In 1917, Yerkes served as president of the American Psychological Association

(APA). Under his urging, the APA began several programs devoted to the war
effort in World War I. As chairman of the Committee on the Psychological
Examination of Recruits, he developed the Army's Alpha and Beta Intelligence
Tests, the first nonverbal group tests, which were given to over 1 million United
States soldiers during the war.

The test ultimately concluded that recent immigrants (especially those from
Southern and Eastern Europe) scored considerably lower than older waves of
immigration (from Northern Europe), and was used as one of the eugenic
motivations for harsh immigration restriction. The results would later be criticized
as very clearly only measuring acculturation, as the test scores correlated nearly
exactly with the number of years spent living in the US.

In his introduction to Carl C. Brigham's A Study of American Intelligence (which

helped popularize eugenics in the U.S.), Yerkes warned that "no citizen can afford
to ignore the menace of race deterioration." The study was based on the findings
of Yerkes and Brigham regarding the alarming results of the Army intelligence
tests: nearly half of the white draft (47.3%) was feebleminded,[3] with blacks and
the newer immigrant groups achieving the lowest scores.

Although Yerkes claimed that the tests measured native intelligence, and not
education or training, this claim is difficult to sustain in the face of the questions
themselves: Question 18 of Alpha Test 8 reads: "Velvet Joe appears in
advertisements of ... (tooth powder)(dry goods)(tobacco)(soap)." The tests
themselves read like a kind of early 1900s Trivial Pursuit.[4]

Along with Edward L. Thorndike, Yerkes was a member and Chairman of the
Committee on Inheritance of Mental Traits, part of the Eugenics Record Office,
which was founded by Charles Benedict Davenport, a former teacher of Yerkes at
Harvard.[5]