Stephen Murdoch - Writer

Alison Motluk, Canada's Globe and Mail, September 15, 2007: If you're like me, you don't like IQ tests. For one thing, you find it objectionable that someone thinks they can quantify your smarts that way, especially with the kinds of inane questions typically found on these exams. For another, the tests never seem to yield a score quite high enough, the way a cheap set of bathroom scales never produce a weight quite low enough, so you don't want to put too much faith in it. And according to U.S. writer Stephen Murdoch's intelligent new book on the subject, you're right to be skeptical.

IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea explores how we've become obsessed with trying to measure innate intelligence, and all the many ways that quest has gone wrong. The history kicks off with Francis Galton, the famous British eugenicist. He put together a booth for the London International Health Exhibition of 1884, where he measured people's physical attributes, things like height, hearing and the speed of your punch. He believed that physical superiorities were linked to mental ones (the latter revealed by a person's place in society) and he wanted to prove it. No correlation was ever found, but the enthusiasm for measuring mental acuity caught on. - read article

Midwest Book Review "Stephen Murdoch is a journalist who has done his historical pick and shovel work which should make him the envy of any publication or instructional historian ... Murdoch is not against the concept of testing as an assessment tool, as a matter of fact he feels in some ways that it is the best of a number of very bad systems that preceded it. ... Perhaps [the] best thing about Stephen Murdoch is his tone which is highly interested, and at the same time laid back. He finds it just so interesting that ... many of today's IQ tests are still based on a number of decisions that a handful of men made in a smoky little hotel room in New Jersey right before America entered WW I, in the spring of 1917. These decisions, in light of our 21st century understanding, seem ludicrous at best, and monstrously discriminating at worse."

Ria Julien, Winnipeg Free Press, August 26, 2007 "...a fascinating new work of popular history. In IQ, Murdoch, a former lawyer, puts the assumptions and history of intelligence testing on trial. What he finds is a modern practice, relatively unchanged in a century, that shares an ancestor with Victorian racial science. ...the value of this book is not only in its chronicle of misuse, but equally in its exposing the ruse of intelligence testing itself. These tests, Murdoch shows, while bolstering the hubris of psychologists and proponents of reactionary social policy, have failed to deliver the basic goods."

Stephen Poole, The Guardian (UK), August 11, 2007: Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, had a peculiar mania for measuring things - the curves of a "Venus among Hottentots" he encountered in Africa, for instance, and people's craniums, reaction times and sensory acuity - all in the name of good breeding, or, as he called it, "eugenics". Are IQ tests any more reliable? Murdoch's zestily polemical history recounts their explicit beginnings in the eugenics movement and the horrific uses to which they were then put, including forced sterilisation of "imbeciles" in the US. Officers in the US military were contemptuous of the results of mass testing of their men, and Murdoch is similarly contemptuous of psychologists, though he shows persuasively that early on they explicitly sought power and influence through claims that their tests were scientific, and demonstrates that even modern IQ tests are made up of a haphazard accretion of questions born from expediency, not from any lucid theory about what they might measure. The book takes in arguments over the old 11-plus exam, the reliance on IQ scores to determine if US prisoners may be executed, and the furore over alleged "racial" differences in IQ. Perhaps there is something called "general intelligence", the author accepts, and perhaps you can test it - but not like this. Now, back to my Nintendo for a spot of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training."

Daily Mail, UK, August 10, 2007, Rita Carter writes: "The book's strength lies in its detailed analysis and intriguing historical detail... ...Murdoch leavens his prose with personal anecdotes and case studies, and he writes fluently (as you would expect of a journalist who has contributed to many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines). If you are interested in the subject of IQ already, you will find it fascinating."

Gordon Parsons, UK Morning Star, July 29, 2007: "Murdoch's highly readable account of a failed idea that is nevertheless still dangerously active in the present may be acutely summed up in the words of one of the more enlightened psychologists Howard Gardner. "Intelligences (note the plural) are not things that can be seen or counted ... they are potentials - presumably neutral ones - that will or will not be activated, depending upon the values of a particular culture, the opportunities available in that culture and the personal decisions made by individuals and/or their families, schoolteachers and others." - read article

Marek Kohn, The Independent, United Kingdom, July 20, 2007: "Murdoch's efforts to develop a transatlantic perspective on IQ come as a pleasant surprise in a field shaped by US concerns. So does his engaging and lively style. Perhaps uniquely among books about IQ, this one is a page-turner. His sympathy for students and teachers alike makes it easy for the reader to warm to him in turn." - read article

Booklist Like the polygraph, the intelligence test gained acceptance more for its practicality than its scientific rigor. As journalist Murdoch tours its history, introducing the psychologists who promoted mental tests and a series of people affected by them, he makes plain his dubious view of IQ tests. Yet in a rough-and-ready way, they continue to suit organizations that need to categorize masses of people according to brain power, such as schools and the military. Murdoch recognizes the IQ test's utility while arraigning its pretenses to objective measurement. The author argues that case effectively as he delves into the construction of tests by nineteenth-century eugenicist Francis Galton, early-twentieth-century psychologist Alfred Binet, American psychologists in World War I, and contemporary testers. Behind the professional history, however, Murdoch's readers may be most engaged by personal stories arising from forced sterilizations in 1920s America, or the tragedy of an Ursula H. swept into Nazi Germany's policy of murdering the mentally handicapped. Including discussion of the SAT, Murdoch challenges IQ testing while he ably relates its century of application.

Russell Martin, author of Beethoven's Hair, Picasso's War, and Out of Silence "The good news is that you won't be tested after you've read Stephen Murdoch's important new book. The better news is that IQ: A Smart History Of A Failed Idea is compelling from its first pages, and by its conclusion, Murdoch has deftly demonstrated that in our zeal to quantify intelligence, we have needlessly scarred--if not destroyed--the lives of millions of people who did not need an IQ score to prove their worth in the world. IQ is first-rate narrative journalism, and a book that I hope leads to important change."

Publishers Weekly With fast-paced storytelling, freelance journalist Murdoch traces now ubiquitous but still controversial attempts to measure intelligence to its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He takes readers back to 1905 when French psychologist Alfred Binet first formulated tests to measure reasoning, language, abstract thinking and complex cognitive abilities. However, many psychologists began to use the tests as a device to separate the mentally retarded from the rest of society. As Murdoch points out, the tests were often administered unfairly to members of various races, offering proof to the test's administrators of their own theories that intelligence was linked to race. Murdoch also demonstrates that the tests were often used as eugenic devices. In the landmark case of Carrie Buck, faulty IQ testing was used as a justification for involuntary sterilization as part of a move to eliminate feeblemindedness in future generations. Murdoch concludes that IQ testing provides neither a reliable nor a helpful tool in understanding people's behavior, nor can it predict their future success or failure. While much of this material is familiar, this is a thoughtful overview and a welcome reminder of the dangers of relying on such standardized tests. (June)

Dr. Paul A. Lombardo, Author of Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court & Buck v. Bell "Stephen Murdoch delivers a lucid and engaging chronicle of the ubiquitous and sometimes insidious use of IQ tests. This is a fresh look at a century old and still controversial idea--that our human potential can be distilled down to single test score. Murdoch's compelling account demands a reexamination of our mania for mental measurement."

Dr. Howard Gardner, Author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century "An up-to-date, reader-friendly account of the continuing saga of the mismeasure of women and men."