Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Stephen Murdoch - Iq: How Psychology Hijacked INtelligence
One of my top 5 non-fiction reads. Extremely hard to find. The version you might get is under a different name and white-washed of its best parts. It's the first popular history of intelligence testing that tells it like it is, and I've always waxed conspiratorial about why it wasn't ever a bestseller. Testing is a multi-billion dollar industry and I'd imagined a book lambasting its origins might have some lobbyists removing it from the spotlight. In talking to the author this week, I was half right. Turns out he tired of both white supremacy praise and psychologists brow-beating his analysis with their just reporting the "facts."
Stephen Murdoch tells us of Intelligence testing's forefather, Darwin's half cousin, a university dropout named Francis Galton, hellbent on proving the size of one's head determined intelligence. Today we also know him as the father of Eugenics, a movement that directly inspired Hitler's holocaustic ideations of exterminating those he considered genetically weak.
Before all that World War II fodder, though, Galton's legacy iterated into American IQ testing, a forced proving ground that in the first few decades of the 20th century resulted in: cognitive segregation, barring immigrants from passing Ellis Island, sterilizing the "feeble-minded", death penalty eligibility, and, forever relevant, to further arguments of racism towards black Americans.
IQ, the intelligence quotient, is solidified in American pop culture as being able to measure something it has never been able to: Intelligence. Unfortunately, graduate programs like mine attempted to indoctrinate a worldview that sacralized intelligence testing for education and employment selection. I get it. Immigration and migration to cities made school and workforce populations balloon. We're a species designed to find order in chaos, and the IQ gave us a perfect mechanism to put students, soldiers and workers into boxes. Psychology secured its foothold in science largely as a result of peddling IQ testing to institutions, and although IQ tests are improvements from their predecessors, continual claims they can measure intelligence means we're in need of newer, less toolish tools.