William Stern, the creator of IQ (and its biggest critic)

Have you ever been given an intelligence test? Have you had to do, perhaps, a psychotechnic in a selection process? There are various instruments for these purposes, from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) to the always challenging Raven test.

All these resources are not only intended to show us how efficient we are on a cognitive level. Tests that measure areas linked to intelligence also organize us socially based on a list of supposed abilities. For example, let’s think about the Mensa association, a community in which only people with high abilities and those above the 98th percentile enter. Be that as it may, currently, evaluating IQ is still important in many areas and scenarios.

They are used in judicial processes to evaluate the psychological maturity of some defendants. Also when a person has suffered a head injury and we seek to know the extent of the injuries. And, of course, intelligence tests are used to detect the best candidates for a job. Now, there are many voices that have been warning about one aspect for decades.

Using IQ as an exclusive way to measure a person’s aptitude can be discriminatory and also limited. In fact, The first person to warn about the danger of using this indicator as the only mechanism to evaluate human talent and aptitude was its own creator: William Stern.

William Stern regretted having popularized his concept of intelligence quotient (IQ).

Who was William Stern?

William Stern (1871-1938) was a German psychologist and philosopher famous for his notable contributions to the field of intelligence and personality. He coined the term intelligence quotient (IQ) and created innovative instruments to detect aptitude and talent in people. That immediately opened an era in which selection processes began to be regulated by this type of instruments.

Now, if there was an area that benefited from the introduction of the IC, it was children’s. Psychologists had been trying for decades to assess the mental age of children and appreciate individual differences in development. Figures such as Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon had already tried it. However, William Stern provided the defining key.

His theory also proposed the following formula: IQ = cognitive age/chronological age x 100. Chronological age referred to the day and year of the person’s birth. Cognitive is a standardized measure that measures a person’s cognitive abilities compared to the average performance of subjects of the same age.

Thus, with these data, it was established that a person’s mental retardation was established at an IQ of 70-85. Stern warned that this formula should not be used as the only method to categorize an individual’s intelligence.. However, they did not heed his warnings.

Great interest in child development

Stern married another psychologist, Clara Joseephy. If there was a field in which they were both interested, it was learning about child development and that led them to implement a famous project. The Stern couple studied their three children from birth to age 18 to understand how they established language and the entire set of cognitive processes: memory, attention, judgments, reasoning, etc.

A work carried out by Dr. James T. Lamiell collects all the conclusions that the couple reached in that family study. To this end, the IQ test did not measure aspects that are also part of intelligent behavior in children. William Stern highlighted the importance of volitional variables (motivation, resolution) and emotional variables.

For William Stern, emotions are also decisive in evaluating intelligence.

The IQ pioneer who ended up being his biggest critic

The person behind the concept of IQ ended up being its biggest detractor. This is one of the most curious ironies in the history of psychometrics and the study of intelligence. In fact, something that not everyone knows is that William Stern would have liked his name not to be associated with this theory and its now classic formula (Lamiell, 2003, p. 1).

In 1933, he wrote the following words:

The philosophy of personalism versus the mercantilism of personnel selection

If William Stern developed both IQ and other psychometric approaches, it was to know people better, not to delimit their potential based on a percentile. In fact, He was a defender of the philosophical theory of personalism, an approach that perceives the human being as someone free.unique and with inherent value just for being who he is.

Someone who can never be treated as a commodity and who also demonstrates the opportunity to update their potential whenever they want.. All of this contrasts with what was later carried out with his intelligence tests. The work industry and also the military began to select people based on the IQ indicator.

Stern lamented all his life that psychotechnicians turned people into machines for the labor market or the army.. Many saw their opportunities completely limited just by obtaining a low or average score on these tests. It was the beginning of the 20th century and what the father of IQ did not know is that this trend would last several more decades…

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