In this video I consider group differences in IQ scores and the history of how group differences by race and nationality have been interpreted. This includes discussion of the eugenics movement, social Darwinism, the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests created by Robert M. Yerkes, Henry Goddard, and Lewis Terman, and problems of bias and standardization in early tests. Finally I consider the implications of these results for social policies including immigration laws and “artificial selection” via forced sterilization.
Gould (1982) “A Nation of Morons”: http://systematicbiology.co.nf/Gould(…
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Video Transcript
Hi ,I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to consider group differences in IQ. Now we’ve already seen that individuals vary in their IQ scores and this is part of what makes IQ worth investigating. People get different scores and this means that scores can tell us about the ways in which people differ.
But we can also consider groups of people and how they might differ in their average IQ. So for instance I might tell you that there’s two people; one who’s a surgeon and one who’s a janitor, and I might ask you to guess which person has the higher IQ and you’d probably guess that the surgeon has the higher IQ and you’d probably be correct. Now the reason you make this guess is that you know that performing surgery is a very complex job and you also know that becoming a surgeon is very difficult, it requires years and years of rigorous intellectual training, whereas becoming a janitor doesn’t have those same requirements. And so you can make the assumption that a person who has successfully become a surgeon is probably fairly highly intelligent and a person who’s become a janitor you don’t really know for sure. So you might assume that their IQ is not necessarily as high and as I said you’d probably be correct.
Now, you wouldn’t be guaranteed to be correct and there could be exceptions but generally you’re able to make a reasonable assumption about the person’s IQ based on something like their job status. But what if we start making assumptions about people and their IQs based on other group differences? What if we start thinking about things like gender or nationality or race?
Now we have to be careful here because it might seem like our societal ideals are in conflict with our desire for scientific objectivity because we might say that we want to uphold a societal ideal that all groups are equal. We have an ideal of total equality and yet our desire for scientific objectivity suggests that we need to collect the data in order to find out. And this means that we might find things that we don’t want to find. We might find group differences that suggest that all groups aren’t necessarily equal. At the same time, we might argue that we need to find these differences if they exist in order to properly address them. In other words, if we find certain groups that are underperforming, well, then we’re aware of this and we might be able to have interventions that could help to remedy this. Maybe they’re underperforming for some reasons that we can change, we can effectively address. And so the only way to do that is to know about the differences.
Now this gets even more difficult because there’s a controversial history. It’s not a very pleasant one when it comes to group differences in IQ. So this brings us to thinking about eugenics. So eugenics is a term that was coined by Sir Francis Galton and it just refers to “good genes”. So it’s the Greek prefix “eu” for “good” and “genic” for genes. And it’s just the idea that there are good genes but eugenicists took this idea to mean that some people who have these good genes are inherently superior to other people who don’t have these good genes and that we should think about enhancing the reproduction of people with good genes and limiting the reproduction of people with inferior genes.
Now this was often done under the guise of “survival of the fittest” this idea that, well, some people are more fit than others and therefore they should survive and the others shouldn’t and that’s just the way of the world. That’s natural selection. And this view was referred to as “Social Darwinism” and I want to point out two important things here. The first is that the phrase “survival of the fittest” which was not coined by Darwin, is meant to suggest that the organisms which survive are those which have the best fit with the environment, not that they’re the most “fit”, not that they’re superior in some way. But that they fit with the environment best and that allows them to survive and the other organisms don’t have as good of a fit with the environment and they don’t survive, right? So it’s not suggesting that some version of a trait is inherently superior rather than it fits with the environment best at that time. Now should the environment change then that trait is no longer going to be the best fit and some other version of the trait is going to be superior at that time.
Now this relates the idea that variation in traits is important for a species. We want to have variation in traits because that means that if the environment changes that you don’t wipe everyone out. If everybody has the same exact variation of the trait and the environment changes and makes that trait disadvantageous then suddenly you wipe out the entire species. Whereas if you have variation in traits then a change in the environment might wipe out some members of the species but it probably won’t take out all of it and that means that the species can continue to survive. So those are some misapplications of ideas of natural selection and this idea of social Darwinism is really a disgrace to Darwin’s name. He would not have supported this type of view, it really doesn’t match with the ideas of natural selection.
Ok, so let’s look at some specific intelligence tests. So a man named Robert Yerkes formed a committee and here’s a picture of Yerkes here, and he formed a committee, including Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman, to create intelligence tests for the military. And they created two different tests the army alpha test, which was for literate soldiers, and the army beta test, which was for illiterate soldiers. And during World War I they administered these tests to 1.75 million U.S. army recruits. And the purpose of the tests was to place soldiers in ranks and to determine which soldiers were suitable for officer training. Now in addition to testing these soldiers, they were analyzed based on groups. So they looked at groups like nationality or race to find if there were differences in intelligence between these groups.
Now there were a number of problems with these tests and these were described in an essay called “A Nation of Morons” by Stephen Jay Gould which was a chapter of his book “The Mismeasure of Man” and Gould points out a number of problems with these army tests. The first problem was that these tests weren’t very well standardized. So they didn’t have clear standardized instructions, they didn’t have standardization for timing of different sections of the test, and they didn’t even necessarily have clear rules for how the tests should be scored. So this is a big problem for assessing the results of these tests and it also allows the possibility of bias in the administration of the test. So given that this test was given to 1.75 million people, we can pretty well presume that most of the people administering this test were not trained psychometricians. And this means that they may have allowed some personal bias into either the giving of instructions or the timing of sections or the scoring itself of the test, and that they may have had bias against certain groups and this may have influenced how they administered the test. And that would then influence the scores of people from those groups. So that’s one area for bias.
We also see bias in terms of the questions themselves and this is cultural bias. This cultural bias showed itself in questions like “Cornell University is at: Ithaca Annapolis Cambridge or New Haven”. Now a question like this really depends on your knowledge of the United States. If you’ve never heard of Cornell University and you’ve never heard of those cities then you’re going to have a really hard time answering that question. And it’s really not assessing anything about your innate intelligence. It’s really about your experience. Similarly there are questions like “There’s a reason is an ad for: a drink a revolver a flower or a cleanser”. And again if you’re not familiar with US culture at that time, you haven’t seen that advertisement, then you really don’t have a way of answering this question regardless of how intelligent you are. You just have to guess.
So this leads us to one of the group differences that was found and this was that people from southern European countries tended to do worse on the test than people from northern European countries. Now this was claimed to be because of their intellectual inferiority, they were just genetically inferior to their northern northern European counterparts, but what’s more likely is that the Northern Europeans had emigrated to the U.S. several decades earlier and the southern European immigrants were mostly newer immigrants to the US. So they have spent less time in the US. It turns out if you look at how long somebody had spent in the US you can make some predictions about their score. The longer they have lived in the US, the higher they tended to score on the test. That’s because they’re more familiar with the US culture and they’re more able to answer these types of questions.
Now when we look at these questions the cultural bias seems obvious. I mean here it is a hundred years after the test and so now none of us are familiar with this “there’s a reason” ad and so we can’t answer the question and we recognize that it’s probably inappropriate for an intelligence test. But the implications aren’t so funny because we look at how the results of this test were used. They were often used to legitimize discriminatory practices. So the average mental age of an army recruit based on these tests was 13, which is why Gould titled his essay “A Nation of Morons”. Now one of the things that Gould suggests was related to these group differences is that eugenicists often referred to these results to justify discriminatory practices such as the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted the immigration of people from southern European countries on the basis that they were intellectually inferior and therefore they needed to be kept out of the country because they were dumbing it down. That they were going to come here and reduce the average mental age of the United States.
Now it also led to even worse practices like “artificial selection“. So, artificial selection, in contrast to natural selection, was the idea rather than sort of letting nature sort things out that people should intervene and attempt to refine the human gene pool by only allowing those who are believed to be superior to reproduce and to prevent people who are inferior from reproducing. This meant that tens of thousands of people in the United States underwent forced sterilization. They had their reproductive rights taken from them. So people like criminals and prostitutes, people who were mentally ill, people who were disabled, and members of some ethnic minority groups were sterilized, often by force and against their will, and occasionally without their knowledge. So they went in for medical procedures and the doctors would have also sterilized them without telling them. And most people are familiar with the horrible eugenic policies of the Nazis in the 1930s but they’re less familiar that these things were happening in the United States as well. And some of sterilizations continued in some states until the 1970s.
So it’s really horrible part of our past and it brings up the important point that we need to think very, very carefully about how psychometric tests are used and how we draw conclusions and the implications of that on certain social policies. So this brings us to modern testing. Now we can say that modern IQ tests are far more standardized and far less biased than these army tests that were in place 100 years ago. Some researchers would even say that modern IQ tests don’t have any cultural bias at all.
And yet we still find group differences. We still find group differences by gender and by race. So what should we make of these differences? What might be causing them? Well that’s what we’re going to look at in the next two videos; one video on gender and IQ, and the next video on race and IQ. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
