Audrey M. Shuey

Audrey Mary Shuey (1910 – 1977) was an American psychologist and writer. She served as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon College.

Biography

Audrey M. Shuey was born in 1910. Shuey took her B.A. at the University of Illinois, her M.A. at Wellesley College, and her Ph.D. at Columbia University where she was a student of Henry Garrett.

Shuey served as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. She published the book The Testing of Negro Intelligence (1958, 2nd ed., 1966) surveying and summarizing the results of 40 years of intelligence tests involving whites and blacks. It argued that the 15-point Black-White average IQ difference remained constant from the 1910s to the 1960s, across all regions of the U.S., as well as in Canada and Jamaica. The publication and distribution of her book was funded by Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, in a bid to counter the desegregation of the American school system following Brown vs. Board of Education.

Shuey died in 1977.

Reception

The scholar Graham Richards noted that Shuey's text relied on unpublished material like masters and doctoral theses, many of which originated in the Deep South, that some pre-1940s material that she used contained methodological flaws, and that she overstated the consistency of her sources.

The psychologist Hans Eysenck praised Shuey's work.

Works

• Shuey, Audrey M. (1966). The Testing of Negro Intelligence (2nd ed.). New York: Social Science Press.
• Shuey, Audrey M. (1978). "Own-race Preference and Self-esteem in Young Negroid and Caucasoid Children." In: Human Variation: The Biopsychology of Age, Race, and Sex. New York: Academic Press.