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Gould (Yerkes) (The design of the Army Alpha tests were where literate…
Gould (Yerkes)
The design of the Army Alpha tests were where literate recruits would be given the written test which was made up of 8 parts and took less than an hour to complete. There were questions that included number sequences, unscrambling sentences and analogies.
The army beta test were where illiterate recruits were given a pictorial test. This had seven parts and included maze running, cube counting, finding the next symbol in a sequence and translating numerals into symbols. Literate recruits who failed the alpha test should have also done the beta test.
The individual examination was supposed to be a spoken test and given to the participants if they had failed the two prior examinations, but this was never actually administered.
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These "facts" provided a genetic explanation for differences in intelligence (some groups of people were naturally less intelligent than others). Gould argued that there was systematic bias in the ways the tests were administered and designed, which meant black P's did worse, for example. It was really measuring their levels of schooling and familiarities with US culture rather than native intellectual ability.
These findings were taken up by gov's who used the "facts" to lobby not just the limits on immigration but also by imposing tight quotas against different nations deemed to be of inferior genetic stock. This eventually led to the Immigration Restriction Act 1924 which limited arrivals per year to 2%. It was suggested that some racial groups were superior to others (eugenics argument).
As a result of the law, up to 6 mill southern, central and eastern europeans were banned entry between 24 and outbreak of ww2. In relation to which immigrant restrictions were made tighter because of Yerke's research, Gould points out that the consequence of this was that it was consigning many would-be immigrants to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.
Standardised procedure (same q's etc). Efforts made to make beta test equivalent in difficulty to alpha test. Laid down v clear instructions about tests. Very large sample = generalisability ,however all P's were male and from the same army, yet lots from different cultures. Most would most likely be of the same age range.
More a measure of how much schooling a P had or the type of upbringing they had - not an accurate test of intelligence, there were other extraneous variables that weren't controlled for. Quite representative sample - not ethnocentric, yet the results weren't representative/true. Definition of literate seemed to be drastically lowered and fundamentally, the tests were measuring many things other than a person's actual intelligence.
Sectioning the P's as A, B, C, D equivalent to roles in the army also very biased and unrepresentative
Yerke's aim was to produce a reliable and valid measure of intelligence. He also wanted to prove that psychology (intelligence testing) could be as objective and quantifiable as other scientific disciplines.
Yerke's actual procedure was a quasi experiment with a research design of independent measures (with some repeated measures as some participants experienced both the alpha and beta tests). Gould only reviewed the study and so has no experimental design.
York's used army recruits of the USA army to build up his sample. This consisted of 1.75 million men. There was a mixture of white americans, negroes and european immigrants. They were of all different ages.
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Findings; Another researcher, Boring, analysed the results of the tests from 160,000 participants. He identified 3 "facts";
- Average mental age of a white american adult was 13, which was just above that of a moron.
- The darker people of southern europe and the slavs of eastern europe were less intelligent than westerners and northerners. (Russian mental age was 11.34, Poles 10.74).
- Black recruits scored the lowest of all, with their average age being 10.41. Lighter black men seemed to score the highest out of them all.
What yerkes would conclude;
- Intelligence is an innate quality with a hereditary basis. It's possible to grade individuals by colour of skin.
- The avg. man of most nations can be considered moronic
- Mental testing like this is valid and scientific.
What Gould would conclude;
- there were systematic errors in the design of the tests and how they were carried out which led to the black recruits and immigrants scoring lower
- Intelligence testing of this kind is culturally biased and if interpreted incorrectly, can lead to racial discrimination and, in this case, indirect cause of mass murder
Ethics; /Consent - the army recruits "were told nothing about the examination or its purpose"/ We can reasonably assume that they weren't really allowed to withdraw from the study/ When taking part, the recruits had to "fill in their names, ages and education", which made the identifiable and NOT anonymous/ Many recruits were in a state of heightened anxiety and could've been psychologically harmed in some way/ Partially deceived as not given full disclosure or consent of the experiment/ No mention of debriefing so can assume they were not