Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 - November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Mead was a respected and often controversial academic who popularized the insights of anthropology in modern American and Western culture. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.

In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology" Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether this information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification". In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. By this she meant that environment (i.e., family structure, socioeconomic status, exposure to language) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Lastly, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing, in his book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are indeed racial differences in intelligence.  In 1929 Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northern-most province of Papua New Guinea, travelling there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.  Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering, and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.  Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a U.S. Air Force military funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.  As an Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

A genealogical method to do what?
Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages,