Intelligence Theory Through the Ages

Tara-Nicholle B. DeLouth
California State University, Bakersfield

Directory of Intelligence Theorists

• 500B.C. - 50 A.D.
Pythagoras (ca. 580-500 B.C.) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Plato (ca. 427-347 B.C.) Philo (ca. 25 B.C. - A.D. 50)

• 900 - 1300
Avicenna (980-1037) St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

• 1600-1800
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828)

John Locke (1632-1704) Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780)

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716)

James Mill (1773-1836) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Julien de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

• 1800-present
Francis Galton’s (1822-1911) William Stern (1871-1938)

James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) Charles Spearman (1863-1945)

Alfred Binet (1909-1975) Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957) Theodore Simon

(1873-1961) Louis Terman (1877-1956)

Robert Yerkes (1876-1956) David Weschler (1896-1981)

• 500B.C. - 50 A.D.

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One of the largest running, most complex debates in the history of psychology concerns the
definition and structure of the construct we now call intelligence. The presently raging
dialogue about the nature of human intellectual ability originated in Pythagoras’ (ca. 580-
500 B.C.) theory of mind-body dualism. The early Greek cosmologist believed humans were
comprised of both physical bodies and powers of reasoning that enabled comprehension of
the abstract elements of the universe. This relatively simplistic analogue of intelligence was
thought by Pythagoras to be located in the immortal soul.

Plato (ca. 427-347 B.C.) was perhaps the first to develop a theory recognizing individual
differences in intelligence levels, which he distinguished on the basis of the extent to which
an individual was able to understand purely abstract concepts, or Forms. On the lowest level
of Plato’s intelligence taxonomy were the average citizens who were characterized by the
passionate soul, capable only of conceiving intangible images (e.g., memories, reflections) of
physical objects. These lowly souls had not even the capacity to confront the physical objects
corresponding with these images. Above the citizens in this hierarchy lay the soldiers, who
exemplified the spirited soul which dealt cognitively with the physical objects themselves.
This, however, was still a suboptimal level of intelligence as the highest function allowed by
direct cognition of physical objects was the formation of opinions, or beliefs.

The "states of mind" (read: levels of intelligence) characterized by the passionate and spirited
souls (imagining and believing, respectively) were considered inferior due to their limited
subject matter - the physical world. As such, Plato’s next intelligence level, thinking, was
considered superior to these because it dealt with abstract mathematical relationships. Yet
because these relationships could potentially be false, the highest level of intelligence (which
Plato actually called "intelligence" or knowledge") required full comprehension of the
abstract Forms or essences. To know the "Form of the good" was the ultimate in intelligence
because it made one able to understand all other Forms and the relationship between them.

Plato also sparked the nature-nurture debate as it regards intelligence. He believed that each
individual was naturally dominated by either the passionate, spirited, or rational soul; for
those at the lower end of the intelligence spectrum, education held little benefit. For those
destined to be philosopher-kings, however, education was necessary to allow one to attain his
potential intelligence through the mastery of inner chaos (as infants), the external world (as
children), and the forms (as adults). In this way, education was the medium through which the
rational soul achieved control over the other souls.

Similarly, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) postulated different levels of intelligent thought

facilitated by the rational soul, the capacity for thought that is unique to humans. From the
bottom of this classification scheme up, each level was a necessary but insufficient
prerequisite for the next level of thought. For example, the ability to understand isolated
sensations was prerequisite to the common sense’s ability to integrate sensations toward
reaching a conclusion about their shared origin. Passive reason utilized these conclusions to
develop practical applications thereof. The ability to abstract ideas from the passive mind was
active reason, which Aristotle felt was the highest purpose of man, and the immortal
component of his soul.

Philo (ca. 25 B.C. - A.D. 50) viewed intelligence not as a human ability at all, but rather as a
divine grant. Philo postulated that the ability to know mandated freedom from fleshly
distraction through meditation, dreams, and trances, as well as a close relationship with God.

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God chose to reveal knowledge to souls prepared thusly. In Philo’s opinion, this path, not
rational thought, was the only route to knowledge.

• 900 - 1300
The Islamic tradition of philosophy entered the fray with the contributions of Avicenna
(980-1037), who essentially elaborated on the Aristotelian theme of hierarchical intelligences
which he called interior senses. The common sense, as in Aristotle’s theory, integrated
sensory information. The retentive imagination was a form of memory specific to the
synthesized product from the common sense. Compositive imagination referred to
approach/avoidance knowledge on the basis of pain and pleasure; the animal form was
associative only, while the human form involved the novel integration of common sense and
retentive imagination offerings. The estimative power referred to innate, reflexive approach
and avoidance judgments. Next came the memory of all lower cognitions and recollection, the
meaningful use of that memory.

Avicenna’s practical intellect referred to the application of information to everyday matters,

while contemplative intellect was a passive cognition that could be actualized only through a
supernatural, active intellect. This highest intellectual function was a relationship with and
understanding of God. So it seems that Avicenna may have integrated the theories of Aristotle
and Philo in postulating a hierarchical model of intelligence the highest level of which was
divinely mediated.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) retained a version of Aristotle’s Interior Senses that
included common sense, estimation, memory, and imagination. Also essentially Aristotelian
were Aquinas’ conceptions of passive and active minds as distinguished by their mere
embodiment and true abstraction of universals (Forms), respectively. The real benefit of
Aquinas’ work was in his reconciliation of Aristotelian thought (via the argument that
rationality was simply an alternate route to knowledge of God’s truth) with Church teachings
at a time when non-Christian thought was often stamped out; this may have preserved
Aristotle’s work for posterity.

• 1600-1800
The end of the Dark Ages saw a shift in the overall emphasis of emerging intelligence
theories from attempting to describe the structure of human intelligence to postulating the
origins of intellectual abilities. The philosophy of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) represented
the beginning of this trend. During intensive introspection, Descartes recognized that his
thoughts included several ideas that were exceptionally clear and true, concepts such as
geometric rules and God. Because the level of perfection represented by such concepts greatly
exceeded that of the fallible human mind which entertained them, Descartes concluded that
these important, perfect ideas were inborn mental components. There is a clear link between
the Cartesian proposal that learned knowledge may be enhanced or supplemented by innate,
extra-experiential elements of the intellect and the nature side of the nature-nurture debate
over the origins of human intelligence.

John Locke (1632-1704) presented an opinion best described as diametrically opposed to

Descartes’, the predecessor of the nurture side. Locke believed that the newborn human mind
was a tabula rasa, or blank slate, free of any ideas. Ideas, if innate, should be shared by all

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humans; since the moral and conceptual ideas Descartes professed to be innate are not held by
all people, deduced Locke, then they cannot be innate. Locke believed that experience,
whether the sensory experience of our external world or the mental experience of internal,
psychological phenomena, is responsible for the development of each individual’s fund of
knowledge.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was reared by his father, James Mill (1773-1836) to be a
living testament to the influence of environmental education on the intellect. Under his
father’s close tutelage, young J.S. Mill had read the Greek classics by age 8, and read and
taught the Latin classics and learned mathematics (through calculus) by 12 years of age. As
J.S. Mill approached middle age, he generalized his view of himself as a product of an
intensely educative environment into a psychology that saw the human mind as unlimited in
the extent to which it can be shaped by environmental learning. Mill proposed that every
mental impression, or perception, has a corresponding idea, which is represented to the
conscious mind as a memory of the original impression. Mill’s psychology was primarily
concerned with the principles which governed the development of the intellect, or the
association of ideas. Four rules were presented to describe the functioning of this system::
similarity (similar ideas arouse one another), contiguity (ideas repeatedly experienced
simultaneously or in rapid succession become associated), and intensity (the vividity of either
or both ideas is directly proportional to the strength of the association between the ideas).
Although J.S. Mill did leave room for the existence of some innate factors, similar to the
instincts of a non-human animal, he saw even inborn qualities as being subject to significant
modification by environmental factors.

Although French philosopher Julien de La Mettrie (1709-1751) was known as a

Materialist, he advance one of the first truly moderate, integrationist positions in the nature-
nurture debate. La Mettrie believed there to be three determinants of intelligence, a quality he
did not consider uniquely human. In addition to brain size and complexity (innate,
physiological characteristics), education also contributes to intelligence. (One generation
later, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) did find brain size and cortical complexity to be
empirically implicated in intelligent behavior.) Indeed, La Mettrie believed education to be
largely responsible for the difference in intelligence between humans and other primates. La
Mettrie’s position strongly resembles today’s prevailing opinion of the origins of intelligence,
that both genetic, innate factors and environmental and educational experiences contribute to
human intellectual ability.

Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) proposed that all human mental ability was a
product of sensation, memory and basic emotion (i.e. - pleasure and pain). Condillac
disagreed with Descarte’s concept of innate ideas, arguing that the intellectual powers we now
refer to collectively as ‘intelligence’ are consequential to sensation in some way. For
example, the memory of sensations as they occurred represents retrieval, whereas the
recollection thereof in a novel order is imagination, of which dreaming is one variant. The
retrieval or imagination of hated or loved sensations is what we call fear or hope, respectively.
The human tendency to categorize sensations on the basis of common attributes is abstraction.
Although de Condillac’s view of human intellectual abilities might seem overly simplistic to
sufficiently explain such a complex system, he attributed this complexity to man’s ability to
sense in multiple modalities (e.g. - smell, taste, touch). Condillac’s position was located quite
extremely on the nurture end of the nature-nurture continuum , as demonstrated by his belief
that anything not experienced through sensation could never be known by the human mind.

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Unusually, among the theorists discussed thus far, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
(1646-1716) promoted his idea of the mind as quite active and intelligent without any
contribution of experientially gained knowledge. Leibniz proposed that no physical event or
entity (such as a sensation) could lead to a metaphysical event (such as an idea or thought). As
the brain is a physical object, it could not lead to a nonphysical thought. Therefore, concluded
Leibniz, each human is born with the potential to have an idea; experience is the mechanism
thorough which this potential is realized. Leibniz went on to provide an explanation for
individual differences in intelligence. He believed that the universe, and everything in it, was
comprised of living, conscious, atom-like particles called monads, which vary only in their
capacity for limpid cognition. Differences in intelligence amongst humans and other animals
represent differences in the clarity of thought capable of by the most intelligent monads the
organism possesses. So, while plants and animals are characterized by rather dull monads, the
awareness of the most advanced human monads was second only to that of God’s. That is,
humans are second in intelligence only to God. However, the potential represented by the
monad’s clarity must be actualized by experience; the varying degrees to which this occurs
explained individual differences in human intelligence.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) attempted to establish the existence of innate categories of

thought by illustrating several universal constructs that are never actually experienced,
including time, space, causality, and reality. Allowing that sensory input is necessary for the
development of human knowledge, Kant believed that these sensations are only intelligible
and coherent after interpretation through the filter of the innate mental concepts. By
integrating Descarte’s notion of innate ideas with the empiricist concept of the importance of
experience, Kant provided another remarkably modern, moderate opinion in the nature-
nurture debate.

• 1800-present
Perhaps the best known of Francis Galton’s (1822-1911) qualities was his somewhat
obsessive penchant for quantification; this, coupled with the heavy influence of the theory of
evolution proposed by his first cousin, Charles Darwin (!809-1882), resulted in Galton’s
theory of intelligence as being inherited and his lifelong mission to measure human
intellectual ability. As such, Galton incited the pervasive concern with the measurement of
intelligence around which all attempts to define the construct and discussions of the relative
influence of genetics and the environment since have revolved.

Galton echoed the sensationalist view that data are input to the human mind only through the
senses. Accordingly, he believed, an individual’s level of intelligence must be directly
proportional to their sensory acuity, a constellation of inherited characteristics. As such,
intelligence must be inherited, reasoned Galton.

As a natural product of this conclusion and his fixation on measurement, Galton first sought
to assess the occurrence of eminence (as an indicator of genius) in the children of eminent
parents as compared to the frequency of eminence in children of lay people. As a matter of
fact, it was Galton who first used the phrase "nature and nurture" to describe the opposing
viewpoints in the debate over the origins of intelligence. Galton admitted, however, that any
genetic predisposition was not a sufficient cause of eminence; motivation was the variable he
believed to mediate the genetic/eminence relationship.

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Another implication of intelligence being a product of sensory information, according to
Galton, was that an individual’s intellectual ability ought be able to be assessed using tests of
the senses. Galton assembled a battery of such tests and the instruments necessary for their
administration in his "Anthropometric Laboratory" in 1884. Here, Galton made various
measures of sensory acuities, which were intended as tests of intelligence, as well as other
physiological characteristics (included so Galton could study individual differences).

Galton’s belief in the heritability of intelligence was the basis for his proposal of a
governmentally sanctioned system of selective human breeding called eugenics. If children of
highly accomplished individuals were more likely to be highly intelligent than other children,
Galton reasoned, then governments should materially encourage the eminent to procreate with
one another in hopes of causing a proliferation of intelligent individuals in the species.
Galton’s eugenic platform was posthumously misinterpreted as supportive of the genocidal
rhetoric of various hate groups, including the Nazi party of World War II Germany. This,
perhaps, has contributed to his having been maligned or, at the very least, underappreciated in
the annals of psychology until recently. For even though Galton’s anthropometry eventually
proved invalid, his work sparked an era of mental testing in psychology which continues
today. As well, Galton made numerous profound contributions in the areas of research
methods and statistics, including the concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean,
the twin study, the adoption study, the control group, the word association method, and the
questionnaire.

In a strange twist of fate, it was the work of Galton’s most ardent disciple, James McKeen
Cattell (1860-1944), that both popularized Galtonian intelligence theory, anthropometry, and
eugenics in America and discredited them in the scientific community. Cattell, the first
American to receive a doctoral degree from Wilhelm Wundt, sought Galton out because of
their shared interest in the objective measurement of individual differences. After studying
with Galton for two years at Cambridge, Cattell returned to America and a teaching post at
the University of Pennsylvania.

Cattell immediately established a psychology laboratory (the first for undergraduates) and
training and research programs based on his set of "mental tests and measurements" (a term
Cattell coined). Cattell had essentially integrated Galton’s measures of sensory acuity with
Wundt’ psychophysical methods to develop a battery of mental anthropometric tests of
intelligence which Cattell believed should be administered to all university students. A couple
of years after moving to Columbia University in 1891, Cattell actually implemented a large
scale program of administering his test battery to every student entering one of Columbia’s
schools. Among Cattell’s goals for this testing program (which lasted for over ten years) were
determining the concurrent validity (correlation between results on the various tests) and
criterion validity (correlation between test results and academic success) of his tests. His
mathematical illiteracy prevented Cattell from performing such data analyses until he was
joined by an assistant, Clark Wissler, who’d been trained in Galton’s new correlational
methods. After subjecting Cattell’s decade of work to his analyses, Wissler failed to uncover
correlations among the tests and between any of the tests and academic success in college.
These well publicized, inarguable findings constituted the death knell for mental
anthropometry, as well as for Cattell’s career as a researcher. Yet Cattell would go on to
created a very respected position for himself in the history of mental testing as the founder of
the Psychological Corporation, which, worldwide, is the largest publisher of psychological
testing instruments today.

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Even before Wissler, Cattell’s mental anthropometry had been criticized on the basis that it
focused excessively on sensory and motor (physiological processes, effectively excluding
higher cognitive (psychological) functions). In rejecting Cattell’s defense that such complex
cognitive abilities were unquantifiable and immeasurable, his opponents pointed to the work
of a French psychologist, Alfred Binet (1909-1975), who was developing an instrument for
detecting mental retardation in schoolchildren for special educational purposes.

In 1905, Binet and his student, Theodore Simon (1873-1961), published the Binet-Simon
scale of intelligence, a battery of 30 tests primarily assessing cognitive abilities which the
authors believed comprised intelligence and had found to discriminate well between normal
and developmentally disabled children. In addition to being the first direct test of intelligence,
the Binet-Simon scale may have introduced the concept of the norm group. That is, a
determination of the existence and degree of mental retardation was made based on the
comparison of the subject’s performance with the average performance on the same items by
norm groups of children with slight, moderate, and severe mental retardation.

The 1908 revision of the Binet-Simon was an expansion of the original aim of the scale to
discriminate levels of intelligence for both retarded and non-retarded children. The authors
selected tasks which were able to distinguish between children of different ages. For example,
"it was found that only a minority of 3-year-olds could copy a square, a majority of 4-year-
olds (75% or more) could copy a square, and essentially all 5-year-olds could do so (p. 280)."
If at least 75% of children a certain age could pass a test, then the test was designated with
that age level. This allowed the examiner, by comparing a child’s performance with the norm
for her age, to determine whether even a non-developmentally disabled child’s intelligence
was average, below average, or above average.

In 1911, the scale was revised to raise the ceiling of the level of item difficulty (to one
appropriate for individuals aged 15 years) and to give 5 tests for each age level. This allowed
for a more precise computation of a child’s "intellectual age" (in fifths of a year) which could
be greater or less than, or approximately equal to the child’s chronological age, as determined
by how the child’s performance compared to children younger, the same age, and older than
him or her.

Binet recognized the danger of assigning a child an intelligence age label lower than their
chronological age, noting the potential for self-fulfilling prophecy in the classroom. In
addition, Binet asserted the inconclusiveness of poor test performance, citing lack of
motivation, physical illness, and lack of cultural knowledge as potential confounds. While
Binet believed in an heritable ceiling on intellectual ability, he also believed that the majority
of humans do not function at their intellectual potential, and that, therefore, education could
enhance almost anyone’s intellectual ability. Due to its ease of use, effectiveness, and relative
time efficiency, the Binet-Simon was being used worldwide by the start of the first World
War.

Despite Binet’s objections, in 1911 German psychologist William Stern (1871-1938)

substituted the term mental age (MA) for intellectual age, and proposed that this number be
divided by the child’s chronological age (CA) to derive an intelligence quotient: IQ = MA/CA
x 100. (Both the abbreviation of intelligence quotient to IQ and the multiplication of the result
by 100 to eliminate the decimal point were suggestions of Lewis Terman, who we’ll
discuss later). Binet argued that the distillation of the complex skills and abilities comprising
intellectual function into a construct represented by a single number was a gross and improper

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oversimplification. Nevertheless, the idea of a single indicator of overall intelligence has
historically been popular and endures in today’s leading intelligence tests.

During a hiatus from his studies with Kulpe, Charles Spearman (1863-1945), inspired by
his recent reading of Galton’s work and unaware of Clark Wissler’s recent results discrediting
anthropometric testing for purposes of assessing intelligence, conducted several correlational
studies of sensory acuity and teacher/peer ratings of "cleverness in school". Spearman’s
results included moderately high correlations amongst the sensory measures, and more
importantly, between the sensory acuities and intelligence ratings, which, when he "corrected"
them for attenuation due to the imperfect reliability of his measures, became perfect
correlations of +1.0. (Later in his career, Spearman would dismiss Wissler’s results a having
been the artifact of excessively unreliable sensory measures.) Based on these perfect
correlations, Spearman concluded that his sensory measures were indices of an overall faculty
of intellectual ability, or a ‘general intelligence’ (g) which he believed to be wholly heritable.
Despite the popularity of Binet’s scale, it was Spearman’s concept of a unitary, inherited
intelligence that became the most widely accepted definition of intelligence in America at the
time.

Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957) became the research director at the Vineland, New
Jersey Training School for the Feebleminded after receiving his doctorate at Clark University
under G. Stanley Hall. Goddard translated the Binet-Simon scale (as well as the other works
of Binet and Simon) into English, tested it extensively on Vineland’s students and New Jersey
public school students, and became an outspoken advocate of the effectiveness of Binet’s
methods for distinguishing between children displaying various degrees of mental retardation.
As did many of his contemporaries who accepted Binet’s methods, Goddard rejected Binet’s
conception of intelligence as greatly malleable and adopted, instead, Galton’s, Cattell’s, and
Spearman’s view of intelligence as inherited,

Inspired by this conviction and his finding that many of the children in his public school
sample scored below their age norms, Goddard proceeded to study a family he gave the
fictitious name of Kallikak (Greek for good/bad). The essence of the study was that the
patriarch had a wartime fling with a ‘feebleminded’ barmaid which produced a child who
eventually had 10 offspring, all of whom were undesirables as a result of their lack of
intelligence (according to Goddard). They were mentally retarded, alcoholics, prostitutes,
criminals, etc. When the war was over, the patriarch married a "worthy girl"; the descendants
of this union were almost all upstanding and even prestigious citizens.

These findings led Goddard to loudly vocalize, along with several other prominent scientists,
a call for the mandatory sterilization and/or segregation of ‘undesirables’ (as described above)
to prevent their procreation. In response to this call, at least 20 states and several other
countries passed statutes mandating the sterilization of such individuals, some of which were
enforced until the 1970’s. Goddard’s assertion that approximately 50% of immigrants were
‘feebleminded’ (based on the results of poorly translated Binet-Simon scales administered
under adverse testing conditions) directly effected severe increases in the deportation rates of
immigrants from Ellis Island from 1912 to 1914. During the latter part of his career,
Goddard’s views regarding the nature of intelligence changed such that he agreed with
Binet’s much broader conception of the genetic limits on intelligence and his belief in the
educability of many children who had tested as retarded. Despite the damage Goddard had
done, his work constituted the first large scale use of the Binet tests and the first major
applications of mental tests to social policy.

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Louis Terman (1877-1956), a professor of education and , later, the chair of the
Psychology Department at Stanford University, discovered that Goddard’s translation of the
Binet-Simon was not accurate for U.S. populations as it was. The norms were somewhat
skewed in different directions for different age groups, probably based on cultural differences
(e.g. the 5-year-old questions were too easy and the 12-year-old questions were too hard for
their respective age groups). Terman deleted offending items, added appropriate items, and set
the mean score at 100 so that the average MA and the CA of the groups would be
approximately equal. The results, the Stanford-Binet has been revised several times and is still
one of the most widely used tests of childhood intelligence.

Terman agreed with Goddard that intelligence was genetically transmitted and that a lack
thereof predisposed an individual to an immoral life. He argued, however, with the popular
view of childhood genius as a negative aberration that led to an unsuccessful adult life. In his
search for support of his belief that child geniuses had a greater likelihood of success as adults
than other children, Terman initiated the longest running longitudinal study in the history of
psychology. He began by administering the Simon-Binet to thousands of students in
California schools and comprised his sample of 1,528 kids who were assigned IQ scores
above 135 (his genius cutoff point). These individuals have been (and continue to be) studied
repeatedly throughout their life span and have been found to achieve higher rates of
education, prominence, and overall success and adjustment than non-gifted individuals,
contrary to popular belief at the time the study began.

Robert Yerkes (1876-1956) advocated the administration of all items on the Binet-Simon
to each subject (as opposed to attempting to customize a range of questions appropriate for
each subject) to derive a point score (as opposed to only an IQ score). This would increase the
ease of administering the test and facilitate the statistical analysis of the results, making the
test much more appropriate for group administration. As President of the American
Psychological Association during World War I, Yerkes spearheaded an effort to aid the
military by developing a group test of ‘innate’ intelligence that was easy to administer and
score, which was called the Army Alpha. The illiteracy of 40% of recruits mandated the
development of a performance based test called the Army Beta. Although the Army
discontinued the testing program shortly after the War ended, 1.75 million recruits had been
assessed by that time. Nevertheless, the program was not the great success it is often thought
to have been; apparently, poor test performance only resulted in a recommendation of
discharge in .005% of individuals tested, and even in these instances, the Army often
disregarded the recommendation. However, the widespread publicited of the Army
intelligence testing program cemented the intelligence testing movement as a lasting force in
psychology.

This same publicity was likely responsible for sparking David Weschler’s (1896-1981)
interest in intelligence testing to the extent that, as a graduate student in psychology at
Columbia University, he volunteered to score the Army Alpha tests. Later, as an Army
officer, Wechsler was given the duty of further examining individuals who’d scored poorly on
the Alpha or the Beta using the Stanford-Binet, the most popular individual test of
intelligence availbale at the time. Wechsler criticized the Stanford-Binet as being
inappropriate for evaluating adult intelligence. During his military career, Wechsler was sent
to England to study with Spearman, whose ‘g’ he felt was impressive, but underestimated the
role of motivation and personality in intelligence and failed to recognize the many component
abilities which comprise intelligence. Out of all the popular intelligence tests of the time,
Wechsler had found the Army Alpha to be the most useful because it used the same type of

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items (and measured the same abilities) at all levels of difficulty, alloweing for a comparison
of relatively strong and weak skill areas, and because the point-scale scoring system did not
use a mental age/chronological age relationship, which would be inappropriate for use with
adult populations. Wechsler set out to improve upoon the Army tests when hecreated the
Wechsler Bellevue in 1939 and its revision, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale in 1955.
The WAIS is divided into Verbal and Performance subtests which Wechsler derived from the
Army Alpha and Beta, respectively. The results on the different subtests can be compared for
a multifaceted view of the subjects intellectual abilities (or disabilities). In deference to the
utility of Spearman’s single index of intelligence, however, Wechsler also included a general
deviation IQ score based on the location of the individual’s score on the normal distribution
of scores for his or her age peers. This deviation score method has now been incorporated into
most populat intelligence tests, and the WAIS is now the most popular instrument for the
assessment of adult intelligence worldwide.

The prevailing view of the origins of intelligence today is a pretty moderate view that closely
echoes that expressed by Alfred Binet. Most psychologists believe that there are some genetic
ceilings on one’s level of intellectual ability, but that almost everyone’s intelligence can be
improved by educational intervention. The widely held construct of intelligence is similar to
Wechsler’s idea that an overall ‘g’ probably exists and influences all of our intellectual
abilities, but that there are a number of specific abilities that are required by different tasks to
different extents. Modern discussions of intelligence theorists have expanded to include
debates over the existence of an ‘emotional intelligence’, arguments over the merits and
dangers of sophisticated artifical intelligence, and a variety of controversies over the
applications of intelligence test results. Nevertheless, the age-old polemics regarding the
relative importance of nature and nurture and an exact definiton of intelligence remain alive
and are can be traced in the manuals of intelligence assessment instruments.

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