To make the point even more vividly, suppose
you are a ghetto resident in the Roxbury section of
Boston. To qualify for being a policeman you have
to take a three-hour-long general intelligence test
in which you must know the meaning of words like
"quell," "pyromaniac," and "lexicon." If you do
not know enough of those words or cannot play
analogy games with them, you do not qualify and
must be satisfied with some such job as being a
janitor for which an "intelligence" test is not re-
quired yet by the Massachusetts Civil Service Com-
mission. You, not unreasonably, feel angry, upset,
and unsuccessful. Because you do not know those
words, you are considered to have low intelligence,
and since you consequently have to take a low-
status job and are unhappy, you contribute to the
celebrated correlations of low intelligence with low
occupational status and poor adjustment. Psycholo-
gists should be ashamed of themselves for promot-
ing a view of general intelligence that has en-
couraged such a testing program, particularly when
there is no solid evidence that significantly relates
performance on this type of intelligence test with
performance as a policeman.