author
Henry Herbert Goddard
1866–1957
A pioneering and deeply controversial early psychologist, he helped bring intelligence testing into the United States and shaped debates about education, disability, and heredity. His work had wide influence in its time, but much of it is now remembered as a warning about the misuse of science in public life.
2 Audiobooks
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness
by Henry Herbert Goddard
The Criminal Imbecile: An Analysis of Three Remarkable Murder Cases
by Henry Herbert Goddard
About the author
Born in Maine in 1866, Henry Herbert Goddard was an American psychologist best known for his work at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. There he studied intellectual disability and introduced Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon’s intelligence test to English-speaking readers, helping popularize mental testing in the United States.
Goddard became widely known through The Kallikak Family (1912), a book that argued that "feeble-mindedness" was strongly hereditary. That work was highly influential in its day, but it is now broadly criticized for its methods, its assumptions, and its role in promoting eugenic thinking and segregationist policies.
Because of that history, Goddard is remembered in two very different ways: as an important figure in the early spread of psychological testing, and as a cautionary example of how scientific authority can be used to support harmful social ideas. Later in life, he distanced himself from some of his earlier conclusions, but his legacy remains controversial.