in order to identify children whom they assumed would not benefit from the traditional schooling due to low intelligence they devised a test called the bennett simon scale which is widely accepted as the first ever iq test published in 1905 the bennett simon test consisted of a variety of tasks that had different levels of difficulty which bennett and simon thought were representative of the typical child's abilities at various ages after the test the child's score would be compared with the scale and reveals the child's mental age during the same time that the skill was being developed authorities and public officials in the united states were also seeking a similar solution for quantifying intelligence however their aims were to utilize this measure of intelligence amongst all members of society not just for children's educational needs a psychologist at stanford university named louis turman adapted the original bennett simon test into a new version called the stanford bennett intelligence scale this new test not only helped identify people with learning difficulties but also helped find people who possessed above average levels of intelligence however both the original bennett simon scale and the newest stanford bennett scale were only suitable for assessing people's intelligence individually in 1917 the us entered the first world war and there became a need to assess intelligence on mars with group tests administered to several people at once so that over one million soldiers could be recruited quickly and easily in order to achieve this robert yerkes an american psychologist at harvard university who was also president of the american psychological association at the time developed the army's alpha and beta intelligence tests which were non-verbal group tests prior to this during the early 1900s psychology was largely viewed as a soft science by academia and yerkes wanted to improve this by demonstrating that it could be as objective and quantitative as other areas of scientific research he believed that intelligence was completely inherited not learned and that therefore if he could demonstrate that intelligence could be reliably measured then this could help demonstrate that psychology deserved to be regarded as a hard science however the alpha and beta test developed by jerks had a number of negative consequences since he argued that the results of the test shows that immigrants to the united states from southern europe had a lower level of intelligence than those from northern europe which provided a eugenics-based justification for racist restrictions on certain immigrants and racial minorities in the us yerkes's conclusions from the tests were later discredited as having only measured acculturation rather than intelligence since the test scores had a nearly exact positive correlation to the number of years the recruits had spent living in the u.s with such a controversial history intelligence testing has been the subject of much research and debate in the years since the alpha beta tests were used with many contemporary researchers critiquing the methodological ethical and theoretical assumptions that formed the basis of early research aim gould aimed to investigate the early history of intelligence testing developed by jerks and in particular examine the following problems bias in psychological theories on the inheritance of intelligence and the prejudice of a society which can remove the objectivity of intelligence testing problems with psychometric testing specifically iq tests political and ethical implications of research and using bias data to discriminate between people in suitability for occupation and even admission to a country sample gould studied the 1.75 million army recruits who were recruited via the alpha beta tests devised by yerkes in the world war one these included recruits of varying ages and ethnicities such as white americans african-americans and more recent immigrants from europe methodology gold's study is an extract from a book that he authored in 1981 called the mismeasure of man which discusses the history and development of measuring human intelligence and in particular the tests developed by yerkes the study is therefore a review article rather than a piece of empirical research conducted by gould procedure yaks developed three tests in total for the army each of which he believed for a measure of pure native intellectual ability and not influenced by education or cultural factors the first test the alpha test was designed to be given to literate recruits and included written questions about number sequences and analogies the tests required a good basic understanding of the english language and literacy skills however many questions required knowledge of cultural context in order to answer them some of these questions include washington is to adams as first is to insert name here crisco is a patient medicine disinfectant toothpaste or food product the number of kefir's legs is 2 4 6 or 8. christie matthewson is famous as a writer artist baseball player or comedian the test was subsequently criticized for having a large amount of cultural bias since anyone who was not familiar with american culture history and everyday life would perform poorly due to these factors rather than their level of native intelligence the second test devised by jerks was the beta test this was designed for recruits who were illiterate or had failed the alpha test and consisted of picture completion tasks such as finding the next in a series of symbols translating numerals into symbols using a code counting the number of cubes and so on however despite this the test had instructions that were written in english and three parts of the test required written answers which contradicted the aim of the test to cater to recruits that were not skilled in reading or writing english furthermore the pictures used in the tests were again culturally specific meaning that people who were not familiar with american culture would have struggled to provide answers if recruits failed on both the alpha and the beta tests it was intended that they would take part in a spoken exam however this rarely happened in practice the spoken exam assessed the recruits basic comprehension following which they would be graded on grades a to e with a indicating recruit was suitable for the army and e indicating they weren't overall there were many problems associated with the administration of the tests which meant that the standard process outlined by jerks was not followed in many cases for example the recruits who were deemed illiterate should have bypassed the alpha test and immediately been assigned to the beta test or if they had taken the alpha test they should have progress to the beta test however this only happened in a few camps which meant that many illiterate or immigrant recruits took part in the alpha test and scored nothing the level of literacy among the general population of recruits turned out to be a lot lower than yerkes had expected which caused further problems with administration the cue for taking the beta test began to build up and slow down the recruitment process which led to a decision to artificially lower the standards required to take the alpha test in order to process the recruits quicker this was also complicated by the fact that in some army camps the minimum level of schooling was sufficient to allow recruits to take the alpha test whereas in others they had to achieve a certain grade first out of all the recruits who took the beta test and failed only one-fifth were allowed to take the spoken exam results the findings from the three tests were analyzed by yerkes and were manipulated to identify averages based on the race of the recruits and the national average yikes presented the findings as fact but subsequent revelations have identified that cultural and social bias underpinned much of the testing procedures that were conducted on the recruits these findings included the average white american man had an average mental age of just 13 years old which is above that of the quote unquote historically a term that was associated with the eugenics movement to describe so-called feeble-minded individuals whose intelligence fell below the ideal level based on this he brazenly concluded that america was a nation of morons jerks further argued that the results provided evidence that people from northern europe were the most intelligent with others such as southern europeans slavs of eastern europe and those of african origin in descending order have inferior intellect to help provide validity of these claims jerks pointed out that two-thirds of men who had been promoted by the end of the war had achieved good test results during the original testing phase moreover he claimed that there was a steady stream of requests from organizations who wanted to use the alpha and beta tests as a part of their own recruitment processes overall yerkes concluded that the results showed that intelligence is inherited despite later admitting that the alpha invaded tests would have been difficult for people who weren't familiar with the english language the findings presented by yerkes had a profoundly influential impact on american society in the 1920s in 1924 the immigration restriction act was passed which meant that people from southern and eastern europe who had scored very poorly on the alpha beta tests were no longer welcome in the us it also capped further immigration to two percent of each nation that was recorded in the 1819 census meaning that immigrants from southern and eastern europe countries was limited this had devastating consequences in the 1930s when particularly jews were persecuted in germany and central europe which started well before the beginning of the second world war data suggests that up to 6 million people from southern central and eastern europe were denied entry to the united states between 1924 and 1939 due to immigration restrictions on countries within these areas the fate of many people who tried and failed to escape nazi germany is well known conclusions based on his investigation into the intelligence test devised by yerkes gould made a number of key conclusions the iq tests devised by jerks were culturally and historically biased and not purely a measure of native intellectual ability as he claimed iq tests in general are often are reliable since there are several extraneous factors that can influence performance aside from innate intelligence this means that iq tests may not always produce valid results especially if cultural factors are not considered evaluations perhaps the key evaluation of yex's tests was that they are not a valid measure of intelligence since there were other extraneous variables such as the recruits level of education how familiar they were with american culture and their understanding of english which greatly affected their scores there were further issues with reliability in the way that the tests were administered with many illiterate recruits wrongly taking the alpha test contrary to what yorks had intended which led to low scores this was also partly due to most recruits having lower than expected levels of literacy which resulted in the threshold for recruits taking the alpha test to be lowered in order to prevent a large buildup of cues for the beta test only one-fifth of those who failed the beta tests were progressed to the individual spoken examinations as had been intended by yerks which further compounded the issues with the reliability and validity of the results furthermore many of the findings from the tests were extrapolated to the general population including women and older people despite the recruits only consisting of young men the study therefore also suffered from sampling bias the tests were also carried out on individuals once during a short period of time and can be considered a snapshot of their performance and cannot tell us anything about how their intelligence may have changed over time with improved education and levels of literacy a longitude study in combination with a program of education to teach those with low literacy levels may have proven that the tests were greatly affected by illiteracy and were not a test of pure native intelligence as yerkes had claimed the recruits consisted of individuals from many backgrounds and ethnicities so the sample was not ethnocentric however the tests themselves were highly biased and the procedure was inconsistent many ethical issues arose from the findings published by yerkes as a direct result of flawed conclusions that various ethnic groups had a lower general level of intelligence the introduction of the immigration restrictions act in 1924 meant that up to six million people were denied entry to the us from southern and eastern europe as a direct consequence of ux's findings and prevented many jews from fleeing persecution in the 1930s you