About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about bias in IQ testing, focusing in particular on: (i) Gould’s 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, which contained ‘A Nation of Morons’, a critique of Yerkes’ intelligence testing during the first world war; (ii) Yerkes’ belief that intelligence was both hereditary and quantifiable; (iii) Yerkes’ Alpha Test for literate recruits, which contained tasks like completing number sequences and unscrambling sentences; (iv) Yerkes’ Beta Test, which was pictorial in nature, so as to be appropriate for illiterate recruits; (v) Yerkes’ Individual Test, which was an oral-based test for those who failed the Beta Test; (vi) Yerkes’ 1917 study results, which found that White American adults had an average mental age of thirteen, that European migrants’ mental ages could be ranked based on their country of origin, that Black people had the lowest reported mental age of any group, as well as that immigrants who had lived in America for longer scored more highly; (vii) the influence of familiarity on test scores, demonstrated by these results; (viii) an example of one of the questions which clearly required knowledge of American culture to answer correctly; (ix) problematic methodologies in Yerkes’ study, highlighted by Gould in ‘A Nation of Morons’; (x) Gould’s conclusion, that Yerkes’ findings should be viewed with scepticism due to cultural bias and administrative problems.

About the lecturer

Dr Cody Porter is a senior lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Porter’s research interests are in information elicitation, lie detection and offending behaviour. Some of Dr Porter’s recent publications include ‘Implementing converged security risk management: Drivers, barriers, and facilitators’ (in press) and ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022).