Social Deviance and the ‘Discovery’ of the Moron

ABSTRACT

American psychologist Henry H. Goddard's introduction of the Binet test in the United States was hailed by contemporaries as a major advance in diagnostic technique. With it he ‘discovered’ the moron, who was believed to suffer from a mild type of mental deficiency that had previously been unidentified. But Goddard had actually grafted his new classification onto an older tradition that was based on social judgments about what constituted normal behaviour. This paper describes the social context of Goddard's discovery along with the assumptions and methods that resulted in his ‘scientific’ confirmation of the earlier, socially constructed prototype.