Chapter 12 Chapter 8 Measurer-2

Nowhere are intelligence tests adopted more quickly and with more enthusiasm than in the United States.And for good reason.The United States is a fluid social structure, with a rapidly growing demand for workers capable of complex skilled work, a large underclass of bad actors, the poor, and criminals, and millions of undereducated and seemingly Semi-primitive immigrants flocked in, and a scientific method for assessing people's mental abilities could offer social leaders a way to bring order out of chaos. However, while Binet believed that the intelligence of mentally handicapped people, especially those close to normal mental age, could be enhanced through special training, most advocates of psychological testing in the United States accepted Galton's The position that heredity is the greatest determinant of mental development and that human intelligence is therefore immutable.They use psychometrics as a means by which society assigns its members to schools and occupations suited to their natural abilities, and as a diagnostic means of distinguishing those whose reproduction should be restricted so as not to pass on their defects. people.

Henry Goddard was one of the leaders who held this view.Goddard (1865-1957), a forceful and lively man, was trained at Clark University, when G. Stanley Hale (one of Wundt's early disciples) was a professor in the Department of Psychology. Director, he is a staunch geneticist.Goddard absorbed the idea of ​​genetics, and when he became director of the "Training School for the Mentally Retarded" in 1906, a New Jersey research base in vineyards, it seemed to him that everything was right around him.Many mentally retarded people not only have problems with movement, they also seem to be born with problems.Goddard even hypothesized that the psychological defect was caused by a degenerative gene.

He did see, however, that the children in the vineyard were not all handicapped to the same degree, so in order to determine what kind of training was particularly suitable for a particular child, he needed a way to measure each individual's level of mental ability .For a while, he tried unsuccessfully to use Cartel's human trials.Then, on a trip to France, he learned that there was a 1908 edition of the Binet-Simon standard, and recognizing its strengths, he immediately translated it into English, except for substituting American examples for some French cultural examples , he did not make any modifications.

Goddard was the first to use the Binet-Simon scale to conduct a large-scale test. He managed to test 400 children in training schools and 2,000 children in New Jersey public schools.His results showed that there were some large disparities in intelligence scores among mentally retarded children and, surprisingly, that the situation was similar among public school pupils, many of whom were below their Mental age is normal. This led him to start a campaign to test intelligence in public schools to identify below-normal pupils and divert them into special classes; he also began giving lectures to teachers promoting the Binet-Simon standard usage and distributed thousands of promotional materials to colleagues across the United States.Within 6 years, the Binet-Simon standard had been used in many public schools, and it played a big role, and teachers used this standard to determine the education method of students.It is also used in many institutions to test for "mental deficits", in correctional and juvenile institutions, and in magistrates' courts to improve the treatment of wards and prisoners.

Goddard believes that low IQ is a serious social problem that must be solved vigorously.Idiots and weaklings are not a threat to society, he said, because they usually don't reproduce themselves, but "highly deficient" or ignorant (the term was invented by Goddard) are quite possible, and they may become incapable of reproduction. A social fit or a criminal, and just as likely to be a sociopath.He also looked at the problem from another angle, saying that many criminals, mostly alcoholics and prostitutes, and "all those who cannot adapt themselves to their surroundings, abide by social traditions, or act according to the needs of their senses" , are second-class at the genetic level and mental ability.

These claims are drawn, on the one hand, from the Binet-Simon criterion, and from his own research on the descendants of a Civil War soldier.A man named Martin Karikak (pseudonym) had a son with a mentally handicapped bar girl, and later married a Quaker woman and had a child with her.Goddard traced hundreds of descendants of Karikac and the two women until the turn of the century.Goddard reported that most of the offspring of the bar women were mentally retarded, immoral, or criminal, while almost all offspring of the Quaker women were socially decent and honest. We now know that there was something very wrong with this study.Among other things, very few families have been, or may have been, tested, and most of the cases that have been mentioned have intellectual problems based on looks alone or second-hand reports and rumours.Also, Goddard said, the children on both sides grew up in roughly the same environment, yet the available information (such as the survival rate of the children on both sides) clearly shows the opposite.However, at the time (1912) and for many years, "The Carricks" was seen by many psychologists and general readers as strong evidence for the genetic transmission of intellectual abilities—Goddard actually used the " Good blood" and "bad blood"—and their social consequences.

Goddard's Busi data and his findings about the Carrickacs led him to take a much more serious position than Galton's: "It is very clear that the mentally retarded should not be allowed to marry, or become Parents. For this provision to be enforced, it is clear that the intellectual part of society should reinforce it.” To achieve this goal, Goddard appeared twice as an expert witness before the National Commission, advocating the sterilization of the “mentally retarded” measures, one of which was soon extended to the poor, criminals, epileptics, the mentally ill, and the congenitally handicapped.

Legislators were so impressed by the representations of Goddard and other psychologists that, by 1931, 27 states had enacted laws enforcing eugenic sterilization laws, and thousands of psychologically and socially "wrong" people were receiving them. Sterilizations were performed over the next 30 years—nearly 10,000 in California alone.However, by the 1960s, when forcible sterilization of unfit survivors on the one hand appeared to be indistinguishable from Nazi atrocities, and on the other hand, environmental explanations of mental and social incapacity dominated, some state legislatures began to call Legislature approves new regulations to implement voluntary sterilization of mentally retarded persons.

Goddard also actively called for the adoption of Busi's standard on immigration issues, and brought the results of its implementation.Immigrants have been pouring into the United States since the turn of the century.Many are illiterate and socially backward, which has raised fears in the United States that the country will be troubled by "impaired people" in mental and social abilities.Earlier, Congress had already passed a decree prohibiting the mentally ill and idiots from entering the United States. Among the thousands of applicants who arrive every day, immigration officials refused to sign one-tenth. However, they still thought it was possible to sneak in through other channels. . In 1913, the head of the US Immigration Service asked Goddard to study the screening procedures on Airy Island and come up with a plan.Goddard and several other assistants picked out some immigrants who looked a little like psychological defects, and then asked them to take the Busi standard test through a translator.Most scored in the deficit range—no surprise, given their fatigue, fear, lack of education, and difficulty translating—and so, after a week at work, Goddard suggested, immigration officials at This uses a concise "psychological method", based on the Busi's test. In 1913, the proportion of immigrants with obvious low abilities who refused visas rose to 350%, and by 1914, it had risen by half on this basis.

Goddard continued to work on Airy Island for several months in 1914; samples taken from the arriving immigrants showed that Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians made up four-fifths of low energy.Goddard himself was a little skeptical.He checked the data again, thought about the answer, and then lowered the number, but it was only in the range of forty to fifty percent.These findings, combined with evidence from like-minded psychologists, led Congress to draft a tough immigration control law in 1924, reducing the quotas for Eastern and Southern Europe to one-fifth of those for Northern and Western Europe.

Lewis M. Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, although he accepted Goddard's translation of Busi's standard, but found some errors in it, and felt that he could correct this standard and make it more accurate .Terman, like Goddard and many others who agree with intellectual heritability, believes that there is a social need for such an approach.He also saw the need for science: although he was a geneticist, he said that the relative influence of heredity and environment would not be known until well-established tests of intelligence came into widespread use, so he compared The West standard has been significantly modified, also known as the Stanford-Binet standard. Terman himself had no reason to believe in genetic inheritance of intelligence; he was the 12th of 14 children from an Indiana farm family whose members, or grandparents on either side, held high positions or attended college people.However, when he was 10 years old, an itinerant bookseller sold the Termans a book on phrenology while stroking the boy's head and declaring him a genius.This event may have contributed to Terman's obsessive belief in nativism, as his later history also bears out.Despite great financial difficulties, he managed to go from a country school to a regular school, to college, and finally on a scholarship to Clark University, where he received a doctorate in psychology in 1905.At this time, he was a committed geneticist and an admirer of Galton's method. At Stanford, he spent several years in the Department of Education, then became the chair of the department.In a long and eventful career, Terman turned the department into a leading graduate school and research center, conducting a respected long-term study of gifted children and studying the psychology of married happiness. The scientific factors have been studied in a classical style.Yet his main reason for being famous in psychology, his main contribution to psychology and his greatest impact on American life, was the Stanford-Binet standard. Terman's experience with Busi's scale, even in its 1911 edition, convinced him that there were too few test items at the upper mental levels, that many of the test sequences at the upper and lower levels were misplaced, and that Nor are the correct steps for giving and interpreting test questions strictly defined.With the help of eight colleagues and many public school teachers, he experimented with the old method and then devised 40 new items (27 items were selected from this set and 9 items were selected from other sources, jointly form the final series), 1,700 normal children, 200 mentally retarded and bright children, and 400 adults participated in the test.The final standard, the Stanford-Binet standard, consists of 90 questions; those appropriate for children aged 3-5 take about half an hour to complete, and questions designed for older test groups take increasingly longer.Adult levels take an hour to an hour and a half. The results of each set of questions for children of any age group are divided into good and bad by comparing the results of the other group; questions that are too easy for children of one age group will be moved to a younger age group, and those that are too difficult will be moved to the back .In order to bring the whole standard into balance, the questions in the upper and lower sections are added.The test results were compared with the teacher's and the same children's assessments of intelligence using the Pearson correlation method; the overall correlation coefficient was 0.48, or slightly higher, thus making the criterion valid.The correlation could have been higher if teachers had not taken into account that some children were younger or older than their peers when assessing the intelligence of these children. The most valuable thing about this modification is that the whole standard is more "standard" than the Bixie or Goddard-Binet-Simon method.That is, the scores are based on outcomes obtained from a larger standardized sample of normal, mentally retarded, and superior children, as well as adults.On this basis, if a child or adult gets a score of 100, he is an average test-taker; a child who gets a score of 130 or higher is smarter than 99 percent of the general population and gets a test taker. People with a score of 70 or lower are slightly stupid than 99 percent of the population.Terman divides intelligence scores into the following levels: 140 and above: "nearly" genius or genius; 120-140: very high level of intelligence 110-120: higher intelligence level 90-110: normal or average intelligence 80-90: relatively dull, rarely can be judged as low energy 70-80: Nearly flawed, sometimes classified as dull, often treated as imbecile Below 70: Definitely imbecile Terman, a well-mannered and soft-hearted gentleman, expressed his good wishes for the use of this new standard: After we have accepted the lessons of intelligence tests, we should no longer blame mentally handicapped workers for not being able to work effectively, nor should we punish mentally handicapped children for not paying attention, let alone imprisoning them. Or hang mentally defective criminals because they lack the intelligence to grasp the general laws of social behaviour. If the Stanford-Binet criterion failed to make these pleas a reality, luckily it also failed to make Terman's idea of ​​using it as a method of eugenics: It can be safely predicted that, in the near future, intelligence tests will place tens of thousands of . . . advanced morons under the care and protection of society.In the end, it will have a wonderful result, so that the imbecile will not continue to reproduce, and it will stop the huge amount of crime, poverty and industrial inefficiency. Published in 1916, the Stanford-Binet scale immediately became, and remained for over two decades, the standard test for measuring intelligence.Later, it also became a test method for the imbecile in a series of schools, preparatory schools, universities and various institutions.However, its influence is far more than that, and it will have a wider range and deeper meaning; the Stanford-Binet standardized test method (and its later 1937 version) became the basis of almost all IQ measures that have since emerged. standard of law.Some of the characteristics that Binet, Simon, and Terman considered to be the main elements of intelligence became the model for almost all subsequent intelligence tests; these elements include memory, language comprehension, vocabulary size, eye-hand coordination, and familiarity. Knowledge, the ability to judge unreasonable things, the speed and richness of thought associations, and some other ability characteristics. A later test based on elements of the Stanford-Binet standard revolutionized the field of intelligence testing. Almost all of the Binet Standards—and later a dozen or so—have to be tested one person at a time by a psychologist or trained professional.However, group testing, in which subjects read the papers themselves and then choose answers on multiple-choice questions, or make appropriate marks on forms, would be faster, easier, and much cheaper to do. This breakthrough in psychometrics was caused by the involvement of the United States in World War I.Two weeks after President Woodrow Wilson signed the War Declaration on April 6, 1917, the American Psychological Association appointed a committee to study what psychology could do for the war effort.The commission reported that the most useful contribution the profession could make to war was the devising of a system of psychological tests to rapidly examine large numbers of military personnel and weed out the mentally unsound and incompetent, according to the military The ability of personnel is divided into categories, and the most suitable personnel for special training and work with heavy responsibilities are selected. A team of psychologists—among them Terman, Goddard, and Harvard professor Robert Yerkes—gathered at the Vineyard to begin designing the test. Yerkes was named a major in the Army in August and charged with running the program.He brought together about 40 psychologists, and within two months came up with the "Army Alpha Plan", that is, written intelligence test questions and the "Army Beta Plan", which proved that 40% of the conscripts were illiterate. The picture test questions designed by the soldiers (the test questions for the Beta questions are required to be read out loud by the assistant).From today's point of view, the widely used alpha scheme looks like a strange amalgam of scientific common sense, folk wisdom, and moral values, as the following example shows: 1.If the plants are dying from lack of rain, you should — water them, - seek advice from the gardener, — Fertilizer next to it. 8.Better to fight than to flee, for —Cowards are often killed, —It is more honorable to die in battle, ——If you run away, you may be shot in the back. 11.The cause of the echo is - the reflection of sound waves, - There are electrons in the air, - There is humidity in the air. Yerkes' group began testing in four barracks, however, within a few weeks the chief medic decided to implement the program throughout the army; by the end of the war, in November 1918, 1.7 million men had received these On the test, about 300 psychologists under Yerkes scored each man and recommended him for a suitable military assignment.Although Yerkes' contingent of psychologists encountered resistance and non-cooperation from career officers, these test results resulted in the removal of some 8,000 men as unfit for duty and the assignment of some 10,000 men of low intelligence to labor camp or perform similar service work.What's more, the Alpha program was an important selection criterion, affecting two-thirds of the 200,000 men who became officers throughout the war. However, the Army Test Program had far less impact inside the Army than outside it.It made America more aware of the practical uses of psychology, especially those derived from psychometrics. (James McKeeth Cattell says that war puts psychology on the "operational picture"; Stanley Hale says that war gives psychology an incalculable direction toward practical rather than " pure science" direction.) Project Alpha, in particular, led to the explosive expansion of intelligence testing, which quickly became a multimillion-dollar industry.Years after the war, a series of Alpha-type intelligence tests that could be done with nothing more than pencil and paper were rolled out to school administrators across the country.The most successful one appeared in 1923 by Terman, Yerkes and three collaborators under the auspices of the National Research Council.They touted the program as "a direct result of the application of military testing methods to the needs of schools."By the end of the 2020s, some 7 million American students had taken these tests.Another great success was the "academic aptitude test" developed by Yerkes' colleague Carl C. Brigham on the military model.Universities and schools, military institutions, various agency associations and different industrial fields are very popular in adopting tests. The widespread use of intelligence tests has gained even stronger momentum from the statistical evidence that these tests not only measure a range of individual mental aptitudes, but are tests of an aggregate core of innate mental abilities, or "total intelligence."Charles Spielman, a British psychologist and statistician, showed that many mental abilities are related. (A person with a wide vocabulary, for example, might also typically score well on arithmetic and other subtests.) He used this to indicate that an innate general intelligence, which he called g, underlies all specific abilities.Even if knowledge tests are available and partly rely on learning, the correlation implies the existence of an innate learning ability. This provides additional evidence for intelligence testing in schools, because in the 1930s both the United States and Great Britain worked to classify students early in the schooling process, with some students taking many broad courses in preparation for higher education. Education, or the narrower "vocational" or "technical" courses that prepare some students for blue-collar jobs.In the US this is called "tracking" and in the UK it is called "scoring". The development of tests is not limited to tests of intelligence.During the 1920s and 1930s, many other criteria were developed to measure musical, mechanical, graphic, verbal, and other abilities, as well as a range of occupational aptitudes.Although intelligence testing itself was under attack in the 1920s, Binet's method of testing mental abilities opened up a vast new field of psychological research, and the U.S. Army's Alpha program turned Binet's onerous and expensive tests into so easy and so cheap that it has become an assembly line in psychology. Intelligence tests did not maintain their unquestioned status for long.Beginning in 1921, when Yerkes compiled a sprawling report based on the results of the Army Testing Program, intelligence testing has been attacked by some because, they say, it does not measure innate intelligence but Acquired intellectual and cultural values ​​thus favor the dominant white middle class and prejudice the lower classes and immigrants. There is some truth to this criticism, at least on the Stanford-Binet scale.Many or most of the items on this standard test measure a combination of hereditary ability and acquired knowledge or skill, yet a person who has had little opportunity to acquire knowledge or skill will give unsatisfactory answers, while Regardless of whether his or her natural psychic abilities are strong or weak. For example, at the 12-year-old level, Stanford-Binaifer asked questions about the definitions of the words "charity" and "justice."If a Mexican-American kid from a shack in the rural Southwest under-responses, does that indicate a natural intellectual disability, or does the child fail to learn the meaning of these concepts in white, middle-class America?Furthermore, in the Stanford-Binet standard test at the 8-year-old level, there is such a question: "If you broke something that belongs to someone else, what should you do?" Does a child in an urban slum struggle to survive, so does his or her answer measure his or her innate intelligence, or the tradition of the ghetto or the conventions of that subculture? Binet left the question unanswered, namely, to what extent is mental development, measured by his criteria, due to heredity or experience?However, the gist of Terman's "Measurements of Intelligence" (the instruction manual for the Stanford-Binet standardized test) is that, despite the evidence to the contrary cited above, intelligence is largely genetic, and poor scores indicate a psychological defect which, he says, is a genetic and racial trait: (Low intelligence) Quite common among Hispanic-Indian and Mexican families and blacks in the Southwest.Their dullness looks as if it is race related, or at least inherited from the family they come from... I predict... will find that there are huge differences in intelligence between races that are by no means in any way Psychological training can eliminate it. Walter Lippmann, a respected columnist and highly erudite pundit, launched a critical campaign in The New Republican magazine in 1922 against Terman, Yerkes, and others who claimed that intelligence tests could A person who measures innate mental ability.Lippmann critiqued the subject, past and present, saying that such tests perpetuate some children, especially those from poor backgrounds, as subhuman, and thus serve the interests of prejudiced and empowered individuals. Powerful people. He and others who share his views have very good reasons to oppose the Army's alpha testing law, even more than against the Stanford-Binet law.They also criticized Yerkes' view that these tests, modeled on the alpha scheme, "measure innate intelligence."Many of the answers to the alpha questions clearly require acquired knowledge rather than intelligence.Stephen Jay Gould makes this point very clearly in his dialectical study, Human Mistesting.He cites the following examples in his book: Washington's relationship to Adam as the first man is like his relationship to... Crisco is: a patented drug, anti-infective drug, toothpaste, food. The number of African black legs is: 2, 4, 6, 8. Christy Matthewson is famous for what he is: a writer, an artist, a softball player, a comedian. According to Professor Gould, some of the questions in the Beta program can indeed reasonably measure general mental ability, because the subjects with limited literacy can complete some unfinished figures (for example, filling in a face with a mouth, Or add ears to a rabbit), but many other questions only if the subject has specialized information (add filament to a light bulb, add nets to a tennis court, put a ball in a pitcher's hand) to complete correctly.When some immigrants from cultures different from ours answer these questions, their answers must look foolish. And, indeed, the results of the Army's testing program, as expressed by Yerkes in his own report in 1921, described a society whose population was being degraded by an increase in inferior genetic ancestry.Under the alpha and beta scheme, the average mental age of white American men is only thirteen, just above the imbecile level, although Terman has previously raised that to sixteen.Gould said these startling statistics reinforce xenophobia, racial hatred and meritocracy in America: The new figures reach the point of ridicule by eugenicists who have long since predicted the outcome and bemoaned our declining intelligence.Mental decline is the result of the uncontrolled birth of the imbecile and the poor, of the widespread dissemination of Negro blood through intermarriage, and of the mass influx of southern and eastern European immigrant scum into the country. Yerkes also supported Goddard's data on Airy, reporting that the alpha and beta schemes showed that the Slavic races of southern and eastern Europe were less intelligent than the northern and western European races, and that these "discoveries" contributed to the 1924 years of immigration law. However, as the IQ controversy heated up, intelligence tests also began to cool down among psychologists in the 1930s, and the rate of cooling accelerated even more in the 1940s.At the same time, the view of general intelligence has also retreated, and new research methods formed by using advanced statistical methods have found special correlations in all "factors" or feature clusters of psychological characteristics, thus making the meaning or usefulness of g overshadowed. Still, tests that measure a range of mental abilities and lead to a composite score called intelligence continue to be used by educators, business executives and others.By the 1960s, such tests were again under attack, this time by human rights activists.Some psychologists have even gone so far as to deny the existence of any intelligence.For example, Professor Martin Deutsch of New York University emphasized in 1971: "Intelligence is a very convenient word that can explain certain behaviors, but I doubt, in fact, whether this thing itself really exists." Some psychologists and educators today are inclined to say, as Pauline did earlier, that people cannot tell what intelligence is, but that is what intelligence tests can measure. Despite longstanding objections to intelligence tests, intelligence tests are widely used, and for good reason. On the one hand, these tests do predict quite accurately how children will do in school, which children should be given special attention, or what kind of intensive education should be given. On the other hand, there have been some recent complex statistical studies of complete twins and fraternal twins, especially those twins who were separated and reared in different families shortly after birth, with far stronger evidence than Gould could establish, namely that mental ability It is largely heritable, so intelligence tests do measure innate abilities as well as learned ones. ("Heritability" refers to how much of the range of differences between people in a given trait is due to genes. If the heritability of intelligence is found to be zero, then any of the IQ measurement variability ranges from nearly zero to 200 or so variables are not caused by genes; if heritability is 100%, all variables are caused by genetic sources. Today, psychologists who hold "genetic beliefs" set the heritability of IQ at 100% 80 percent or so, and nurture psychologists say anywhere from 50 percent to zero. In a recent rather convincing study, psychologist David W. Full G., John C. De Fury, and Robert Plomin tested the cognitive abilities of 245 stepchildren of various ages, their biological parents, and their stepparents, and found a startling finding: the correlation with the absent biological parents varied increased over time, while the correlation with stepparents decreased over time. From this data, the researchers calculated that the heritability of mental ability was about 36 percent at age 7 and decreased later in childhood It will get higher in a few years.) The IQ controversy ebbs and flows, ups and downs; politics blinds science, and science is used by politics.The battle is still going on, with no end in sight yet.But the orthodox version, handed down directly from earlier intelligence tests, has now been greatly modified to be more "culturally fair" than it was earlier.They are also widely used in schools, institutions, military, industry and elsewhere. Regardless of what people call it or what people think about intelligence testing, the fact is that psychometrics are useful, beneficial to society (though not in the social sense that Goddard and Terman had in mind), and always have been. Psychology F is one of the major contributions to modern American life and to social life in most other developed countries.