9. A Norwegian Terman–Merrill and the Shelf Life of Intelligence Tests

This chapter identifies a crucial and central aspect of IQ tests that is often hidden in public narrations, but that has been with them since their very beginnings – namely, their lives as commercial objects. This chapter traces how the 1937 Terman–Merrill revision of the Stanford–Binet intelligence test was translated, adapted, published, and used in postwar Norway, and uses that case to reflect on the unusually long shelf life of intelligence tests. It shows that this longevity depends less on scientific authority than on material, procedural, commercial, and institutional factors.