Question

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. government developed intelligence tests to evaluate newly arriving immigrants. Poor test scores among immigrants who were not of Anglo-Saxon heritage were attributed by some psychologists of that day to:
A) stereotype threat.
B) innate mental inferiority.
C) savant syndrome.
D) differences in cultural experiences.

Answer 1

Answer:

Psychologists of that day attributed poor test scores to Option B: innate mental inferiority.

Explanation:

In the early twentieth century, there were still many erroneous beliefs about intelligence and there was little consideration of how Western derived intelligence tests had a lot of inherent bias and were not objective measures of intelligence across all human societies. This was tied to eugenics and the idea that persisted from the end of the 19th century up until WWII that racial groups could be improved genetically with a conscious selection of particular traits and attributes. For example, The Immigration Restriction League was founded by three Harvard graduates in 1894 and it was closely associated with ideas of eugenics. The League wanted to prevent any dilution of what they saw as the superior upper-middle-class White stock that they represented themselves. They lobbied for stricter immigration laws under this logic.