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.