INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES. The criticism has often
been made that the responses to many of the tests are so much subject to
the influence of school and home environment as seriously to invalidate
the scale as a whole. Some of the tests most often named in this
connection are the following: Giving age and sex; naming common objects,
colors, and coins; giving the value of stamps; giving date; naming the
months of the year and the days of the week; distinguishing forenoon and
afternoon; counting; making change; reading for memories; naming sixty
words; giving definitions; finding rhymes; and constructing a sentence
containing three given words.

It has in fact been found wherever comparisons have been made that
children of superior social status yield a higher average mental age
than children of the laboring classes. The results of Decroly and Degand
and of Meumann, Stern, and Binet himself may be referred to in this
connection. In the case of the Stanford investigation, also, it was
found that when the unselected school children were grouped in three
classes according to social status (superior, average, and inferior),
the average I Q for the superior social group was 107, and that of the
inferior social group 93. This is equivalent to a difference of one year
in mental age with 7-year-olds, and to a difference of two years with
14-year-olds.

However, the common opinion that the child from a cultured home does
better in tests solely by reason of his superior home advantages is an
entirely gratuitous assumption. Practically all of the investigations
which have been made of the influence of nature and nurture on mental
performance agree in attributing far more to original endowment than to
environments. Common observation would itself suggest that the social
class to which the family belongs depends less on chance than on the
parents' native qualities of intellect and character.

The results of five separate and distinct lines of inquiry based on the
Stanford data agree in supporting the conclusion that the children of
successful and cultured parents test higher than children from wretched
and ignorant homes for the simple reason that their heredity is better.
The results of this investigation are set forth in full elsewhere.[42]

[42] See _The Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon
Measuring Scale of Intelligence_. (Warwick and York, 1916)

It would, of course, be going too far to