Robert Yerkes - Intelligence Testing and Eugenics

Intelligence Testing and Eugenics

In 1917, Yerkes served as president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Under his urging, the APA began several programs devoted to the war effort in World War I. As chairman of the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits, he developed the Army's Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests, the first nonverbal group tests, which were given to over 1 million United States soldiers during the war.

The test ultimately concluded that recent immigrants (especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe) scored considerably lower than older waves of immigration (from Northern Europe), and was used as one of the eugenic motivations for harsh immigration restriction. The results would later be criticized as very clearly only measuring acculturation, as the test scores correlated nearly exactly with the number of years spent living in the US.

In his introduction to Carl C. Brigham's A Study of American Intelligence (which helped popularize eugenics in the U.S.), Yerkes warned that "no citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration." The study was based on the findings of Yerkes and Brigham regarding the alarming results of the Army intelligence tests: nearly half of the white draft (47.3%) was feebleminded, with blacks and the newer immigrant groups achieving the lowest scores.

Although Yerkes claimed that the tests measured native intelligence, and not education or training, this claim is difficult to sustain in the face of the questions themselves: Question 18 of Alpha Test 8 reads: "Velvet Joe appears in advertisements of ... (tooth powder)(dry goods)(tobacco)(soap)." The tests themselves read like a kind of early 20th century Trivial Pursuit.

Along with Edward L. Thorndike, Yerkes was a member and Chairman of the Committee on Inheritance of Mental Traits, part of the Eugenics Record Office, which was founded by Charles Benedict Davenport, a former teacher of Yerkes at Harvard.