• No_Eponym@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    My comrade in crisis, you are either misinformed or intentionally misinforming others.

    Setting aside the fact the character is called “I.Q.” and not “I.Q. Test,” the concept of IQ, and the first test, was invented by the English statistician Francis Galton. Galton believed in eugenics and was a racist, and his research was in the pursuit of proving his racist beliefs.

    Alfred Binet and two other french colleagues made their own IQ test almost 50 years later, and they eventually abandoned it because they felt IQ was better studied qualitatively.

    You didn’t mention it, but for the sake of dispelling another common piece of misinformation you might have, Lewis Terman brought the abandoned Binet test to the US and popularised what we now typically refer to as “I.Q. Test.” Why did he do it? Eugenics!

    TL;DR: IQ as a concept and IQ testing was born from eugenics, and the popularised concept in the west today was based on a later test developed by the French and adapted to suit American eugenics by a racist. To their credit, the French abandoned standardized testing because it was a bad way to look at intelligence.