Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    389/534 (page 373)
    <4 % THE CORRELATION BETWEEN NATIVE ABILITY AND SOCIAL STATUS WILLIAM McDOUGALL Harvard University The purpose of this paper is to present a summary of facts recently ob¬ served which takén together go far to establish a positive correlation between social status and civic worth, or, in other words, to show that the economic stratification of society corresponds in some degree with the distribution through the population of the more desirable human qualities, more es¬ pecially the quality of intelligence. Eugenists have very commonly as¬ sumed or alleged the reality of such correlation. But the lack of empirical proof of it has been a principal ground of many criticisms adverse to their propaganda. Most of the new evidence I refer to has been obtained by the application of the methods of experimental psychology, the method of mental testing which Francis Galton was the first to create and apply. One piece of this evidence important by reason of the very large sample of in¬ dividuals dealt with, was provided by the mental testing of recruits to the American Army raised by draft for the Great War. The evidence consists in the fact that the illiterate recruits attained a considerably lower average mark for intelligence than the literates, and this was true in about the same degree for both white and colored recruits taken separately. Unfortunately the significance of this fact is not quite indisputable. The popular inter¬ pretation of it is naturally that the literates are more intelligent than the illiterates, because they have learned to read and write. It is on the face of it equally probable that in the main they have learned to read and write because they are more intelligent. Both statements are probably true in part. The tests were designed to reveal degrees of native intelligence, and they are believed by the best authorities to do so in the main, and there is much to support that view in the large experience of mental testing that has now been accumulated. If a certain concession is made for the popular view and 50 per cent of the difference is attributed to the effect of learning to read and write in sharpening the intelligence of the literates, a large difference still remains to be regarded as a native difíerence.^ Now there ^ Unfortunately for the present argument, the tests (known as the A and В tests) used for literates and illiterates respectively were not the same, but were believed to be roughly equivalent. 373 У