Note: This is a loose collection of notes I put together around summer 2020. I have more recently attempted to organize some of this information across two chapters in my introductory textbook to cognitive psychology:
I’m working through the task of learning about influences of eugenics on psychology and society. As a part of this, I’m documenting the eugenics views held by many psychologists, as well as connections between psychologists and eugenics. I will keep updating this page as I document the connections. There are many connections, it will take some time. So far, this is an emerging disorganized collection of factoids.
A major overarching goal of compiling and documenting connections between psychology and eugenics is to better understand how strucutural eugenics and racism in the discipline of Psychology has shaped and continues to shape the field, both in terms of the questions it asks, and who gets to ask them.
I haven’t found too many membership lists yet about affiliations with eugenics societies. So, just a few screenshots for now:
Relation to Thomas Poffenberger? of Poffenberger, T. (1963). Two thousand voluntary vasectomies performed in California: background factors and comments. Marriage and Family Living, 25(4), 469-474.
Generally an advocate for appling testing everywhere to make sure everyone goes into their pre-ordained slot in life.
Some work on testing and predicting success in life from school grades. Poffenberger, A.T. (1925). School achievement and success in life. Journal of Applied Psychology, 9(1), 22–28.
Poffenberger, A. T., & Carpenter, F. L. (1924). Character Traits in School Success. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 7(1), 67–74. This paper is a good example of value-free science. There is an effort to expand testing in schools beyond IQ tests to include other tests measuring traits that also predict performance…e.g., fill in the gaps that IQ misses in terms of variance explained. However, very little is said about what how these tests would be used in society, even though it is clear from the authors own collegial associations that “better” tests would certainly be put to use for eugenics purposes.
Poffenberger (1922) This paper is basically full on eugenics without using the word. Poffenberger describes how IQ tests can be used to slot people into professions that they are “suitable” for given their IQ. It is an argument to keep “low IQ workers” in their place as laborers, and given the best jobs to people with high IQ, and to worry about how the economy may collapse if people aren’t slotted in based on their IQ.
Poffenberger (1930) carries on in the tradition of Galton & Cattell to ask what factors make men of science great. Maintains a thin veneer with respect to avoiding commentary on eugenics.
Highly relevant account of the activities of the national research council 1919-1933 (division of anthropology & Psychology), wherein it obvious just how many activities were eugenic in nature. Poffenberger (1933)
List of correspondence between C Davenport (director of eugenics record office) and other folks, from Society et al. (1987)
I need to pause for a bit. I’ve been quickly trying to sketch out some connections between APA presidents and eugenics. Mostly this involves googling their name and eugenics, and pulling the string.
My main aim in making these connections is to draw attention to the larger pattern of institutional eugenics within the discipline of Psychology. I am less interested about whether or not specific individuals were “card-carrying” eugenicists, or really truly held eugenics views in their “soul” or not. I think it is enough to establish the pattern and spread of eugenic ideology to consider how eugenics shaped the discipline. For example, I suspect that rampant eugenics had a part to play in systemically limiting the diversity of faculty in Psychology. I suspect it also guided the questions we ask, and continue to ask.
So, as a part of reflecting on what I am doing, I drew up a quick spreadsheet of the APP presidents. For the first 50, I gave them each a eugenics score from 0 to 1, with some intermediate scores representing eugenics adjacent work. These are just some rough personal qualitative estimates, to put a number on things. My rough numberization adds up to 34.75 of 50 APA presidents were into eugenics or eugenics adjacent research. Very few were ever explicitly anti-eugenics.
Consider a sentence like, “It is overwhelming the case that the first 50 years of American Psychology as measured by APA presidents research interests and leadership demonstrate that the discpline of psychology was primarily constructed as arm of the national eugenics movement in the USA”. I just wrote that sentence, and I’m starting to think that I’m not exaggerating.
Human Betterment foundation Eugenics society of America International eugenics conferences
Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race betterment - january 8-12, 1914, Battle Creek Michigan - published by the race betterment foundation
Part of the impetus for all of this research is to characterize the widespread acceptance of eugenics in terms of institutions. So far my perspective is that psychology as a discipline has a problem with instutional forms of eugenics and racism. Institutional eugenics is term that could carry broad meaning from literal institutions (e.g., such as the APA), to widely adopted policies in society inspired and propagated by eugenics leaders (e.g., IQ testing).
Some American Institutions to consider in terms of Psychology & Eugenics
How have institutions with some involvement in eugenics responded to their involvement? I’ve been wondering about this question the whole time that I’ve learning about eugenics. With respect to eugenics I’m still in the “what happened” phase, and perhaps slowly coming to the “what happened next” phase, which could lead into the “what’s going on right now phase”.
In any case. When I have time I will extract this section and make a post out of it to keep track of info I’m finding. I’ve discovered the internet archive https://archive.org contains an ample amount of historical eugenics literature, so have been collecting some of it. It’s also interesting to search for indvidual psychologists in this database because all sorts of old textbooks come up. More recently, I’ve started coming across government documents, for example the National Research Council has convened multiple panels to assess the impact of certain practices on society, some of these include eugenics related practices.
https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Federation_of_Eugenics_Organizations
Snippets from Kuhl:
Look up Psychologists of the IFEO psychology committee, like W. Stephenson
The American eugeni- cists continued their research and publication activity unhindered, and in August 1915, 55 the National Conference for Race Betterment met for the second time
the antiracist reinterpretation of the American army intelligence tests in the First World War by the New York anthropologist Otto Klineberg
The second committee, which included the British eugenicists and psychologists Charles Spearman and W. R. S. Stephenson as well as the American researcher on race Morris Steggerda was tasked with making uniform the intelligence tests developed in Europe and America and revising these tests in a way that they could be used for the “psychological examination” of “non- European and primitive peoples.”67 In that way, not only could a direct evaluation of each individual be made possible, but the presumably intellectual abilities and characteristics of the races could be shown quantitatively.
The IFEO Commission for Race Psychiatry that was set up in 1930 was assigned the task of bringing out these differences in the mental and psychological constitu- tion of races.
Test to see why html is not updating on github
Albett, R. S. (1969). Genius: Present-day status of the concept and its implications for the study of creativity and giftedness. American Psychologist, 24(8), 743.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Ethnology_and_Eugenics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_C._J._McGurk
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/02/08/archives/dr-clairette-p-armstrong-research-psychologist-86.html
The psychologist Clariette Armstrong, a former member of the Eugenics Research Association, testi- fied to the court for the IAAEE how great a hardship it would be for the Negro child to be in school with brighter, younger Whites, leading to greater delinquency, and so on.59 The IAAEE published and distributed arguments by Henry E. Garrett and Ernest van den Haag for racial segregation in the United States.60
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_M._Shuey
pg 171 in kuhl Arthur Jensen,
Hans J. Eysenck
Richard Herrnstein, a psychologist at Harvard University, picked up on Jensen’s and Eysenck’s hypotheses.
J. Philippe Rushton, a Canadian professor of psychology, not only received exten- sive support from the Pioneer Fund but after the turn of the century also took over leadership of the fund.
Eysenck, Jensen, and Herrnstein, in conjunction with ten other American and British academics, suc- ceeded in initiating a resolution defending them against “personal and professional disparagement.”124
For many years a large part of the project funds of the Pioneer Fund went for a research project on twins at the University of Minnesota, but the fund has also been involved in almost every piece of research that is intended to determine the psy- chological differences between the races.144 Arthur Jensen alone between 1971 and 1992 received over a million dollars. J. Phillippe Rushton in the same period was able to receive over $770,000 in grant funds from Pioneer. William Shockley, who promoted breeding of the highly gifted and to this end made his own sperm avail- able, received about $200,000 for his various activities in the area of race research. Other race researchers as well, such as the professor of education and psychologist R. Travis Osborne, the psychologist Richard Lynn, the sociologist and professor of education Linda Gottfredson, the sociologist Robert Gordon, and the philosopher Michael Levin, received generous amounts from the Pioneer Fund.145
Mankind Quarterly, he attempted to reinforce international visibility in particular by taking European and American scientists onto the editorial board. He made sure that the eugenic orienta- tion of the journal stayed true by expanding the editorial board with such persons as the Italian anthropologist Bruno Chiarelli, the psychologist Raymond B. Catell,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Brigham
Chapman, Paul Davis. Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology and ….the American Testing Movement, 1890-1930. New York University Press, 1990. ….(Reprint edition.)
Raymond Cattell (1987), & beyondism