Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

The testing was supposed to aid military personnel assignment, but there’s a not-so-subtle eugenicist angle there, too: By separating recruits based on IQ, the psychologists could counter the dysgenic effects of war, keeping smarter men away from the line of fire and moving unexceptional men closer to it. There’s not much evidence that the military took the testing effort very seriously, but as a result of the experience, the bionomists gave up on pacifism.