Content area
Full text
Murdoch, S. (2007). IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons (288 pp., $24.95, pb, ISBN: 978-0471699774)
If you would like to know about the early history of testing for intelligence then this book has much to offer you. But keep your critical faculties sharp. By the time I'd read to the end I felt that the author, Stephen Murdoch, was getting so desperate to fulfill the promise of his title that he has to resort to bald statements such as, "The history of the use of IQ tests is appalling. IQ tests have often been used for the vilest purposes . . ." (p. 231).
Where the author really scores is his production of a great page-turning read of the history of the subject. He is a good journalist. All those dry names, Galton, Binet, Simon, Spearman, Yerkes, Goddard, and Burt, become real people with histories, dreams, and rivalries. They were all dogged pioneers and even managed to invent the first multiplechoice questionnaire. Few of them, though, managed personal success in their aim to improve their lot in life, except for Lewis Terman in his Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.
But there is a difference in understanding between this desk job and getting down and dirty in the field of practice. He seems to regard psychologists as robots who judge...