Intelligence Testing, Mental Age, and the Question of Capacity in the United States, 1910

Abstract

Intelligence Testing, Mental Age, and the Question of Capacity in the United States, 1910 Chelsea D. Chamberlain (bio) In 1910, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded (AASF), the association's Committee on Classification adopted a new approach to diagnosis. Under this system, a physician or psychologist would administer a Binet intelligence test to determine a subject's "mental age." That age would earn the subject a label: normal, moron, imbecile, or idiot. Psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard convinced the AASF, a group made up mostly of physicians, that the innovation of tying long-standing subdiagnoses like "idiot" and "imbecile"—plus Goddard's neologism "moron"—to the concept of mental age would arm psycho-medical experts with a new definition of feeblemindedness that the public could understand. In his editorial promoting the system, AASF secretary Dr. A. C. Rogers praised mental age as a commonsense way to explain feeblemindedness to patients' relatives and the public at large: "Who is there that does not have a mental picture always in view of the activities and capacities of normal children at different ages?"1 Applications to institutions for the feebleminded from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century show that everyday people did indeed sometimes describe the character and severity of a person's condition by indicating a gap between their chronological age and behaviors. One father applying to a Pennsylvania institution, for instance, explained that his nine-year-old daughter "speaks like a child of four years." Another applicant, a physician, described a fifteen-year-old boy's table manners as that of "a child of five or six years." It is worth noting that in applications such as these, applicants also frequently described patients with animal metaphors, describing eating habits "like a monkey" or singing "like a mocking-bird." Age was therefore one option among many for describing the "peculiarities" of someone suspected of feeblemindedness.2 [End Page 387] When psycho-medical experts adopted mental age as a diagnostic tool, they promoted "double age" as something more than the supposedly natural way that laypeople understood feeblemindedness. They asserted that age and abilities aligned in predictable, precise, and measurable ways. If a child deviated from these stages of development, a skilled psychologist could quantify that deviance and translate it into a diagnostic double age. Crucially, this diagnosis was also a prognosis: those whose mental and chronological ages diverged significantly, experts insisted, were fundamentally dependent, dangerous, and required lifelong institutionalization.3 The concepts of mental age and chronological age helped constitute and legitimate each other in the early twentieth century. As age became a more central organizing feature of American life and governance—reflected in the rise of child study, age-graded classrooms, and laws regarding birth certificates, compulsory education, child labor, and consent—mental age offered a remedy to the problem that there were children and adolescents for whom time since birth did not seem to provide an accurate "standard for measuring maturity." It also proposed that such children could nevertheless be defined and understood in the language of age. Mental age therefore benefited from chronological age's increasingly concrete status and its "supposedly benign universality." At the same time, in promoting the notion that normal children did acquire predictable, identifiable, standardized capacities as they aged, mental age affirmed chronological age as a general measure of maturity and human development. A double age was only necessary for those suspected of asynchrony. It offered a new, scientific way to define, identify, and segregate a pre-existing category of disabled people, the so-called feebleminded.4 Viewing age and disability as intertwined makes it possible to understand the conceptual power and practical implications of double age as a diagnostic measure. As governments apportion rights and citizens claim them for themselves or oppose them for others, they all speak the language of capacity, which is inextricably bound up with both disability and age. The state, in cooperation with psycho-medical experts, has used disability to mark entire groups—including, at various times, propertyless men, women, Native Americans, and Black Americans—incapable of aging into adulthood and the rights that accompany it. As with all categories of analysis...