0:22
And I think most importantly, the impact Eugenics movement
had, not only on the field of psychology but on the
field of behavior genetics the core, subject matter of this course.
0:32
If you remember from last module, we ended with the term eugenics.
Introducing the term eugenics was actually
Galton introduced in the, late 19th century.
Eu, Greek for well. Genics, born.
0:48
I think, from 100 years out, it's probably a little difficult
for us to, to fully appreciate how it
is that the eugenics movement ever gained in popularity.
But gain in popularity it certainly did, in the late 19th and early 20th century.
There are probably several factors that contributed to the
growing popularity of the Eugenics movement at the time.
1:11
The 18th century, the mid-18th century was
really the end of the Industrial Revolution.
And what happened in the Industrial Revolution,
among other things, is people migrated into cities.
And they migrated into cities because that's where the manufacturing jobs were.
As people migrated into cities, populations grew more dense, and
social pol, pathologies were magnified or amplified.
And things like crime and poverty and crowding, prostitution were observed
at levels that had never been seen before.
And people were worried about how to address these social pathologies
that were actually a consequence of people just crowding into cities.
2:05
With the industrial revolution came affluence.
And, once consequence we now know of affluence is declining reproduction.
And, rates of reproduction decline most rapidly among the most affluent
members of society. So what was happening in England.
Let's say Galtin's England of the mid to late 19th century is this, the elite, the
scholarly elite of the time saw what they thought were growing social pathologies.
While they were reproducing at a much lower rate.
2:37
And they did, and they argued that, that the typical
way of trying to address the social pathologies would not work.
Ethel Elderton was a very famous early statistician disciple of, of Francis
Galton who argued that social conditions alone by improving social conditions.
That would not be enough
to address the pathologies that were a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
What we needed to do, according to Elderton and other
disciples of Galton, was we needed to brea, breed people.
We needed to make sure that the right
people reproduced and the wrong people did not reproduce.
3:18
Again, from, from our vantage point, it may be very difficult
to understand how it is that this ideology ever gained any traction.
But many very popular and influential intellectuals of the time, although they
might not have been card-carrying eugenicists,
were certainly very sympathetic to eugenic ideology.
H G Wells, George Bernard
Shaw, Winston Churchill, John Maynard
Keynes, the American president Teddy Roosevelt.
3:56
And Margaret Sanger. Was he certainly eugenist.
Margaret Sanger is kind of an interesting case, at
least for me, maybe also for you, I think most
of you probably know Margaret Sanger as the founder of
what we in the United States now call Planned Parenthood.
4:29
What I think that is interesting about Margaret Sanger,
at least again from my perspective is, when I
think about Margaret Sanger, I think about someone, who's,
who is a great hero, a great champion for women.
4:39
But if you look at what Margaret Sanger talked about in
terms of eugenics, it's hard to argue that she wasn't a eugenicist.
And how is it that somebody who was a hero could also be
someone who subscribed to what we now believe is a very evil ideology?
I think there's probably a lesson to be learned there, that, that certainly,
I at least, in my opinion Margaret Sanger was not an evil person.
But that she saw eugenics much like Teddy Roosevelt or, or
HG Wells or the others, as something that really could address
the pathologies that they were observing at the time.
What did the eugenicists do?
Well, they did various things to try to popularize eugenics.
5:22
One thing they did, is they did elaborate pedigree, or family studies.
they, they tried to identify very
informative families that could illustrate, eugenic principles.
So one of these famous families is the Kallikak family,
from the United States.
Martin Kallikak was a revolutionary era solider.
And, when he went off to war.
Yeah, it's a little bit hard to see in
the pedigree here, but he made it with a barmaid.
And she's listed as being a feeble-minded, which is a term that was used at the time.
A feeble-minded girl, of unknown family. And he produced a line, of relatives
from, this barmaid. And then when he went home, he married
6:08
a upstanding young woman and produced a second line of relatives, descendants.
And the eugenicists, when they studied
Martin Kallikak's pedigree, what they argued
is that the line from the barmaid included all kinds of social pathology.
Lots of intellectual disability,
prostitution and crime.
But the, the other line produced virtually none of this.
And they calculated the cost of this line to
society and they, they made various cost-benefit analysis and argued
that if only that this women had been sterilized, society
would've been saved the cost of all this social pathology.
6:50
Another thing they did and I don't, in your country
you, you might not have this, but in the
United States we have what are called State Fairs.
And at State Fairs they're, they were
originally agricultural celebrations, and you would bring
your prized animals and, and, and crops and have them judged at the state fairs.
Well, in the early 20th century,
the eugenicists established what are called fitter
family contests, where families were also
judged, human families, just like prize cattle
could, and, could be judged and given a blue ribbon.
Prize families were judged, and so this is a family that won a blue ribbon
for being a very eugenically illustrative family
in, in the Texas State Fair in 1927.
This is kind of interesting family that won a blue ribbon for being very average
in some eastern state. Eugenicists were, were largely successful
in, in popularizing their movement.
Again, not a lot of people would have been members of
Eugenic societies, but the broader public did take up the Eugenic beliefs.
And one illustration of this is just, the popularity of
the name Eugene in the United States given to baby boys.
As you see, the name Eugene increased in popularity until it reached a peak
in the late 1920s and 1930s and then decreased thereafter
for reasons that we'll get to in a little bit.
8:26
Another thing the Eugenicists attempted to do and
were in part, successful, is to influence public policy.
To enact legislation
in the United States.
They, for example, lobbied for immigration restriction acts.
In the early twentieth century, most of the
immigration to the United States was from Europe.
And what the eugenicists argued is that the
best individuals would be coming from northern Europe, and
so they passed a law, or they lobbied to
pass an immigration law in 1924 that restricted immigration
from southern European countries. They also lobbied for sterilization laws.
Most U.S. states and many countries, certainly most of the
European countries, as well as several Asian countries, had sterilization.
Eugenically motivated sterilization laws on their books.
9:37
Remarkably, the sterilization laws in the
United States were supported by the courts.
In a very famous case called Bell versus Buck.
A young woman named Carrie Buck, who at the age of 17, she lived in Virginia.
And at the age of 17, she was raped by a relative.
10:16
And at the age of six months they
decided that her child was also intellectually disabled.
Although I think it's rather questionable whether
or not any psychologists could judge whether or
not a six-month-old child is intellectually disabled.
And the state then moved against Carrie Buck at to attempt to sterilize her.
Carrie Buck argued, got legal representation, and
argued in court against the sterilization, her sterilization.
And this case actually went all the way to
the Supreme Court of the U.S., where it was upheld,
the, the position of the state of
Virginia, and Carrie Buck was actually sterilized.
11:00
In a very famous quote the justice, Supreme Court Justice from the
United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded
that three generations of imbeciles is enough.
A rather harsh statement I, I, you have to admit.
11:15
Oliver Wendell Holmes was actually
an extraordinary jurist, a progressive, but he also
supported eugenic, the eugenic ideology and movement.
11:30
Ultimately I think as you probably know, what
began as the eugenics movement in the United States
and in Europe was taken by the Nazis
to deprive, in an attempt to provide a foundation
for their own mental hygiene, sterilization and
ultimately the Holocaust. When it
was recognized, or revealed that the eugenic movement
influenced early Nazi policy. The Eugenic movement almost overnight
12:04
became unpopular in the West. And along with them behavioral
geneticists, who were once, because of Galton's works, the
darling of early psychology, really became the pariahs, the outcasts.
Nobody wanted to be seen to be doing any type of research
that might in any way be used to support the Nazi regime.
So just like the term, the, the use of the
Eugene to name baby boys declined in the 30s and 40s.
Here I've, I've graphed in blue the rate at which
publications in the psychological literature
talked about the inheritance of behavior.
And what you see is it pretty much tracks the name Eugene, that as Eugene went
up, so did interest in publishing studies on heritability but as Eugene went
down psychologists' interests in inheritance declined rapidly as well.
13:00
What
Gaulden set out to try to accomplish, to establish
psychology as Darwinian, was undermined by the eugenics movement.
And by the 40's and the 50's, very, very
few psychologists were interested in doing behavioral genetic research.
This later will come that there is a, a rebounding of
interest in genetics; which we'll talk about in the next lecture unit.
13:26
That created a void within psychology, and that void was filled by an ideology I
would say is every bit as radical as Henry Goddard's ideology of genetic determinism.
The notion that we can become anything, that we're born blank slates.
This is a quote, a very famous quote from an early
psychologist, John Watson, who is the
founder of the radical Behaviorist movement.
John Watson argued
that you could take a, he, if you gave him a baby,
he could turn that baby into anything he wanted it to be.
14:06
Nobody ever gave their baby to Watson, and
indeed, Watson knew he couldn't really do this.
But it didn't matter.
Behavior genetics was totally discredited, so Watson and his
disciples became ascended.
14:19
And what the Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker calls the blank slate model of
human nature grew to dominate within Psychology for more than a generation.
And this is reflected in the, the notion,
for example, that schizophrenia is caused by the way you were parented.
Schizophrenia by the famous psychoanalytic psychiatrist
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann argued that schizophrenia was caused by
abnormal communication from parents to offspring by schizophrenogenic mothers.
14:58
Or that autism was caused by refrigerator parents.
Cold, unemotional parents. By the well-known autism
research of Leo Kanner. So by the nine, the late 1930s, and
well into the 60s and early 70s, behavior genetics has become discredited.
And it was only in, when people started to do
twin studies again in the late 60s and early 70s,
something that we'll talk about later in the course, that
psychology came to come back and to look at behavioral genetics.
Matt McGueRegents Professor
