Prometheus Society
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| Motto | Ignis Aurum Probat ("Fire tests gold") |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1982 |
| Founder | Ronald K. Hoeflin |
| Type | High IQ society |
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Membership
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~120 (as of 2012) |
| Website | www.prometheussociety.org |
The Prometheus Society is a high IQ society, similar to Mensa International, but much more restrictive. The entry test is designed to be passable by 1 in 30,000 of the population, while Mensa entry is achievable by 1 in 50. The society produces a magazine, Gift of Fire, published ten times per year.
An earlier organization, Mensa International, was founded by Roland Berrill and Lancelot Ware, who noted from their first conversation that although they came from different backgrounds, they were able to communicate and had much in common. They hypothesized that what they had in common was intelligence, and decided to see if a society of people selected for intelligence (using the only means available, IQ tests) would also have much in common.
They decided to focus on people whose IQ test scores would place them at or above the 98th percentile.
In the late 1930s Leta Stetter Hollingworth's research examined people with unusually high Stanford-Binet IQ scores. Starting in the early 1960s, when the now-defunct MM was started, there were attempts to form high-IQ societies for people scoring at similar levels on then-current tests. The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry and the Triple Nine Society were founded in the 1970s and still exist today. Their membership requirements were intended to accept one person in one thousand from the general population. Restricting entry still further was difficult; no tests have ever reliably discriminated among test-takers with more selectivity. The paucity of data on persons with unusually high IQ scores, by definition, made ensuring the reliability of such scores very difficult. High IQ scores are less reliable than IQ scores nearer to the population median.
There were two possible ways to overcome this obstacle. Either the raw data from standardized tests could be obtained and determination could be made if they could be normalized to Hollingworth’s levels, or new tests could be designed and normalized. In the late 1970s, it was the latter approach that was followed. Kevin Langdon and Ronald Hoeflin both developed high-range, untimed tests. Langdon claimed that his Langdon Adult Intelligence Test had a ceiling at the one-in-a-million level (176 IQ [or 171 using the academic-standard 15-point-per-standard-deviation system], or 4.75 standard deviations above the mean). Hoeflin claimed a considerably higher ceiling but the Langdon and Hoeflin tests are closely comparable, with Hoeflin's tests having ceilings only one or two points higher than Langdon's. These tests were given to a pool of about thirty thousand test-takers, recruited through Omni magazine, and the resulting data were used to develop norms. Langdon equated means and standard deviations; Hoeflin used equipercentile equating. Using these tests and norms, Ronald Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society in 1982. It was the second society to select for the top one in thirty thousand, the first being Kevin Langdon's Four Sigma Society, founded in 1976.
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