Bell Curve Excerpt

This excerpt was taken from an FYI section in the introduction to the book The Bell Curve.

By the way, this is technically a test post. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with this thing.

Fact and Fiction About Immigration and Intelligence Testing

Two stories about early IQ testing have entered the folklore so thoroughly that people who know almost nothing else about that history bring them up at the beginning of almost any discussion of IQ. The first story is that Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average intelligence, even feebleminded, which goes to show how untrustworthy such tests (and the testers) are. The other story is that IQ tests were used as the basis for the racist immigration policies of the 1920s, which shows how dangerous such tests (and the testers) are.

The first is based on the work done at Ellis Island by H. H. Goddard, who explicitly preselected his sample for evidence of low intelligence (his purpose was to test his test's usefulness in screening for feeblemindedness), and did not try to draw any conclusions about the general distribution of intelligence in immigrant groups. The second has a stronger circumstantial case: Brigham publish his book just a year before Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which did indeed tip the flow of immigrants toward the western and northern Europeans. The difficulty with making the causal case is that a close reading of the hearings for the bill shows no evidence that Brigham's book in particular or IQ tests in general played any role.