Some Implications for the Notion of a Culture-Free Test
Our characterization of what one has to do to be clever in Kpelle culture
and what it would take to sample such cleverness in a test must be
discomforting for anyone who imagines that one can construct a culture-free
test of intelligence. Imagine, for example, that by some quirk it was our
imaginary Liberian Binet who constructed the first IQ test, and that other
West African tribal people had adopted it. Next, imagine that American
children were posed items from the West African test. Even items considered
too simple for Kpelle eight-year-olds would cause our children severe
problems. Learning the names of leaves, for example, has proven too
difficult for more than one American Ph.D.14 Our children know some
riddles, but little use is made of such knowledge in our society except for
riddling, which would put them at a severe disadvantage on more “advanced”
items.
If our children were forced to take a test constructed by a West African
Binet, we might object that these Kpelle-derived items were unfairly biased
toward Kpelle culture. If the eventual incomes of our children depended in
any way on their ability to interpret Kpelle riddles, we would be outraged.
Nor would we be too happy if their incomes depended upon their use of their
own riddles as rhetorical devices. At the very minimum, we would want a
culture-free test if real life outcomes depended upon test performance.
However, what kind of test is a West African Binet likely to dream up that
we would consider culture-free? It would not involve a set of drawings of
geometrically precise figures, because Kpelle, a preliterate group, do not
engage in much graphic representation and they have no technology for
drawing straight lines. It would not be recall of lists of nonsense
syllables or even lists of words, because there are no corresponding
activities in Kpelle adult life. We might try a memory test like recalling
all of one’s family, but here the Kpelle, who teach their children
genealogies, would have a distinct advantage: what is the name of your
grandmother’s father on your father’s side of the family? In fact, if we
run down the list of presumably culture-free items that our mental
experiment on Kpelle IQ testing turned up, we would almost certainly find
none of the subtests that have been claimed as culture-free tests of
intelligence in our society. The reason is very simple; our West African
Binet, having scientifically sampled his culture, would have come up with
items that reflect valued activities and that differentiate people in his
culture, while Binet and all his successors have come up with items that do
the same job in their culture. They are different kinds of activities.
Our imagined study of cross-cultural test construction makes it clear that
tests of ability are inevitably cultural devices. This conclusion must seem
dreary and disappointing to people who have been working to construct valid,
culture-free tests. But from the perspective of history and logic, it
simply confirms the fact, stated so clearly by Franz Boas half a century
ago, that “mind, independent of experience, is inconceivable.”
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