The Tangling Tale of Terman's Termites
The Story Behind One of Psychology's Greatest Studies
The year was 1877 when, in a small farm town in the USA, a boy was born to the Terman family. This was their 12th kid but this child was not like the others. Early in his life, it was clear that there was something special about young Lewis.
He spent a lot of his time reading books and pondering upon the things that made people different. He belonged to a town that was built around farming. Most of the children there barely made it past the 8th grade before dropping out to help their families at the farm. It was unlikely that Lewis would spend his life doing much apart from farming.
But he was not okay with that.
At the age of 15, he joined a university where he earned a degree in pedagogy after five years. Lewis had always been told that bookish people don’t progress very far in life. He was told that they end up being shy introverts who get easily bullied.
Terman was not okay with that either. He wanted to know the truth of genius. He wanted to know what made gifted children, gifted.
Chasing the Gifted
In 1903, at age 26, Terman decided to join Clark University which was then under the leadership of one, G. Stanley Hall.
Now, Mr Hall was a bit of an oddball. He didn’t prescribe any formal curriculum to his students at Clark University. He gave them the freedom to pursue any topic they wanted, as long as they pursued it with scientific curiosity and vigour.
Terman, who had always been uncomfortable with rules, thought this was the perfect place for him to flourish.
And flourish he did.
Terman wanted to understand the development of intelligence in young kids and what made them gifted. He didn’t believe it was purely the environment which decided who would be a genius, he believed genetics played a role as well.
He approached Stanley Hall and proposed the idea of mentally testing children to measure their intelligence. Remember, this was a time before the IQ test had even been thought of. Hall was uncomfortable with the idea initially but eventually gave Terman his blessings.
The Birth of Intelligence Tests
With the blessings of his mentor, Terman started working on tests to measure and separate people based on their intelligence. Along with the work of Simon Binet, he developed the Stanford-Binet test to measure intelligence in people.
He described this measure of intelligence as “the ratio of a person’s mental age and their chronological age multiplied by 100.”
This measure is today known as the intelligence quotient (IQ).
Anything that can be measured can be organized in a hierarchy and Terman was a big fan of hierarchies.
He believed in the idea of eugenics which meant that some people are genetically more gifted than the normal population.
They are the superior race.
While others are inferior to the average person, they are inferior by birth.
Sounds a lot like Nazis doesn’t it? That’s because the Nazis also used the idea of eugenics to justify the slaughter of people they considered inferior.
(Of course, Terman didn’t know what was going to happen in the future.)
Now that he had developed a way to measure intelligence, he wanted to study what made people intelligent. He wanted to study the lives of the gifted.
And for that, he started what is today regarded as one of the greatest studies in the history of psychology.
Terman’s Termites
In 1921, Terman decided to decode what made geniuses…well geniuses. He recruited nearly 1500 young children from USA who had scored an exceptionally high score in the Stanford-Binet Test ( IQ > 135 )
He then followed the lives of these ‘termites’ to see who would go on to become what. He had been made to believe that geniuses were reclusive and introverted. Terman wanted to see if that was actually true.
Interestingly, the study was initially planned for a short period of time but the original study is still going on, a century later!
As of 2003, nearly 200 of the termites were still alive and sending back data when asked upon about the updates in their career, family and life at large.
Terman’s termites seemed to form a special relationship with the man himself and Terman himself was very attached to his ‘children’. He became more of a confidant and mentor for these children instead of being a simple detached researcher.
The dedication these termites had towards Terman was unmatchable. When World War II struck, some of them sent back reports to Stanford University from the front lines in Europe!
The study found that a lot of the termites ended up living highly successful lives. Some won the Oscar, some won the Pulitzer prize while others became extraordinary psychologists themselves. But then there were some who lived very mundane lives.
They were police officers, clerks or typists. Some died in combat while others took their own lives. Most of them lived a full life.
What Did We Learn?
Terman’s study was the first longitudinal study carried out in psychological sciences. It tracked the lifetime development of gifted children into a diverse set of experiences.
Most importantly, it taught us that IQ scores and achievement have a decent correlation. It is not a complete association since many people with high IQs did not achieve anything great in life but those with high IQs were more likely to achieve more.
Terman started this study to understand the genetic influence on intelligence in children and to change how people saw giftedness. On both the accounts, this study was a roaring success.
He showed that an innate quantity such as IQ determined achievement in life to a great extent.
One of the people selected in his study was a young Russian boy who was the victim of domestic abuse. The young boy was in a juvenile centre when he was recruited for the study.
This young boy was none other than legendary film director Edward Dmytryk
While Terman passed away in 1956, his study was carried on for years to come and is now in its latter stages as the last remaining termites enter their final years of life.
The young boy who was told he couldn’t dream past the life of a farmer changed the world of psychology forever.
And that is it! Lewis Terman has had quite an interesting life. Do you agree with his premise that intelligence is largely dictated by genetics? Can nurture really change how intelligent we are?
You can let me know your thoughts by replying to this email or in the comments.
Until next time,
Arjun
🛣🖊🎯