Sunday, January 06, 2019

America's obsession

Scott Barry Kaufman notes that when David Wechsler came up with his tests (for the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale) around 1939,

"The test publishers were skeptical.  Why take so much time to measure a person's intelligence? This was antithetical to America's obsession with a fast, cheap and efficient way to categorize the totality of a person".
 This leads to the question, why is America so obsessed?  Is it a by-product of the ideology of capitalism?
Posted by Arun at 9:20 AM
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Guest · 325 weeks ago

I suspect that the industrial revolution was more important for IQ testing than capitalism per se. Industrialism created a need for educated workers and Binet (in France, BTW) came up with the first IQ test to see at what level students were prepared to learn (he called the result mental age, not intelligence). Germans came up with Intelligenzquotient which became the English IQ. All the early industrializers were pretty enthusiastic about IQ, but its big break came when the American Army used it to classify soldiers in WWI. They were still doing it when I was drafted for Viet Nam, and as far as I know, still are.

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