The IQ test was created in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It reached a highpoint in the United States around 1920: Psychometricians had taken Alfred Binet’s clinical methods and converted them into a set of test items that could be administered and scored efficiently. The IQ test had shown its usefulness in World War I and its aftermath—used as well in educational and clinical settings. When I give talks on the topic of intelligence, I often show two photos: Binet, the French originator, and Lewis Terman, the Stanford University standardizer.
Terman took the IQ very seriously—clearly he believed that it was the gold standard in psychological measurement. As a dedicated researcher with social goals, he sought to identify the brilliant students in California (more men, to be sure) and then to follow their trajectories throughout lifetime. The results were impressive, many of the individuals did well, but also disappointing—no geniuses emerged and some of the most productive and most notable Californians of the era did not make the cut. There’s an impressive literature on the 1500 or so who were so identified—often dubbed “the Termites.”
In the 1920s, Terman launched a set of volumes called “Genetic Studies of Genius.” I have been most interested in Volume 2, called “Early Mental Traits of 300 Geniuses,” with Catharine Cox as the senior author. Using biographical information and the concepts that undergirded the Stanford-Binet IQ test, Cox sought to determine the IQs of 300 extremely eminent individuals (mostly men) who lived in the 15th-19thcenturies.
I have two diametrically opposed views of this work. On the one hand, Cox (and research assistants) did virtually super-human research to figure out the IQs of these individuals (and a comparison group.) They read primary sources in several languages, computing reliability scores, and laid out what they had read about and what inferences they had made. For their efforts they get a straight A.
On the other hand…
The notion that one can compute an individual’s skills and knowledge, as well as areas of lesser competence, from reading biographies written decades, even centuries, after the childhood of these individuals is bizarre. And even if we had records far more detailed and accurate—including scores on IQ tests!—it’s hard to avoid the tendency of the biographers to look for, or even invent, signs of precocity in those who eventually left a mark on history. I consider this endeavor to be fundamentally misguided—at best, a Sisyphean task. If I were the grader, I would say “go back to the drawing boards and come up with a different dissertation.”
Of course, it’s easier to say this a century later—Cox submitted her dissertation on this topic to Professor Terman in 1925.
So why revisit this work, long forgotten except for those who work in this field?
In reviewing the work several decades after I first scanned it, what caught my eye was Cox’ effort to rank order professions in order of inferred IQ.
Here’s her list from lowest to highest IQ: At the bottom are soldiers; next come artists and musicians; then religious leaders and statesmen; and finally at the top of the list, writers, scientists, and—the queens or kings of intellect—the philosophers.
I have always maintained that IQ tests—or their cousins—standardized tests like the SAT or GRE—are a reasonable measure of who will succeed in a standard Western educational setting. In my terms, these tests tap linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence—the intelligences, I often quip, of the law professor. And the more that a person wants to remain in an academic setting, and to be judged by academic standards, the more useful these measures are. As are grades and class standing…
But once one leaves the academy, the IQ test proves far less useful. And here is where the other intelligences become relevant, even necessary.
And so, to go down the list:
Religious leaders and statesmen need to have high personal intelligences
Musicians need musical intelligence
Graphic artists require spatial (and bodily-kinesthetic) intelligence
Soldiers—especially in the pre-modern era—presumably rely on bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, as well as spatial intelligence.
By the way, you may be wondering which soldiers received sufficient eminence to make Cox and Terman’s roster. While I had heard of nearly all of the philosophers, scientists, writers, musicians and artists, many of the soldiers’ names were unknown to me. But when I did recognize names—like General Sherman of Civil War fame and Admiral Lord Nelson of the Napoleonic Wars—it was clear that such individuals had to do more than stay alive and shoot straight. They were planning large and complex operations and yet they may not have been able to solve verbal analogies or complete numerical sequences. The label should have been “military leaders,” not soldiers!
A thought experiment: If we could actually have observed Mozart, or Leonardo, or Shakespeare in their youth—or for that matter, Virginia Woolf, Martha Graham or Eleanor Roosevelt, three women whom I have studied, would they have stood out in terms of IQ? Or would their intelligences have manifested in other ways.
Two cheers for Catharine Cox, who clearly would have done well on her professor’s test. But I wonder how she would have responded to this blog post. Would it have seemed “folly” to her, as it does to celebrants of the IQ—or would it have caused her to rethink her data, methods and argument? I suspect that the answer would not depend on her intelligences, however defined, but on her personality, and particularly her openness to other perspectives.
Photo by K. Mitch Hodgeon Unsplash