IQ testing and/as divination: comparative reflections
Tuesday 10 November 2026, 3- 5pm
Seminar Room 00.063, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
Speaker: Håkon Caspersen, University of Oslo
All welcome
Divination techniques predict the future and help diagnose present problems through ritualised procedures. If divination is about predicting the future – then in one aspect, at least, IQ tests do so as well, correlating with future educational achievement and a range of other factors. If divination is about identifying the hidden cause of symptoms – is not the educational psychologist also a diviner when using IQ tests to invoke the concealed realities of a problem through the authority of a test? In this talk Dr Håkon Caspersen will draw historical and social anthropological perspectives to discuss the similarities and differences between IQ testing and divinatory techniques. What can we learn from such a comparison? Are they so different after all?
Biography:
Håkon Caspersen is a social anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher in the history of science at the Museum of University and Science History, part of the Cultural History Museum, University of Oslo. Here he explores how IQ tests are introduced and taught to test-practitioners, and the historical and contemporary use of IQ testing in Norway’s educational psychological services, as part of the research project Historicizing Intelligence, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Historicizing IQ Testing: Intelligence Assessments and their Role in Norwegian Society from the 1900s to the Present | Open Book Publishers
Håkon is currently visiting research fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
Divination, Oracles, and Omens Network
