‘The intelligent and the rest’: British Mensa and the contested status of high intelligence

Introduction

In the late 1940s, a society was founded in Great Britain that centred around the wonders of thinking and intelligence. The members of this emerging ‘high IQ society’ were captivated by outstanding cognitive abilities and sought to form a group in which extraordinarily intelligent people could meet. Yet an author in the first issue of the Mensa Magazine suspected that few of his peers would qualify as sufficiently bright:

What is intelligence? Psychologists debate this question until their definitions become too complex for comprehension and too indecisive for meaning. Test constructors spend ten years on the perfection of a yard stick for measuring intelligence and then everyone spends the next ten years in casting brickbats of criticism at their laborious construction. Educational authorities adopt this or that test in order to allot the children under their care to appropriate secondary schools, and no one, parent, child or teacher, is satisfied with the results. So it would appear that intelligence is something too abstract…for us to be able to grasp.…Yet, when we meet our fellow men, how quickly we can place them into one of their two classes…the intelligent and…the rest. It takes but a short time and a brief conversation for one of the first category to classify his fellows, and what an alarmingly small number can be firmly placed in category one! (J. M. C., 1947)

Whichever reading one prefers, it will demonstrate how deeply statements about intelligence were intertwined with judgements about oneself, others, and society at large. The history of British Mensa offers abundant examples of such entanglements. This article explores the history of the association to examine public conversations on (high) intelligence and its measurement in Great Britain between the late 1940s and the late 1980s.

There is no shortage of publications on intelligence and its testing, and it is well known that, in 20th-century British history, issues of brainpower and mental measurement were a regular topic for scientists and the wider public alike. Since the emergence of intelligence testing in the early decades of the 20th century, the public at large had quarrelled over the definition of intelligence, where it came from, how it could be measured, whether it should be measured at all, how it could be attributed, and what being attributed intelligence should imply practically. ² During the second half of the 20th century, there was much disaccord about intelligence testing in the context of schooling and education. ³ In the late 1960s, publications triggered controversies about the heritability of IQ and postulated intelligence discrepancies between ‘black’ and ‘white’ Americans and Britons. ⁴ When critics posthumously accused the famed psychologist and former Mensa president Cyril Burt of inventing research associates and falsifying his research, the suspicions were widely disseminated in popular print media and brought the credibility of research on intelligence (testing) in general under attack (for a summary, see Wooldridge, 1994: 340–58).

Members of British Mensa participated in many of these debates and did not shy away from antagonizing positions. In the egalitarian years of post-war Britain, Mensa officials saw the group as an elite formed by intelligence and speculated about its potentially influential role in British society and politics (see ‘Foundation, Admission Procedures, and Membership Development’ below). While the opening of secondary education seemed one of the most pressing educational issues for most people in the 1950s and 1960s, Mensa members fuelled the discussion about improving education for the highly intelligent and establishing special schools for gifted children. ⁵ During the decades of heated controversies about the role of nature versus nurture and race differences in intelligence, members deplored ‘the negative correlation between IQ and fertility’ (Weyl, 1982: 3); they thought about producing babies with Nobel Prize sperm bank donors and Mensa mothers (‘Breeding Super People’, 1983) and meditated about the potential use of eugenics to counteract the expected population growth of the ‘impoverished, undereducated, lower-I.Q. peoples of the South’. ⁶ All this may have motivated historian Mathew Thomson to characterize the association as ‘a sect that was predicated on exclusivity and which struggled therefore to overcome a reputation for snobbery, or at best a certain boffinish eccentricity, which left it open to ridicule in the press’ (Thomson, 2006: 265).

I argue that it is through this eccentricity that the history of Mensa can add new perspectives to the history of intelligence (testing), as well as enrich current research on scientific and everyday understandings of cognitive and neurological factors and the ‘social life of the brain’ (Pickersgill, 2013). My suggestion here is that we interpret public claims to be highly intelligent as involuntary ‘breaching experiments’. With this term, Garfinkel (1967) refers to the creation of social ruptures that can serve to make visible social rules and normative assumptions that are left unverbalized in the regular course of social life. This case study thus expands the common focus on positions ‘about’ intelligence and methods of evaluating brainpower and pays attention to communicative patterns and situations in which cognitive factors are debated and attributed (Goodnow, 1984: 392). It aims to strengthen connections between the history of science and knowledge, social history, and research into the creation and contestation of differences (Hirschauer, 2014; West and Fenstermaker, 1995). Not least, this article provides a starting point for a critical and more comprehensive history of British Mensa, which until now has predominantly been narrated from an inside perspective. ⁷

The article first covers Mensa’s foundation, admission procedures, and membership development. It then explores how members promoted intelligence and its testing in membership campaigns, newspaper puzzles, and popular publications. Finally, the article addresses communicative patterns in which Mensa members and journalists debated high intelligence. These are used to discuss how aspects of difference and the ascription of social positions in a democratic society are negotiated in public understandings of intelligence. Temporally, the focus from the late 1940s to the late 1980s gives emphasis to processes and long-term developments in the intelligence debate. Consequently, the article circumvents event-based perspectives and avoids offering detailed accounts of prominent scandals and controversies.

To gain insight into Mensa members’ self-perceptions and self-descriptions, I have studied the association’s journals and some publicity material. ⁸ My analysis also relies on sources that give voice to broader public debates about Mensa and intelligence, such as articles and advertisements in The Times and the Daily Mirror (a tabloid with significantly higher circulation) between 1945 and 1990. ⁹ In some cases, and for specific debates, I have included sources from the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections and the Brian Simon and Michael Duane papers (both University of London, Institute of Education Archives).

Foundation, admission procedures, and membership development

Following a narrative widely related today, Mensa ‘was formed in Oxford in 1946 by Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister and Dr Lance Ware, scientist and lawyer’ (Mensa, n.d.). ¹⁰ In the late 1950s, members also credited Cyril Burt with having provided the major intellectual inspiration for establishing a society of the ‘highly intelligent’. ¹¹ This was said to have resulted from the famous psychologist’s suggestion during a BBC radio broadcast in 1945 that ‘an association or guild’ should be formed ‘whose one qualification for membership should be a high degree of intelligence’. ¹² In accordance with the aspirations of co-founder Roland Berrill, this panel of highly intelligent people was expected to ‘answer questionnaires – like a special Gallup Poll’ and ‘help the Government on the most important problems of the day’ (Whiting, 1950). In 1950, Roland Berrill publicly declared that the new group should ‘be canvassed by governments, and people in authority will know that answers are being given by the finest set of brains in the country’ (ibid.).

Even though the founders had initially planned to limit admission to 600 persons, ¹³ the group accepted all applicants who scored in the top 1% of the population in an intelligence test during the 1950s. ¹⁴ This meant that Mensa welcomed all persons who had reached at least 155 out of 161 possible points in the Cattell Intelligence Test, Scale III. Particularly recommended for adults, this scale included tasks in classification, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, inferences, and word completion. One journalist who tried to take the Mensa entrance exam in 1950 reportedly spent 75 minutes trying to answer ‘twelve pages of typewritten questions requiring mostly “Yes”, “No”, or using an “X” for an answer’:

I thought about eels, garva and tennel fish and decided which species would survive longest in a tank. I looked at eight queer-shaped squares, circles, and half-moons and decided which presented an odd pattern. I fitted 600 words into half-finished sentences. Here’s an example: ‘As spring is to rhythm so days are to…?’ and the answer was ‘Repetition’. I still don’t know why, and Mr. Berrill didn’t say. ¹⁵

In its early years, members pictured the group as ‘primarily a society for research in statistical psychology and sociology by the fourfold method of observation, hypothesis, prediction, and controlled experiment’. ¹⁷ During the 1950s, members spent their time answering questionnaires and interrogatories that were being circulated in the group. These questionnaires were intended to gauge members’ opinions and their views on the world, which were seen as representative of the highly intelligent – and particularly important for that reason.

Accentuating the perceived integrity of the group’s selection process, members lauded Mensa as ‘the only society whose members are selected by a scientific technique’ (Serebriakoff, 1959). This did not rule out sporadic critical discussions about the value of intelligence (testing). ¹⁸ Overall, however, Mensa members’ self-understanding during the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by the idea of an objective criterion applied to the group’s selection methods and, accordingly, the validity of the opinions gathered by the group as representing the views of the highly intelligent.

Besides offering its membership to be used as an object of research, the major practical aim of the association was to provide highly intelligent people with opportunities to meet and converse. Members were supposed to find kindred spirits of similar intellectual capacity, and ameliorate the lifelong experience of being rejected or misunderstood by other people. ¹⁹ To accomplish this objective, the society organized dinners and lectures, and invited its members to gather at an annual meeting. The Latin word mensa – table – is indicative of these social motives feeding into the group’s foundation. ²⁰ Socializing was combined with the broader goal of fostering ‘every specimen of intelligent humanity so that the sum total of human wisdom may be increased’ (J. M. C., 1947). Finally, the group deliberated the education of ‘gifted children’ and asserted the special needs of youth with high IQs. ²¹

Seen from a broader perspective, the group’s foundation reflected a general trend in society whereby science was becoming ‘increasingly high profile as a political issue’ (Godwin, Gregory, and Balmer, 2009: 36–8). In the 1950s and 1960s, members justified Mensa’s activities as reflective of the increasing prestige of knowledge factors. A leaflet from the late 1950s pictured the group ‘in a world which must increasingly make intelligent use of intelligent people’. ²² In a similar vein, the group’s secretary announced that, ‘in an age of atomic power and interplanetary travel’, technological advancements had augmented the role of cognitive factors: ‘Machines are diminishing the importance of all the physical skills, and the one human ability which will be of increasing value is mental ability’ (Serebriakoff, 1959).

Nevertheless, Mensa membership remained quantitatively insignificant. Total membership was well below the threshold of 1000 persons during the 1940s and 1950s. ²³ At the end of the 1950s, the group began actively seeking to attract new members through advertisements in newspapers and journals, ²⁴ and numbers rose to 2500 in 1964. ²⁵ Throughout the 1970s, UK membership figures fluctuated between 2000 and 2750. ²⁶ The 1980s brought a rapid increase: official Mensa statistics reported about 3400 members for 1980, about 5000 for 1981, 7800 for 1982, 9100 for 1983, and almost 13,000 for 1984. ²⁷ By the end of the 1980s, figures had reached new heights with 25,000 members. ²⁸ In September 2020, Mensa counted around 20,000 members in the UK, and ‘more than 120,000 world-wide’ (Mensa, n.d.).

Parallel to the rise in membership in the late 1950s, the society, which at first was concentrated in the London area, began to spread to regional groups. ²⁹ In the mid to late 1960s, Mensa started to gain members in the United States and Canada, ³⁰ and membership numbers abroad began to surpass those at home. ³¹ Since the late 1960s, Mensa had also begun to face competition, as additional groups emerged that admitted their members based on their above-average performance in intelligence tests. These groups tried to legitimize their existence and prove their exclusivity by establishing even stricter admission procedures.

Intertel (https://www.intertel-iq.org), established in 1966, accepted only those individuals who scored in the top 1%. The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (https://www.thethousand.com), founded in 1974, and its spin-off, the Triple Nine Society (2020), founded in 1978, targeted the top 0.1%. With an acceptance rate of 1:30,000 of the population, the now defunct Four Sigma Society, established in 1976, and the Prometheus Society (http://prometheussociety.org/wp), founded in 1982, established even more restrictive membership requirements. This ongoing contest among these groups culminated in the 1982 founding of the Mega Society, a group that described itself as bringing together ‘one in a million’, and which opened its arms to those who scored in the top 0.00001% in an intelligence test (Mega Society, n.d.). Possibly in reaction to this flourishing of high-IQ societies, the Daily Mirror in 1970 reported on the founding of a ‘Densa’ society for people ‘with IQs less than 48’, allegedly founded by ‘sixty anti-elitists who were against long-haired intellectuals with silly pretensions’ (‘Clever Dunces’, 1970). This, in fact, turned out to be a hoax.

Mensa and public understandings of intelligence (testing)

In accordance with Mensa’s overall aims and interests, the society contributed to public understandings of intelligence and its testing; it functioned as a kind of lobbying group for intelligence measurement and IQ valuation, and played a pioneering role in promoting intelligence testing for adults. In their campaigns for intelligence and its testing, Mensa members combined scientific findings and everyday interpretations of brainpower; they ‘adapt(ed) psychology to their own local needs in the process of adopting its insight’ and thereby exemplify that the ‘loop between psychologists and their publics involves many epicycles which transform psychology’s message in transit’. ³²

That Mensa attained this role in public understandings of intelligence was not inevitable. It seems that the association’s co-founder Roland Berrill still had his hopes set on phrenology as a viable course in the early years. ³³ Also, in the 1950s and early 1960s, intelligence and its measurement were mostly debated in the field of schooling and education (Chitty, 2007: 65–95; Thom, 2004; Wooldridge, 1994: 294–339). Nonetheless, Mensa officials aspired to become informed about questions of mental measurement and broader concerns in psychology and other scientific fields, and invited eminent researchers to present lectures at the group’s annual gatherings. In November 1956, Philip E. Vernon – Professor of Educational Psychology at the Institute of Education, University of London – gave a speech titled ‘Can Intelligence Be Measured?’ (Vernon, 1959). Cyril Burt, who was introduced as ‘the pioneer of IQ tests in this country’ and ‘the father of modern psychology at London University’ (‘Mensa Annual Gathering’, 1959), presented the 1959 annual lecture on ‘The Gifted Child’. In early 1960, Burt was announced as Mensa’s president (‘Message From the Secretary: President of Mensa’, 1960). In 1961, Hans Eysenck was scheduled for the annual lecture to present his views on ‘The Causes and Cures of Neurosis’, ³⁴ only to be invited again in 1965 to talk about research on psychology and crime (Gallop and Robinson, 1965).

Starting in the late 1950s, the group began to publicly campaign for individuals to test their brainpower and to have their intelligence evaluated. Membership campaigns brought the idea of testing one’s intelligence to a wider public, ³⁵ and advertisements encouraged people to participate in organized examinations of intelligence. ³⁶ The association reached an even wider audience when members published books aimed at challenging people intellectually, ³⁷ and major newspapers began cooperating with Mensa in promoting intelligence games and puzzles.

Kicking off a campaign in August 1970, the Daily Mirror printed a series of puzzles that set out to find highly intelligent individuals (‘Are You a Secret Super Brain?’, 1970). This competition involved about 40,000 participants and resulted in the declaration of an 18-year-old youth as the ‘secret Super Brain of Britain’ (Jones, 1970). In December 1970, The Times followed suit and had parts of the newspaper’s traditional Christmas Quiz designed by Victor Serebriakoff on behalf of Mensa (‘The Times Christmas Quiz’, 1970; ‘The Times-Mensa Quiz’, 1971). In the decades to follow, Mensa members and newspaper publishers continued to cooperate and to combine the publication of puzzles with marketing promotions for recent publications and Mensa membership campaigns. ³⁸

At the same time, Mensa members were involved in publishing intelligence self-test books that allowed adults to self-evaluate, however tentatively, their own level of intelligence. These self-test books may have taken inspiration from older publications with puzzles and tests for adults and children; ³⁹ they also shared similarities with training materials for upcoming school examinations. ⁴⁰ In 1962, psychologist and friend of Mensa Hans Eysenck made a start with Know Your Own I.Q., released by Pelican Books (Eysenck, 1962a). ⁴¹ The publication resulted from Eysenck’s earlier involvement with the TV show Pencil and Paper, which had treated its audience to typical intelligence test questions (Eysenck, 1990: 166–7; Thomson, 2006: 258–61). It included a chapter with general remarks on intelligence and its testing, eight tests in order of increasing difficulty, the answers to the questions, and a key to transform scores into an IQ measurement. Being the first publication in post-war Britain with the promise to enable adults to test and measure their IQ at home, the book became a huge success. The sequel Check Your Own I.Q. reached the public in 1966 (Eysenck, 1966).

By the mid 1960s, Mensa’s secretary and spokesperson Victor Serebriakoff joined the effort with IQ: A Mensa Analysis and History (Serebriakoff, 1966: 23–4). Alongside its coverage of other topics pertaining to the measurement and value of intelligence, the book included an attachment containing an ‘AED Intelligence Test’ (as ‘devised by Mr. A. E. Davies’). It encouraged readers to use the provided ‘short general-ability test for people aged over seventeen years’ to ‘see what an intelligence test looks like and make an approximate test of their own intelligence quotient’ – and, of course, to check their eligibility for Mensa (ibid.: Appendix 2). The ‘AED test’ was comparatively brief and rendered its results in a point spread ranging from 1 to 80. This allowed it to avoid the impression of leading to an appropriate measure of IQ in the sense of standardized psychological tests. This changed a few years later, when Serebriakoff published How Intelligent Are You?, available from the New English Library publishing house (Serebriakoff, 1970). In the preface, the author pointed out that the book had been produced by a non-expert for non-experts, and explained it had been ‘written to create interest in the subject, [and] to give people a harmless opportunity to have fun by checking their intelligence and personality on tests which are parallel with and illustrative of Scientific tests’ (ibid.: 5). The book offered a combination of tests in verbal reasoning, numeracy, and spatial recognition that were meant to determine the reader’s IQ, as well as tests relating to personality traits and creativity.

In the ensuing years, Mensa members produced further publications on IQ self-testing for adults. ⁴² They also expanded the target group when Victor Serebriakoff and Steven Langer published Check Your Child’s I.Q. (Serebriakoff and Langer, 1979). This move was in line with a broader trend towards searching for and identifying high intelligence in children, and coincided with debates about the specific needs, problems, and potential of ‘gifted children’. ⁴³ The authors, among other things, legitimized the publication by stressing the right of parents to gain psychological information through testing their children at home, and explicitly opposed the position that only trained psychologists, social workers, or teachers should have access to psychometric testing procedures and their results (ibid.: 4–5).

All in all, the interpretations and adaptations of intelligence and its testing brought to the public by Mensa members can be characterized by two correlated aspects. On the one hand, publications and campaigning activities strengthened the competitive spirit in games and puzzles designed in the main to be entertaining. On the other hand, and in a reciprocal movement, members merged fun and science in an open attempt to encourage people to acquire psychologically inspired knowledge about themselves and their cognitive powers. It seems only logical that, by the 1980s, Mensa advertisements would be using puzzles and intelligence tests interchangeably. A membership advert in the Daily Mirror in 1983 thus invited the reader to solve a little riddle by finding the odd one out in a series of images, numbers, and letters (‘Put Yourself to the Test’, 1983). The advertisement then rephrased the request as ‘Try this mini I.Q. test to find out if you are eligible for membership to Mensa’. ⁴⁴

‘The intelligent and…the rest’: Intelligence and ‘doing difference’ in British Mensa

Mensa campaigns for high intelligence do not only point to public interpretations of brainpower between science and the everyday; they also show how public understandings of intelligence were used to ‘do difference’ – that is, to constitute social differences between people, and to negotiate their intersections, in an ‘ongoing interactional accomplishment’ (West and Fenstermaker, 1995). As a result, statements about intelligence became entwined with discussions about the attribution of social positions, and the legitimization of equalities and inequalities in a democratic society.

Mensa had been established as an organization based on creating social difference and distinction via its reference to intelligence. This was already manifest in the early metaphors and images used to characterize the group. The inaugural issue of the Mensa Magazine in 1947, for instance, referred to the group as ‘an exclusive round-table society’ (‘The Mensa Magazine’, 1947) and a ‘gay little aristocracy’ (Honorary Secretary, 1947). In a similar vein, co-founder Roland Berrill in a 1950 newspaper interview described Mensa as an ‘aristocracy of brains’ (Whiting, 1950; see also ‘Today Drops In on…’, 1960).

Mensa members had the hope that cognitive power might become increasingly salient for the ascription of social positions. Not uncharacteristically, a Mensa member in the 1960s pinned his hopes of achieving upward social mobility on Mensa, assuming that the ‘Mensa pin will become an even more potent symbol than the Eton tie, for the tie only means you went to Eton’ (Simons, 1964). Voiced in the year when Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister Alec Douglas-Home was beaten by the Labour Party, this interpretation prioritized cognitive capacity above educational attainment, along with the financial and cultural preconditions on which it often relied.

Since the late 1950s, aspirations for social mobility through cognitive capabilities were sometimes presented as a step towards building an intellectual ‘meritocracy’. The term had become prominent with the publication of Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033 in 1958. The essay presented a gloomy picture of what might happen if societal positions were distributed based on the principle of measured intelligence and effort. ⁴⁵ Mensa members adopted the term with some reservations. ⁴⁶ Nevertheless, Cyril Burt proceeded to muse about the role of Mensa members in a potentially evolving ‘meritocracy’ without any hint of irony:

But the most important question relates to the part that the Mensa type of mind should play in a modern society. We believe in a democratic society. This commits us to a belief in egalitarianism as regards political rights and educational and vocational opportunities; but (I would contend) it does not commit us to a belief that ‘all men are born equal’ in natural ability. This entails certain practical difficulties even if it does not entail a practical inconsistency. It would seem to imply that the conclusions of 5 per cent who are most intelligent can be outvoted by the verdicts of the 50 per cent who are below average intelligence.…What are the solutions to all these conundrums?…What would be the advantages or the dangers of an intellectual meritocracy? (Burt, 1962)

In fact, Mensa proponents struggled to find a sufficient connection between distinction and exclusivity on the one hand, and time-specific interpretations of equality and democratic principles on the other. In this regard, it is illuminating to take a closer look at how Mensa members communicatively accentuated intelligence, and how they related it to other categories commonly invoked to distinguish, classify, sort, and position people. One interesting example can be found in Victor Serebriakoff’s 1966 monographic account of the group. There, the Mensa honorary secretary stated,

Mensa has members in every occupation and from every social class. It does not recognise distinctions of race, politics, or religion. It is uncommitted, non-profit-making; a disinterested forum where intelligent people of all callings and social classes can discuss their differences and agreements in an atmosphere which is normally one of sophistication and urbanity. Mensa is protean; its most visible feature is its diversity. (Serebriakoff, 1966: 23)

The main emphasis in similar statements was on class and, related to this, educational attainment. Cyril Burt, for instance, proudly offered in 1965 that, when teaching ‘tutorial classes for working men and women’ at the University of London, his suggestion ‘of an all-class intelligentsia…was taken quite seriously, and many offered to join’ (Burt, 1966: 19–20). Such accentuations of social diversity allowed the rhetoric to turn from exclusivity towards a selection principle that could be understood as promoting equality and participation. For an ‘all-class intelligentsia’ such as this would ‘admittedly constitute an élite; but, drawn from every rank and occupation, it would essentially be a democratic élite’ (ibid.).

Besides social diversity, self-descriptions of the group also accentuated its cultural and political plurality. A leaflet from 1957 introducing Mensa depicted its members as virtual personifications of open-mindedness (Cohen-Cole, 2014):

Those who come to gatherings at first seem ordinary; but it soon is evident that they are interested in everything, listen to anything and dispute most things. Their artistic sense is strongly developed. Some of them are also very witty; the only obstacle to progress at meetings is laughter. Their anger is kept for but one thing, the person who holds forth dogmatically. ⁴⁸

‘The other 98 per cent’: Differences in public reactions to the group

Yet despite these efforts, public reactions to the group, overall, remained scathing. While, in entertaining and ‘training’ contexts, mentions of Mensa could have a positive tone, journalists found the general idea of forming a group of highly intelligent people rather appalling, and viewed the association as either a social provocation or a personal embarrassment. I refer to this phenomenon when I understand Mensa’s activities as involuntary ‘breaching experiments’ (Garfinkel, 1967).

A journalist in The Times in 1963, for instance, blamed Mensa for endangering established social standards, observing there was

something alarming about the very thought of Mensa, the high I.Q. association; something vaguely un-British in the idea that people should band together simply because they are more intelligent than the rest of society. The notion might have come straight from the pages of Aldous Huxley, or even George Orwell. (‘Perhaps They Are Mere People’, 1963)

Particularly the group’s membership policy of admitting those scoring in the top 2% in an intelligence test and thereby excluding the majority of people prompted derisive reactions. Journalists publicly announced they had failed the Mensa membership examination (Whiting, 1950). They questioned the relevance and reliability of intelligence tests (‘Are You (a) a Genius?’, 1962), explained that cognitive powers did not imply moral or personal worth, ⁵⁰ or rejected the idea of becoming a Mensa member altogether. Hence, if Mensa sources document various practices of ‘doing difference’ through referring to high intelligence, newspaper articles dating back to the 1950s showcase a number of attempts to question or reverse these efforts.

An article from the Daily Mirror from 1961 is illuminating in this respect. It opened with a declension of the Latin word mensa. This was meant ‘to welcome a society called The Mensa Society’, whose members ‘profess to be people who mentally are a cut above us all’. The columnist proceeded to ridicule a Mensa member’s comment at the group’s annual gathering, which had just taken place in ‘a Bloomsbury hotel’. In the report, the member attested to feeling ‘grateful to Mensa “because every time I start talking nonsense, I am not only told so but proved up to the hilt”’ (‘Table, o Table’, 1961). This led the columnist to declare the following:

Have a care, O Table! Have a care!

Bang goes Edward Lear and the Owl and the Pussy Cat setting out to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.

Bang goes Lewis Carroll.

Bang goes Alice in Wonderland.

Bang goes the Jabberwock, the Jubjub Bird, the Tumtum Tree, the Frumious Bandersnatch, the Slithy Toves, the Wabe, the Borogoves, the Vorpal Sword, the Uffish Thought, the Manxome Foe, the Tulgey Wood and the Frabjous Day – Callooh! Callay!

On second thoughts, and because nonsense is so dear to me, I will not be any part of a Table, to, or for a Table, with, by or from a Table. (ibid.)

Statements that questioned the constitution of difference through reference to intelligence also occurred as commentary on everyday situations and capabilities. A common narrative in newspaper articles cast doubt on Mensa’s cognitive superiority using anecdotal evidence of mental and/or practical shortcomings among its members. For instance, a journalist from the Daily Mail shared this observation from Mensa’s 1964 annual meeting: ‘Two out of every ten tried to enter the hall by pulling a door marked “Push”, which is about the national average’ (Grevill, 1964). With a hint of wicked glee, another journalist cited a press handout that was circulated before the 1963 annual meeting. In the journalist’s words, the handout portrayed Mensa as ‘a group of verbally skilled people of considerable insight’ (‘Perhaps They Are Mere People’, 1963). It

went on to speak of members ‘thrashing out their differencies’ at meetings, of ‘the principle Mensa tenet that gifted people should use their greater share of the national pool of intelligence for the benefit of society in general’, of the many ‘proffessors’ in the association’s ranks, and of its ‘completely independant’ journal. (ibid.) (original emphasis)

Newspaper articles illustrate various approaches to dealing with the status of extraordinary intelligence in general and the role of a high IQ society in particular. While some questioned hierarchical concepts and ascriptions of high intelligence directly, others reveal scepticism only of the right of Mensa in particular to represent the highly intelligent. A journalist disapproving of Mensa and the invention of a high IQ society, for instance, critically mirrored and reversed phrases such as Mensa’s ‘the intelligent…and the rest’ by describing non-Mensa members as ‘the other 98 per cent’ (‘Perhaps They Are Mere People’, 1963). The writer of a letter to the editor in the Daily Mirror simply put forward that ‘most bright women are simply too bright to join egghead societies’ (Proops, 1962). The author of an article from the 1980s put it even more bluntly: ‘One of my definitions of a fool is someone who joins a society in order to prove how clever he is’ (Green, 1980).

Differences against differences

Despite these critical positions, it seems that journalists found it difficult to transcend the taxonomy of differences altogether and to argue in favour of an ‘equality of intelligences’. ⁵¹ Recalling the reflections in Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’, this concept values the creation of temporary and situational moments in which hierarchies inherent in the concept of intelligence are contested, and the ‘presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone’ prevails. ⁵² One could argue that egalitarian moments emerged in light-hearted tones or when narratives about intelligence drew positively on self-depictions of leisure and failure. Yet more often than they created situations of equality, journalists reacted to claimed differences in brainpower by bringing a variety of additional differences into the conversation, and tried to strike a balance of inequalities that they perceived to be tolerable.

For example, a report on Mensa’s annual conference in 1964 noted, ‘Yes. They do look different. The egg-heads of Mensa were having their annual get-together at the French Institute during the weekend. There was something about all those domed heads and sharp-nosed women which set them apart from lesser beings’ (Grevill, 1964). The main aim in this passage was not to question the categories used to constitute difference by reference to intelligence in themselves. Instead, the speaker added at least one more category of producing difference (personal appearance) – perhaps even two, if we include the gender-sensitive descriptions of bald men and sharp-nosed women.

Indeed, journalists employed gender ascriptions regularly to counterbalance and neutralize Mensa’s efforts to positively constitute difference through reference to high intelligence. Newspaper articles denied Mensa members’ ‘straight’ masculinity both directly and indirectly, and did so in a pejorative way. An article from 1950, for instance, commented on Mensa founder Roland Berrill, who liked to wear bold colours: ‘Is Mr. Berrill married? No, because he claims that a wife would prevent him from spending money on Mensa, which costs him £1,000 a year’ (‘He Seeks Wisdom’, 1950). And it does not seem to have been accidental when another newspaper article described a self-description by Mensa members as calling

irresistibly to mind the scene in Proust where the homosexuals recognize each other: the footman, the man going to the ball, the husband, all members of an involuntary secret society, linked by invisible bonds stronger than those of family or any other social group. (Vaizey, 1966) ⁵³

Characterizations of women began to change from the late 1960s, when newspaper articles began to connect brainpower and attractiveness. ⁵⁴ The Daily Mirror brought the association between intelligence and looks to the fore when, in 1984, it reported about an actress under the headline ‘Pretty Smart’. The article contained a photograph of the young woman in a bathing suit of sorts. The caption read, ‘Actress N[…] C[…] is as brainy as she is beautiful. In a Mensa test her IQ was measured as 137, putting her in Britain’s top two per cent for brains’ (‘Pretty Smart’, 1984). This shift towards connections between intelligence and attractiveness in women could also gain sexual connotations. An article from the 1970s, for instance, outlined findings by a US scientist that ‘brainy birds make better bedmates’ (Dowdney and Jackson, 1974), and in November 1985, even Playboy brought out a piece: ‘The Women of Mensa: America’s Smartest Females Pose Nude’ (1985).

Another example of contingencies and shifting connections between categories with which differences were constituted concerns the status of intelligence combined with age. The figure of the ‘gifted child’ remained linked with stories of educational problems and personal failures in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, highly intelligent children could be described in more friendly tones, ⁵⁵ and journalists did not mind positively quoting an individual’s IQ and publicly comparing it with those of others when it concerned children and young people: ‘Schoolboy P[…] H[…], 14, from Cefn Cribbwr, South Wales, was given top marks by Mensa. A test put P[…]’s IQ at 175 – the same as Einstein and an estimated 15 points above Margaret Thatcher’ (‘Paul’s a Genius’, 1987).

The examples of gender ascriptions and young age therefore show that not only were the categories used to create or question difference and to negotiate (in)equalities highly contested in themselves, but their internal connections and potential combinations were also subject to struggles and historical change.

Conclusion: Intelligence, knowledge, and the constitution of (in)equalities

The small set of Mensa members tended to emphasize their cognitive capacities as extraordinarily high; they campaigned for IQ measurement and disseminated knowledge about intelligence and its testing. Yet the criticism and ridicule that such activities provoked indicate that journalists considered it to be rather inappropriate for an adult to publicly claim he or she was highly intelligent, or to socialize only with other individuals that could prove their extraordinarily high IQs. If the ‘cerebral subject’ ever was a central ‘anthropological figure of modernity’ (Vidal, 2009), for the ‘Mensa member’ it remained a highly controversial one that did not become self-explanatory.

Both members’ statements and public reactions to the group illuminate how broader aspects of social life and particularly the ascription of social positions were negotiated in public understandings of intelligence. Mensa members’ main focus here was on advocating for high intelligence as a meaningful and socially relevant distinction and asking for recognition based on cognitive factors alone. Journalists tended to deny these claims and to question the relevance of intelligence or the right of Mensa to represent the highly intelligent.

Nevertheless, positions for or against forming a high-IQ group cannot easily be labelled as ‘egalitarian’ or ‘elitist’. This is because Mensa adherents also emphasized intelligence as a mode of establishing differences and attributing social positions that seemed fairer and more democratic than doing so on the grounds of wealth, tradition, or established power relations. Conversely, journalists’ objections to this practice were not automatically made in the spirit of equality. They were often accompanied by derision based on class, race, gender, and educational attainment. As a result, situational ascriptions of unequal intelligence to people interfered with broader logics of attributing differences and legitimizing inequalities, and vice versa.

All this underscores that, when we wish to understand public conversations about intelligence, we are well advised to address more than the great controversies that intelligence and its measurement have evoked; we also need to take into account the communicative patterns and situations in which intelligence is ascribed or questioned, and the broader normative frameworks on which these interactions rely. This will help us investigate exactly how intelligence is made salient in negotiations of difference in concrete communicative practices; it will show how broader assumptions about individual differences, just modes of attributing social positions, and the legitimization of inequalities in a democratic society are negotiated in public understandings of intelligence. In the long run, focusing on communicative patterns and situational ascriptions of intelligence could also contribute to transcending common dichotomies and narratives based on frameworks such as 98/2%, nature versus nurture, or testing advocate versus testing opponent, and allow to assess anew the circumstances that might foster social and cognitive equality or inequality.

Despite the increased presence of neuroscience in today’s public sphere, debates about the merits and dangers of high intellectual capacity remain related to historical forms of conceptualizing relations among intelligence, society, and self (Pickersgill, 2013). Intelligence self-tests and training publications that were popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s resonate in our era’s ‘brain training games’ (Pickersgill et al., 2017). ⁵⁶ Similarly, debates about parenting strategies for optimal brain development (see Broer, Pickersgill, and Cunningham-Burley, 2020; Nadesan, 2002: 411–14; Pickersgill, 2013: 329–30) cannot be disconnected from past discussions about high intelligence in children. Not coincidentally, imaginaries of cognitive enhancement and ‘smart drugs’ envision merit and distinction in one’s private and professional life through the optimized use of the mind and the brain (Bloomfield and Dale, 2020). In this respect, the challenge to understand statements about brainpower and their role in the creation and contestation of differences persists.