The Business of Braininess: The allure of high IQ and the dark side of Mensa

I know my contributions tend to call back to the prehistoric time of 2002 to 2006, when I was completing my first of three (and in three years, fingers crossed, four) degrees. This time, rather than being a ploy to justify my continuing procrastination on the next instalment of the MLM series, my inspiration came from the recent skeptics in cyberspace meetup. Discussion arose around Mensa and whether they were a viable, alternative audience for persons unsuccessful in promoting their pseudoscience via NZ Skeptics. As with any topic where I have a personal stake and Mark Honeychurch, like a moth to a flame, is drawn to its more absurdist elements, anyone on that Zoom call was treated to an awkward, albeit brief, verbal tussle about who was going to write about what.

By the time you read this you will have missed Mark's radio slot where he talks about the more elite high IQ societies, such as Triple 9 and Intertel, but fear not, you can read all about it in next week's newsletter, and hear all about it on the next Yeah…Nah Podcast. Until then, let me whet your appetite with some background about IQ tests and the most well known, but no less ridiculous, high IQ society Mensa.

Full disclosure: I was a member of Mensa for a couple of years. A proctored test offered at my University for a significantly discounted price of $15 CAD. Not having the wisdom of the ancients, two friends and I sacrificed a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon with the promise that Mensa would offer networking opportunities and look spiffy on a medical school or grad school application. We weren't the only ones there and the test had a healthy level of attendance that would exceed many of my real courses (which, being a Classics Major in an Eastern Canadian University, wasn't all that hard).

As I am a product of the broader North American education system and had parents for whom university study was non-negotiable, I would say I had a higher than average exposure to standardised testing (via the SAT and the GRE and other scholastic assessments). The reputation of Mensa as an arbiter of giftedness also permeated my elementary and high school education with Mensa-style questions popping up in homework activities.

All this to say that while the Mensa admission test isn't one you can or need to study for, my overall impression is that if you were at the very least well-read (specifically, mid-century literature a la Catcher in the Rye or similar) and attended school in North America, you had a good chance of passing. But many either simply lack the ego to pursue the testing, or are limited by location of in-person testing and its cost; while I could drink a little bit less when I went out that Saturday, I would not sacrifice my night out for an IQ test nor would I travel 8 hours from my hometown to the only city where the test was offered. In the end, two out of three of us passed the test and I was the only sucker who paid dues. I did so for a couple of years before dropping it when I moved to NZ, being underwhelmed with the social offerings and unimpressed with what was considered publishable content for the regular magazine.

Still, my interest is piqued whenever the newest 2-year-old is signed up. I mean, there's precocious and then there's the unlikelihood that a 2-year old is answering the same test as adults.

And they don't. The Mensa supervised test can only be taken by children over the age of 10-and-a-half, so children under that age are advised to be assessed by an educational psychologist, which opens grounds for a wider range of measures to be implemented and accepted.

What are IQ Tests, where did they come from, and what do they measure?

There were attempts to categorise people by intelligence before IQ tests came into existence but the first person to have a go at a standardised test was Francis Galton, the father of psychometrics and cousin of Charles Darwin, in the late 1800s. Amongst Galton's multitude of interests and contributions was whether human ability was hereditary and early recognition that cultural circumstances did influence a person's capability. Galton hypothesised that there should be a correlation between intelligence and traits like reflexes and head size, but later abandoned this facet of his research when no correlation was found. Galton can also be credited with introducing the word eugenics, championing both the early marriages between families of high rank and the gradual extinction of inferior races.

French psychologist Alfred Binet and his colleagues Victor Henri and Theodore Simon were more successful with the publication of the Binet-Simon test in 1905. The test focussed on verbal ability and was intended to identify children who were struggling at school by comparing them to other children their age. Binet was aware that there were limitations to the scale, and recognised that intelligence was diverse and required further study. Binet's work was translated in 1910 and Lewise Terman of Stanford University revised the test into the form that it is best known as, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence scales. These scales measured knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory, and fluid reasoning.

World War 1 created a demand for an assessment that could better assign recruits to tasks. The Binet-Simon test was deployed in a manner that is now seen as controversial and its data unusable; many of the recruits were recent immigrants with either no English or little familiarity with American culture. While a nonverbal version was developed for this population, poor scores reinforced contemporary racial and nationalist biases that intelligence was innate.

In the 1960s, David Wechsler's Adult Intelligence Scale and Intelligence Scale for Children overtook the Stanford-Binet test in popularity due to its inclusion of nonverbal skills, and is now the most popular test in the US, while a revised Stanford-Binet is still around. Other tests, like the Cattell Culture Fair III, attempt to measure cognitive abilities by removing sociocultural and environmental biases that plague other tests - but many find that it is still not completely free of culture and learning. Cattell Culture Fair III

Eugenics

Henry H. Goddard, who published one of the early English translations of the Binet-Simon test was a eugenicist and utilised the Binet scale in public schools, immigration, and law. Goddard was firmer in his stance that undesirable traits should be weeded out, starting with preventing reproduction by the so-called ‘feeble-minded'; one state was so effective in this that the Nazis sought advice from the Californian government. While the horrors of the Holocaust laid bare the evils of eugenics, in many corners it never fell out of fashion.

Mensa

Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It was founded at Lincoln College, Oxford on October 1st, 1946 by Australian Roland Berrill and Lancelot Ware, a year after Cyril Burt suggested the formation of a similar society during a radio broadcast. The intention was to form a society with the only qualification being a high IQ. Whether the specific requirement of being in the top 2% or if testing was necessary for admission at the outset is unclear, but it didn't take long for disappointment to set in when many of the initial members were not from the aristocracy but from working and lower-class homes and more interested in solving puzzles than philosophising. Mensa membership in the UK grew in the late 1950s with a campaign inviting people to have their intelligence evaluated, and brought to the public the idea that intelligence can be tested and quantified (and that Mensa was the preeminent organisation for this task). Global membership kicked off with the establishment of the American branch of Mensa in 1959 and the efforts of Margot Seitelman. Cyril Burt was named president 1959 but has long since been discredited due to falsifying his research regarding twin IQ scores.

Early on, members hoped that being a member of Mensa would grant social mobility and build towards an intellectual meritocracy. To this end, there has been a prevailing interest in eugenics within Mensa that has swung from eccentric to offensive over the years. American eugenicist Robert Klark Graham created his Nobel sperm bank in 1980. While initially intending to obtain sperm from white, heterosexual, and married Nobel laureates, lack of donors and the age of the survivors necessitated a loosening of criteria to include athletes and run-of-the-mill scholars. Recipients were also required to be white, well-educated, financially comfortable, heterosexual, and married; it's confirmed that Graham advertised in Mensa magazine in one instance to reach his ideal clientele, but Mensa membership wasn't a requirement for women at least. In 1992, Graham claimed that no woman chose a laureate's sperm and at that time, there was none left. By the time of his death in 1999, Graham had a hand in the births of 218 so-called superchildren.

In 1995, the Los Angeles chapter of Mensa ousted its newsletter editor for publishing articles that appeared to advocate the extermination of the homeless, the intellectually disabled, the elderly, and the infirm. Frey argued that she would not print anything that she thought was truly harmful or offensive, nor did she see why people were upset because the contributors of the offending articles didn't have influence over any laws. In another article, she is quoted as saying “I didn't think it was harmful; I don't think it's even that offensive - nobody wants to have a deformed child,”

However, this is not an isolated Mensa member accidentally being given a platform. A list of special interest groups (SIGs) advertised by Mensa groups in Oregon and Boston include an entry for a Eugenics SIG. While the list section for Oregon was last updated in 2003 and the main webpage in 2021, the Boston SIG list was copyrighted to 2022.

Source | Oregon Mensa

In an interview published by SFGate, Frey appears to reveal that one of the offending writers, Jon Evans, had a history of publishing similar articles in the same newsletter prior to her becoming editor. While Frey was dismissive of Evan's views, she is quoted as saying that she didn't get many submissions so she had to print whatever came in. Nikki Frey was not a pariah from Mensa for long; they were a board member of Greater Los Angeles Mensa from 1998-2017, and again served as an Editor or Co-Editor from 2021-2022.

Have things improved now that we are in the 2020s? If Jamie Loftus' podcast My Year in Mensa and numerous articles are anything to go by, the answer is that things are either unchanged or worse. Central to Loftus' experience in Mensa is the unmoderated, American Mensa facebook group Firehouse. In it and during in-person gatherings she encounters an uncomfortable mixture of dorkiness with alt-right ideology and racism, while also receiving the occasional death threat.