Carl Brigham

Carl Campbell Brigham (May 4, 1890 – January 24, 1943) was an American eugenicist and professor of psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and a pioneer in the field of psychometrics. He sat on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society (later known as the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology) and his early writings heavily influenced the eugenics movement and anti-immigration legislation in the United States. He created the SAT for The College Board.

Early life, family and education Carl Campbell Brigham was born May 4, 1890, in Marlborough, Massachusetts, to Charles Francis Brigham and Ida B. (Campbell) Brigham, the third of four children. His family has roots in early Massachusetts Bay Colony with ancestors that included Thomas Brigham (1603–1653) and Edmund Rice (1594–1663). Brigham's family became wealthy as a result of his grandfather's success in the California Gold Rush. Although many in his family attended Harvard, Brigham earned all of his degrees (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.) at Princeton University. He married Elizabeth G F Duffield on February 10, 1923, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth H. Brigham (b. 1926).

Career

At the outbreak of World War I, Brigham joined the military and was commissioned as first lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps, psychological service from October to December 1917 at Camp Dix. He was then assigned to the Surgeon General's office in Washington, D.C., where he worked with Robert Yerkes to administer the army mental tests to US Army recruits. From January to March 1918 he was at Camps Meade, Lee, and Gordon to conduct psychological experiments. In April 1918, he was assigned to the Tank Corps, but he never served overseas. This test became highly controversial as a methodology for testing mental ability due to its biases favoring Caucasian [white] native-born Americans.

In 1923, Brigham published his influential book, A Study of American Intelligence. Analyzing the data from the World War I army mental tests, Brigham concluded that native-born (Caucasian) Americans had the highest intelligence out of the groups tested. He proclaimed the intellectual superiority of the "Nordic Race" and the inferiority of the "Alpine" (Eastern European), "Mediterranean", and "Negro" races and argued that immigration should be carefully controlled to safeguard the "American Intelligence". Brigham believed that in the early years of the twentieth century, American intelligence was declining because of recent immigration waves from Eastern Europe ("Carl Campbell Brigham: The Man who devised the SAT"). Harvard Professor E.G. Boring suggested that Brigham was not collecting data with scientific purpose which biased his results in favor of his ideas (1923).

The test administered to recruits during World War I was controversial and the inter-group differences were not easily explained. While Brigham conceded that some of the differences in measured intelligence could be attributed to differences in the level and quality of schooling received, he suggested that most of the differences were genetic in nature (Wedell, 1943).

By 1925, Brigham had devised his own college admissions test, known as the Princeton Test. He realized that the SAT test scores do not measure innate ability passed through genes, but are instead a "composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English, and everything else relevant and irrelevant" (Fussell, 2019). Nevertheless, it had already been instrumental in fueling anti-immigrant sentiment in America and in the eugenics debate.

Brigham died January 24, 1943, in Princeton, New Jersey.