Lewis Madison Terman (1877–1956)

Lewis Madison Terman was a researcher and university professor who studied educational psychology and advocated for eugenics in the United States during the early twentieth century. The US eugenics movement, which Terman supported, was a collection of scientific research and social programs that aimed to improve human populations through control over human reproduction. One area many eugenicists studied was human intelligence as a means of determining how “desirable” a person may be. During the 1910s, while working at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Terman helped devise the Stanford-Binet scale for intelligence testing. As of 2024, the Stanford-Binet test is one of the main methods for providing individual intelligence quotient, or IQ, scores. In addition to the Stanford-Binet scale, Terman promoted the idea that individuals had fixed and inherited capacities for intelligence. Through both his development of a widely used method for measuring human intelligence and his promotion of the idea of intelligence as hereditary, Terman supported widespread social efforts to control human reproduction in the US during the twentieth century.

1. Early Life and Education
2. Research on Intelligence
3. Legacy

Early Life and Education

Terman was born 15 January 1877 in Johnson County, Indiana, to Martha P. Cutsinger and James William Terman. The Termans were a large farming family, and he was the twelfth of fourteen children. In an autobiography, Terman reports that his academic career began in rural schooling at age five. Promoted to the third grade at six years old, he states that he made a habit out of memorizing the contents of his textbooks. He also describes himself as more interested in the personalities and minds of his classmates while growing up, focusing particularly on students who functioned differently from other children. Terman attended all of his elementary schooling in a one-room schoolhouse, leaving the school once he was thirteen years old. In his autobiography, he states that his childhood education was somewhat short due both to his growing up in a rural area as well as to what he claims was his natural precociousness. During his teenage years, Terman spent his time off from school working on his family’s farm, sometimes for up to six months out of the year. He reports having enjoyed agricultural work and that his only reason for later leaving the farm was to seek education.

In 1892, when he was fifteen years old, Terman began attending Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, to study to become a teacher. After two years of schooling, he taught at a rural school for one year before going to back to study at the Central Normal College. Until 1898, Terman alternated between teaching schoolchildren and studying in Danville. By the end of that period, he had received three bachelor’s degrees: one in science, one in arts, and one in pedagogy, or the practice of teaching. From 1898 to 1901, Terman worked as the principal of a high school in Johnson County, where he taught the entire curriculum of a four-year high school to approximately forty students. During that period, in 1899, Terman married Anna Belle Minton, whom he had met at Central Normal College. The couple had a son named Frederick in 1900.

In the first years of the twentieth century, Terman pursued further schooling, receiving bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. By 1901, Terman borrowed money to continue his schooling and began attending Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. At the university, he became more focused on psychology, building proficiency in French and German to engage with psychological literature coming out of Europe. He graduated with both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in 1903 and, in the same year, welcomed the birth of his daughter, Helen. The same year, Terman accepted an offer for a fellowship at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to pursue graduate study.

Research on Intelligence

In his autobiography, Terman states that his doctoral work at Clark University was what foreshadowed his future research interests regarding the measurement of intelligence and social control. In his dissertation, entitled “Genius and Stupidity: A Study of Some of the Intellectual Processes of Seven ‘Bright’ and Seven ‘Stupid’ Boys,” he analyzed the results of mental tests from groups of students whom he considered to have different levels of intelligence. His research revealed that those considered to have higher levels of intelligence demonstrated better cognitive processes, including reasoning, mathematical, and memory abilities. Terman received his doctorate in 1905. Due to health issues he had suffered during his time at Clark University, physicians had advised him to seek a better climate, and he moved to San Bernardino, California, that same year to work as a high school principal again. After only a year in that position, he took another job at the Los Angeles State Normal School in Los Angeles, California, as a professor of child study and pedagogy.

In 1910, Terman accepted a position as professor of educational psychology at Stanford University and began to focus his research on the measurement of an individual’s innate capacity for intelligence as well as contribute to the creation of the Stanford-Binet Scale. In Terman’s first years at the university, he began researching intelligence measurement via the Binet-Simon scale. In the years leading up to Terman’s research, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, researchers studying education in France, had developed the Binet-Simon scale to approximate the mental age and cognitive abilities of schoolchildren. The original purpose of the Binet-Simon scale was to identify children with learning disabilities so that they could receive specialized educational services. In 1915, Terman published “The Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale and Some Results from Its Application to 1,000 Non-selected Children,” in which he and his colleagues present an adaptation of the Binet-Simon scale. Their version, called the Stanford-Binet scale, extended the scale to include what they thought were the intelligence levels of adults. Along with the new scale, Terman and colleagues argued that the sample data they took indicates that children of higher social statuses were naturally more intelligent than children of lower social statuses. Terman published the full book The Measurement of Intelligence in 1916, expanding on the history of the original Binet-Simon scale and providing a guide for the usage of the Stanford-Binet scale for different ages of children and adults.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Terman’s research into intelligence testing and his part in the development of the Stanford-Binet scale also came with eugenics-based arguments about how those measures should affect society. In The Measurement of Intelligence, Terman argues that intelligence determines a person’s capacity for moral judgment and that, therefore, people with low intelligence are responsible for crime and other social issues. He argues in another book in 1919 that the educational system needs to pay particular attention to children who exhibit low intelligence, declaring that such children are a burden to society due to their criminal tendencies. In the same book, Terman also advocates for a society with a structure based on measured intelligence, outlining a hierarchy where people with low intelligence work in manual labor and service positions. He argues for strict policies of educational and social control for people with low Stanford-Binet scores due to what he saw as a tendency toward immoral behavior.

In addition to broad social recommendations, Terman’s first two decades of scholarship contained arguments about intelligence differing between racial groups. In The Measurement of Intelligence, he reports consistently lower Stanford-Binet scores for people of Mexican, Indigenous, and Black ancestry and goes as far as labelling those populations reproducing as a problem for society. As of 2024, researchers do not recognize any links between racial or ethnic origin and intelligence.

Beginning in the early 1920s, Terman continued his focus on innate intelligence with a series of five research publications titled Genetic Studies of Genius. In 1921, he secured funding from the Commonwealth Fund, a private philanthropic foundation that awards research grants, to test the intelligences of California schoolchildren whom their teachers deemed to be particularly bright. Terman and his research partners had schoolteachers across California submit who they thought were the three most intelligent students and the youngest student in each class, leading to the researchers testing approximately 160,000 children. Terman and his colleagues selected the highest half of a percent of the scores to study, 661 children at the start, though increasing to 1,528 children with later additions. They followed the children throughout their lives to analyze how the health, careers, personalities, and lives of children with high intelligence changed throughout their lifetime. In 1922, Terman became the head of Stanford University’s psychology department, and the university’s president charged Terman with building up the program, which had granted only a single doctoral degree in the preceding thirty years. In 1925, Terman published the first volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, subtitled Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children, in which Terman detailed information about the health, home lives, and personalities of the selected children. In 1926, Terman assisted in the publication of the series’ second volume, The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses, whose main author was Catherine M. Cox, a fellow psychological researcher. Cox and Terman analyzed the biographies of 300 figures from history who were famous for their abilities and created posthumous, hypothetical Stanford-Binet intelligence scores for the historical figures.

From the late 1920s through the 1940s, Terman continued his Genetic Studies of Genius and performed additional psychological research relating to sexuality, gender, and marriage. During 1927 and 1928, Terman and colleagues resurveyed the children analyzed in the previous publications. Additionally, during the same years, Terman and Cox began studying what they called masculine and feminine personality types, attempting to develop a scale by which they could measure how masculine or feminine an individual person was based on their temperament, physiological factors, and cultural differences. Terman and Cox published on the topic of sexuality into the 1930s. In 1930, Terman and colleagues published The Promise of Youth, the third volume in their study of gifted children, which contained updates on the growth and progress of the children as seen during the resurveys. In 1936, 1940, and 1945, they performed additional surveys of the participants, publishing the fourth volume entitled The Gifted Child Grows Up in 1947, when the average age of the participants was thirty-five. The fourth volume claimed that those children with higher IQ scores typically were healthier and happier and had more successful vocations than the other children. However, Terman also found that, contrary to what he deemed public opinion, children with higher IQ scores were not misfits later in life but rather led normal lives.

The 1940s and 1950s saw a slowing in Terman’s work due to injury-related health issues. In August of 1942, Terman retired from teaching as well as his position as department head at Stanford but continued working on his study of gifted children. In November of the same year, he fell asleep while smoking in bed, causing a house fire that left him with extensive burns. After a roughly four-year period of recovery, Terman returned to his study of gifted children. At his death in 1956, he was still working on the fifth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, and Melita Oden, his colleague with whom he had co-authored the previous volume, continued working on the fifth addition, The Gifted Child at Mid-Life, after his death until publishing the volume in 1959.

Legacy

Terman received positive recognition during his lifetime, and his work at Stanford University linked him to many figures within the field of psychology during the twentieth century. During his twenty-year tenure as head of the Stanford University psychology department, the department awarded fifty-five doctoral degrees, as opposed to the three awarded in the thirty years before Terman. During the same twenty-year period, five of the twenty presidents of the American Psychological Association, including Terman himself, either worked at the university’s psychology department or had received nomination for a position there. In 1928, the National Academy of Sciences elected Terman as a member, with the same occurring with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1934 and 1953, respectively.

Despite the broad adoption of the Stanford-Binet scale as a measure of intelligence by researchers and educational institutions worldwide, there has been significant criticism of Terman’s work in psychology and eugenics advocacy. Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist who studied the history of science during the late twentieth century, argued that Terman’s criteria for correct answers on the Stanford-Binet test prioritized trivial, cultural knowledge rather than true intellectual ability. Gould also argued that Terman and those with similar ideas about intelligence had major failings in the assumptions that held up their beliefs. In particular, he argued against Terman’s assumption that a person’s genetic heritage makes their intelligence fixed and inevitable as well as Terman’s generalizations about entire ethnic and racial groups. Alexandra Minna Stern, who studies the history of eugenics in the US, identifies Terman as one of the pioneers of mental testing in the state of California in particular. She argues that his conclusions about the intelligence of people with Mexican and Indigenous ancestry supported an existing trend of educational and social segregation for Mexican Americans in California. Additionally, Stern argues that Terman’s ideas about Mexican Americans provided new justifications for both restricting immigration from Mexico, as well as controlling the reproduction of people already within California, resulting in the forced sterilizations of thousands of Mexican American women in the state. Terman was part of an intellectual tradition that provided scientific support to the idea that intelligence is a fixed, inborn trait. That idea and similar ones formed the basis for immigration restrictions and eugenics programs across the US.

As of 2024, Terman’s work has left a lasting impact on the US education system. For example, professions continue to use the Stanford-Binet test as a standardized metric of cognitive ability. According to Deborah Blum, a writer for Undark Magazine, Terman established that his intelligence scale was to examine White, middle-class American students and believed that immigrants, Blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos lacked intelligence and were uneducable. By the 1930s, the majority of US schools had implemented standardized tests into the education system, and standardized testing has its roots in ideas of fixed intelligence. However, many critics argued that there was widespread racial bias in testing as, on average, students of color tended to score lower on those tests than white students, leading to a racial gap in higher education. As of 2024, some US schools and colleges have adapted more holistic methods of evaluating students rather than solely relying on standardized testing. Researchers argue as of 2024 that intelligence is not a fixed measure and can change throughout one’s lifetime.

Terman died 21 December 1956 at the age of seventy-nine of a cerebral hemorrhage in Palo Alto, California.

Sources

1. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “Lewis Madison Terman.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences. https://www.amacad.org/person/lewis-madison-terman (Accessed June 19, 2024).
2. American Philosophical Society. “APS Member History.” American Philosophical Society. https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Lewis+Terman&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced (Accessed June 19, 2024).
3. Boring, Edwin G. Lewis Madison Terman: 1877–1956. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1959.
4. Blum, Deborah. “Born of Eugenics, Can Standardized Testing Escape Its Past?” Undark Magazine, December 14, 2022. https://race.undark.org/articles/born-of-eugenics-can-standardized-testing-escape-its-past (Accessed July 4, 2024).
5. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1980.
6. Minton, Henry L. Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing. New York and London: New York University Press, 1988.
7. National Academy of Sciences. “Lewis M. Terman.” National Academy of Sciences. https://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/deceased-members/20001659.html (Accessed June 19, 2024).
8. New York Times. “Lewis M. Terman, I.Q. Expert, Dead; Ex-Psychology Professor at Stanford Made Long Study of 1,500 Gifted Children.” New York Times, December 23, 1956. https://www.nytimes.com/1956/12/23/archives/lewis-m-terman-iq-expert-dead-expsychology-professor-at-stanford.html (Accessed June 19, 2024).
9. Rosales, John, and Tim Walker. “The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing.” Oregon Education Association, March 20, 2021. https://oregoned.org/advocating-change/new-from-oea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing (Accessed July 4, 2024).
10. Stanford-Binet Test. “History of the Stanford-Binet Test.” Stanford-Binet Test. https://stanfordbinettest.com/history-stanford-binet-test (Accessed June 19, 2024).
11. Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
12. Terman, Lewis Madison. “Autobiography of Lewis M. Terman.” History of Psychology in Autobiography 2 (1930): 297–331. https://web.archive.org/web/20010222171358/http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Terman/murchison.htm (Accessed June 19, 2024).
13. Terman, Lewis Madison. The Intelligence of School Children: How Children Differ in Ability, the Use of Mental Tests in School Grading, and the Proper Education of Exceptional Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919.
14. Terman, Lewis Madison. The Measurement of Intelligence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.
15. Terman, Lewis Madison, Grace Lyman, George Ordahl, Louise Ordahl, Neva Galbreath, and Wilford Talbert. “The Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale and Some Results from Its Application to 1,000 Non-selected Children.” Journal of Educational Psychology 6 (1915): 551–62.

16. The Commonwealth Fund. “About Us.” The Commonwealth Fund. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/about-us (Accessed June 19, 2024).