Timothy Bates@timothycbates
Lewis Terman can't defend himself against this travesty from Malcom Gladwell, but we can do it for him.
Here's the real study results from Terman's own volumes (Genetic Studies of Genius) and later analyses.
Terman identified ~1,528 California schoolchildren with Stanford-Binet IQs of 135+ (average around 150).
He followed them studiously for decades with follow-ups continuing after his death.
His goal was to replace myths about "geniuses" with data on their development. People thought IQ might cause lower health, physical weakness, susceptibility to disorder. Terman tracked not only IQ but personality, health, family background, and life outcomes.
The result? The group as a whole crushed general population benchmarks.
By their mid-30s (and this is close to the Great Depression) ~70% of the men and ~67% of women had bachelor's degrees vs. ~8% nationally at the time
Close to a 10x out performance !!
At a time when few entered let alone stayed on at University, many "Termites" pursued and achieved graduate degrees (97 PhDs, 57 MDs, etc.).
By their mid-40s, 96%+ of men were professionals or semi-professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, academics, etc.).
Incomes were roughly double the national white-collar median. Imagine: A single level to pull and you double national incomes!
They produced thousands of scientific articles, books, and patents. This was then replicated in wonderfully detailed and prodigious Vanderbilt studies.
Their health, far from poorly, was better and they had lower rates of divorce and fewer psychiatric problems.
The sample, which based on Gladwell's presentation we should expect from regression to the mean to be downwardly socially mobile , was massively upwardly mobile.
Even relative to their (already fine) childhood homes. High IQ predicted climbing the socioeconomic ladder, not coasting on family money.
Hoping to obfuscate all this success, Gladwell spins a yarn for y'all.
His claim that "rich smarts" had a silver spoon in their mouths while poor smarts were "utter failures" (imagine saying THAT in 2026…) is nonsense and betrays Terman's own words and findings.
Terman did examine differences in adult achievement (A: highest ~top third or so; B: middle/moderate professionals; C: lowest ~bottom 20–30%).
There was a correlation with childhood family socioeconomic status (SES): A's had more parental education/support/resources on average; C's had less.
But the "C" group ("failures" according to Gladwell) far from "produced nothing" Most won college degrees. Most won professional or semi-professional jobs. Most had incomes and achievements well above the general population. Framing these people as underachievers is a disgrace, TBH.
Terman was one of those leading the emphasis on both the need for opportunity and a society which encouraged education, had capital to allocate, enforced the rule of law etc.. And to emphasize the role of "non-cognitive" traits of conscientiousness (persistence, drive, goal setting and ambition). He also emphasised the need for good health.
He didn't pretend that we do not stand on the shoulders's of giants (those who gifted us our current SES) but he did show in staggering detail, the amazing accomplishments of all of these children, identified at a young age as having already college-level knowledge and ability.
Puff like poverty "reduces a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity" is debunked in the American context by the whole cohort outperforming expectations massively. Not just the tippy top, but the cohort as a whole . Resoundingly.
Terman, and no scientist you will find, ever claimed IQ alone guarantees universal leadership or output - the idea of "just one thing", here as everywhere is a distracting red herring.
What Terman did was revolutionize what we know about just how strong a predictor of life success high IQ is. And how precious those point-1 percent are.
It is curious that Terman missed William Shockley and Luis Alvarez (future Nobel physicists). Shockley was co-inventor of the transistor and father of Silicon Valley (along with Frederick Terman, the son of Lewis Terman, who in turn created the "Stanford Binet" IQ-test and did much to promote Stanford and IQ).
As the late Danny Kahneman would have point out, calling out this miss of two people in a sample of 250,000 is to commit the fallacy of low base-rates: Sampling ~1,500 out of ~ 250,000 kids makes missing a 2 people in the extreme tails a likelihood, not a fatal flaw.
This is classic Gladwell: Storytelling with punchy examples, but under scrutiny, the specifics on Terman all fall apart.
Unlike Gladwell, Terman's results stand the test of time far better than any pop-psych retellings.
h/t @charlesmurray
