Why IQ Tests Have Proven Dangerous In The Wrong Hands

Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are a popular means of assessing the intellectual capabilities of students, job candidates, and military recruits, but there's a strong argument to be made against this practice. IQ tests are not an accurate measure of intelligence, as they only test for a limited range of skills. There are few standards, with over 200 different kinds of IQ tests in existence, and many of these versions are severely flawed by the biases of their creators. In the worst cases, IQ tests have been designed to target specific groups, advancing the causes of racism, xenophobia, and even genocide.

The trouble with IQ tests goes back to their very origins. In the late 1800s, Sir Francis Galton of England became one of the first researchers to attempt to quantify intelligence, but he did so in questionable fashion. Galton based his standard for intelligence on the traits of English noblemen, creating the hypothesis that intelligence, like a noble title, is hereditary. This played into another theory of his, one with a dangerous legacy, for Galton was also the man that coined the term "eugenics," the pseudoscience that intelligence was a product of race.

In 1904, a French psychologist named Alfred Binet created the first modern IQ test after the French government requested his help in assessing which children needed extra assistance in school. Binet was heavily influenced by Galton, and although he only intended for his test to be used for addressing children's' needs in the classroom, he inadvertently created a framework ripe for exploitation.

The arrival of IQ tests in the United States came in blatantly xenophobic fashion. The first person to translate Alfred Binet's test for an American audience was Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist and one of the nation's foremost proponents of eugenics. In 1912, Goddard deployed his test at the Ellis Island immigration center to identify so-called "feeble-minded" immigrants whose entry to the U.S. he saw as a threat to the nation's breeding stock. Goddard warned that the offspring of these people were more likely to become criminals, and urged that confining those deemed feeble-minded into institutions to prevent them from reproducing was essential for the good of society.

Goddard's version of the IQ test bore a cultural bias. He had initially written it for American school children, using a framework designed by a Frenchman, and the resulting test based its concept of intelligence on the educational systems of those two countries. Unsurprisingly, immigrants from other countries did worse on the tests, leading Goddard to conclude that around 80% of Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and Jewish immigrants were feeble-minded. Goddard himself acknowledged that these results more likely reflected the underserved backgrounds of these immigrant groups rather than their genetics, but the tests were still used to restrict many races from entering the country. Deportations on the basis of feeble-mindedness doubled after the introduction of Goddard's IQ test.

Henry Goddard's work attracted the attention of American Psychological Association President, Robert Mearns Yerkes, who was also a member of the American Eugenics Society (notice a theme here?). When the United States entered WWI in 1917, Yerkes partnered with the Army Medical Corps on a program called the "Plan for the Psychological Examining of Recruits to Eliminate the Mentally Unfit," which intended to sort out Army applicants who were mentally unfit for the job. Two versions of the test were created: an alpha test, composed of written questions, and a beta test, which used pictorial challenges like mazes to test applicants who lacked English literacy.

The Army alpha and beta tests were used on hundreds of thousands of recruits throughout the duration of the war, and the results weighed into the career trajectory of every applicant who was accepted. High-ranking officer positions were reserved for high scorers. These tests, like the one Goddard used to evaluate immigrants at Ellis Island, had a significant American Anglo-Saxon bias. Recruits of northern European heritage excelled while black recruits and recruits of southern and eastern German ancestry typically scored poorly. This only served to reinforce the already-ingrained hierarchy of both the military and the nation as a whole, and the country's leaders deemed the Army tests to be a huge success. They made intelligence testing even more popular, and by the middle of the 20th century, IQ tests were a staple of American schools and workplaces.

In 1924, the Virginia state legislature authorized the forced sterilization of hospital patients who were considered unfit to reproduce, kicking off the most egregious manipulation of IQ testing in American history. As written in the Code of Virginia, the law singled out those deemed to have "idiocy, imbecility, [and] feeblemindedness". IQ tests were frequently used to place patients in these categories. A low score could cut a familial line short.

Virginia's forced sterilizations led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Case, Buck v. Bell, in 1927. It concerned Carrie Buck, a 17-year-old who became pregnant by sexual assault and was subsequently sent to a colony for the feeble-minded by her foster parents in order to hide their embarrassment. The court ruled 8–1 in favor of the state's right to sterilize Buck, citing as evidence the fact that Buck's sole child had scored poorly on an IQ test, and thus it could be assumed that she could not bear mentally-adequate children.

Buck v. Bell cleared the way for between 60,000 and 70,000 Americans to be sterilized against their will between the 1920s and 1970s. It also inspired Nazi Germany to implement its own forced sterilization program. No matter how it is expressed, eugenics, like craniology and phrenology, belongs buried in the past. That it has persisted so long is thanks in no small part to IQ testing, and when a format is so easily manipulated by bias, no scientific mind should take it seriously.