Alfred Binet
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Alfred Binet (; 8 July 1857 – 18 October 1911), born Alfredo Binetti, was a French psychologist who invented the first practical
IQ test An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern (psychologist), William Stern for th ...
, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator
Théodore Simon Théodore Simon (; 10 July 1873 – 4 September 1961) was a French psychologist who worked with Alfred Binet to develop the Binet-Simon scale, one of the most widely used scales in the world for measuring intelligence. This scale was revised i ...
, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.


Biography


Education and early career

Binet was born as Alfredo Binetti in
Nice Nice ( , ; Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative c ...
, which was then part of the
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until its
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by the
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in 1860, and the ensuing policy of
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. Binet attended law school in Paris, and received his degree in 1878. He also studied
physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...
at the
Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...
. His first formal position was as a researcher at a neurological clinic, Salpêtrière Hospital, in Paris from 1883 to 1889. From there, Binet went on to being a researcher and associate director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1891 to 1894. In 1894, he was promoted to being the director of the laboratory until 1911 (his death). Binet also educated himself by reading psychology texts at the National Library in Paris. He soon became fascinated with the ideas of
John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, Member of Parliament (MP) and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to ...
, who believed that the operations of intelligence could be explained by the laws of associationism. Binet eventually realized the limitations of this theory, but Mill's ideas continued to influence his work. In 1883, years of unaccompanied study ended when Binet was introduced to
Charles Féré Charles Samson Féré (13 July 1852 in Auffay – 22 April 1907) was a French physician. He initially studied medicine in Rouen, where he subsequently served at the Hôtel-Dieu under surgeon Achille Flaubert (1813-1882), an older brother o ...
who introduced him to Jean-Martin Charcot, the director of a clinic called La Salpêtrière, Paris. Charcot became his mentor and in turn, Binet accepted a position at the clinic, working in his neurological laboratory. At the time of Binet's tenure, Charcot was experimenting with hypnotism and Binet, influenced by Charcot, published four articles about his work in this area. Binet aggressively supported Charcot’s position which included the belief that people with weaken and not stable nervous systems were susceptible to hypnosis. Unfortunately, Charcot's conclusions did not withstand under professional scrutiny, and Binet was forced to make an embarrassing public admission that he had been wrong in supporting his teacher. Nevertheless, he had established his name internationally in the field,
Morton Prince Morton Henry Prince (December 22, 1854 – August 31, 1929) was an American physician who specialized in neurology and abnormal psychology, and was a leading force in establishing psychology as a clinical and academic discipline. He was part o ...
for example stating in 1904 that, "certain problems in subconscious automatism will always be associated with the names of
Breuer Breuer is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Amit Breuer, Canadian-Israeli documentary filmmaker * Annabel Breuer (born 1992), German wheelchair fencer and wheelchair basketball player * Bessie Breuer (1893–1975), American jo ...
and Freud in Germany,
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and Alfred Binet in France." When his involvement with hypnosis waned as a result of failure to establish professional acceptance, he turned to the study of child development spurred on by the birth of his two daughters, Marguerite and Alice, both born in 1885 and 1887. Binet called Alice a subjectivist and Marguerite an objectivist, and developing the concepts of ''introspection'' and ''externospection'' in an anticipation of
Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...
's psychological types. In the 21-year period following his shift in career interests, Binet "published more than 200 books, articles, and reviews in what now would be called experimental, developmental, educational, social, and differential psychology." Bergin and Cizek (2001) suggest that this work may have influenced
Jean Piaget Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemolo ...
, who later studied with Binet's collaborator
Théodore Simon Théodore Simon (; 10 July 1873 – 4 September 1961) was a French psychologist who worked with Alfred Binet to develop the Binet-Simon scale, one of the most widely used scales in the world for measuring intelligence. This scale was revised i ...
in 1920. Binet's research with his daughters helped him to further refine his developing conception of intelligence, especially the importance of attention span and suggestibility in intellectual development. Despite Binet's extensive research interests and wide breadth of publications, today he is most widely known for his contributions to
intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
. Wolf postulates that this is the result of his not being affiliated with a major university. Because Binet did not have any formalized graduate study in psychology, he did not hold a professorship with a prestigious institution where students and funds would be sure to perpetuate his work. Additionally, his more progressive theories did not provide the practical utility that his intelligence scale would evoke. Binet and his coworker Fere discovered what they called transfer and they also recognized perceptual and emotional polarization. Binet and Fere thought their findings were a
phenomenon A phenomenon ( : phenomena) is an observable event. The term came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which ''cannot'' be directly observed. Kant was heavily influenced by Gottfried W ...
and of utmost importance. After investigations by many, the two men were forced to admit that they were wrong about their concepts of transfer and polarization. Basically, their patients had known what was expected, what was supposed to happen, and so they simply assented. Binet had risked everything on his experiment and its results, and this failure took a toll on him. In 1890, Binet resigned from La Salpêtrière and never mentioned the place or its director again. His interests then turned towards the development of his children, Madeleine and Alice, who were two years apart. This research presages that done by
Jean Piaget Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemolo ...
just a short time later, regarding the development of cognition in children. A job presented itself for Binet in 1891 at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the
Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...
. He worked for a year without pay and by 1894, he took over as the director. This was a position that Binet held until his death, and it enabled him to pursue his studies on mental processes. While directing the Laboratory, Theodore Simon applied to do doctoral research under Binet's supervision. This was the beginning of their long, fruitful collaboration. During this time he also co-founded the French journal of psychology, ''L'Année Psychologique'', serving as the director and editor-in-chief of the journal that was the first scientific journal in this domain.


Later career and the Binet–Simon test

In 1899, Binet was asked to be a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. French education changed greatly during the end of the nineteenth century, because of a law that passed which made it mandatory for children ages six to fourteen to attend school. This group to which Binet became a member hoped to begin studying children in a scientific manner. Binet and many other members of the society were appointed to the Commission for the Retarded. The question became "What should be the test given to children thought to possibly have learning disabilities, that might place them in a special classroom?" Binet made it his problem to establish the differences that separate the normal child from the abnormal, and to measure such differences. ''L'Etude experimentale de l'intelligence'' (Experimental Studies of Intelligence) was the book he used to describe his methods and it was published in 1903. Development of more tests and investigations began soon after the book, with the help of a young medical student named Theodore Simon. Simon had nominated himself a few years before as Binet's research assistant and worked with him on the intelligence tests that Binet is known for, which share Simon's name as well. In 1905, a new test for measuring intelligence was introduced and simply called the Binet–Simon scale. In 1908, they revised the scale, dropping, modifying, and adding tests and also arranging them according to age levels from three to thirteen. In 1904 a French professional group for child psychology, La Société Libre pour l'Etude Psychologique de l'Enfant, was called upon by the French government to appoint a commission on the education of retarded children. The commission was asked to create a mechanism for identifying students in need of alternative education. Binet, being an active member of this group, found the impetus for the development of his mental scale. Binet and Simon, in creating what historically is known as the Binet-Simon Scale, comprised a variety of tasks they thought were representative of typical children's abilities at various ages. This task-selection process was based on their many years of observing children in natural settings and previously published research by Binet and others. They then tested their measurement on a sample of fifty children, ten children per five age groups. The children selected for their study were identified by their school teachers as being average for their age. The purpose of this scale of normal functioning, which would later be revised twice using more stringent standards, was to compare children's mental abilities relative to those of their normal peers. The scale consisted of thirty tasks of increasing difficulty. The easier ones could be done by everyone. Some of the simplest test items assessed whether or not a child could follow a beam of light or talk back to the examiner. Slightly harder tasks required children to point to various named body parts, repeat back a series of 2 digits, repeat simple sentences, and define words like house, fork or mama. More difficult test items required children to state the difference between pairs of things, reproduce drawings from memory or to construct sentences from three given words such as "Paris, river and fortune." The hardest test items included asking children to repeat back 7 random digits, find three rhymes for the French word "obéissance" and to answer questions such as "My neighbor has been receiving strange visitors. He has received in turn a doctor, a lawyer, and then a priest. What is taking place?" (Fancher, 1985). For the practical use of determining educational placement, the score on the Binet-Simon scale would reveal the child's mental age. For example, a 6-year-old child who passed all the tasks usually passed by 6 year-olds—but nothing beyond—would have a mental age that exactly matched his chronological age, 6.0. (Fancher, 1985). Binet was forthright about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates and could be influenced by the environment; therefore, intelligence was not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be found in children with comparable backgrounds. Given Binet's stance that intelligence testing was subject to variability and was not generalizable, it is important to look at the metamorphosis that mental testing took on as it made its way to the U.S. While Binet was developing his mental scale, the business, civic, and educational leaders in the U.S. were facing issues of how to accommodate the needs of a diversifying population, while continuing to meet the demands of society. There arose the call to form a society based on
meritocracy Meritocracy (''merit'', from Latin , and ''-cracy'', from Ancient Greek 'strength, power') is the notion of a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, and achiev ...
while continuing to underline the ideals of the upper class. In 1908, H.H. Goddard, a champion of the eugenics movement, found utility in mental testing as a way to evidence the superiority of the white race. After studying abroad, Goddard brought the Binet-Simon Scale to the United States and translated it into English. Following Goddard in the U.S. mental testing movement was
Lewis Terman Lewis Madison Terman (January 15, 1877 – December 21, 1956) was an American psychologist and author. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is best known ...
, who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The new Stanford-Binet scale was no longer used solely for advocating education for all children, as was Binet's objective. A new objective of intelligence testing was illustrated in the Stanford-Binet manual with testing ultimately resulting in "curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency". Addressing the question why Binet did not speak out concerning the newfound uses of his measure, Siegler pointed out that Binet was somewhat of an isolationist in that he never traveled outside France and he barely participated in professional organizations. Additionally, his mental scale was not adopted in his own country during his lifetime and therefore was not subjected to the same fate. Finally, when Binet did become aware of the "foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument" he condemned those who with 'brutal pessimism' and 'deplorable verdicts' were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct. He did a lot of studies of children. His experimental subjects ranged from 3 to 18 years old. Binet published the third version of the Binet-Simon scale shortly before his death in 1911. The Binet-Simon scale was and is hugely popular around the world, mainly because of the vast literature it has fostered, as well as its relative ease of administration. Since his death, many people in many ways have honored Binet, but two of these stand out. In 1917, the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child, of which Binet became a member in 1899 and which prompted his development of the intelligence tests, changed their name to La Société Alfred Binet, in memory of the renowned psychologist. The second honor was not until 1984, when the journal ''Science'' 84 picked the Binet-Simon scale as one of twenty of the century's most significant developments or discoveries. He studied sexual behavior, coining the term
erotic fetishism Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has ''a fetish'' for that object is a fetishist. A sexual fetish may be regard ...
to describe individuals whose sexual interests in nonhuman objects, such as articles of clothing, and linking this to the after-effects of early impressions in an anticipation of Freud. Between 1904 and 1909, Binet co-wrote several plays for the
Grand Guignol ''Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol'' (: "The Theatre of the Great Puppet")—known as the Grand Guignol–was a theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris (7, cité Chaptal). From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, it specialised in natura ...
theatre with the playwright
André de Lorde André de Latour, comte de Lorde (1869–1942) was a French playwright, the main author of the Grand Guignol plays from 1901 to 1926. His evening career was as a dramatist of terror; during daytimes he worked as a librarian in the Bibliothèque d ...
. He also studied the abilities of Valentine Dencausse, the most famous chiromancer in Paris in those days.


Binet and chess

Binet had done a series of experiments to see how well
chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...
players played when blindfolded. He found that only some of the master chess players could play from memory and a few could play multiple games simultaneously without looking at the boards. To remember the positions of the pieces on the boards, some players envisioned exact replicas of specific chess sets, while others envisioned an abstract schema of the game. Binet concluded that extraordinary feats of memory such as blind chess playing could take a variety of mnemonic forms. He recounted his experiments in a book entitled ''Psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d'échecs'' (Paris: Hachette, 1894).Alfred Binet,
Psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d'échecs
', (Paris: Hachette, 1894).


Publications

*
La psychologie du raisonnement; Recherches expérimentales par l'hypnotisme
' (Paris, Alcan, 1886; English translation, 1899). Published in English as
The psychology of reasoning, based on experimental researches in hypnotism
' (Chicago, Open court publishing company, 1899).
Le magnétisme animal
(Paris, F. Alcan, 1887). Published in English as
Animal Magnetism
' (New York, D. Appleton and company, 1888) * ''Perception intérieure'' (1887). * ''Etudes de psychologie expérimentale'' (1888). *
Les altérations de la personnalité
' (Paris: F. Alcan, 1892). Published in English as
Alterations of personality
' (New York : D. Appleton and company, 1896).
Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology''
(1894) * ''Introduction à la psychologie expérimentale'' (1894; with co-authors). *
On Double Consciousness
' (1896). * Binet, A. & Henri, V.
La fatigue intellectuelle
' (Paris, Schleicher frères, 1898). *
La Suggestibilité
' (Paris: Schleicher, 1900). * ''Etude expérimentale de l'intelligence'' (1903). * ''L'âme et le corps'' (1905). Published in English as
The Mind and the Brain
' (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & co. ltd.). *
Les révélations de l'écriture d'après un contrôle scientifique
' (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1906). * Binet, A. & Simon, T.
Les enfants anormaux
' (Paris, A. Colin, 1907). Published in English as
Mentally defective children
' (1907). *
Les idées modernes sur les enfants
' (Paris, E. Flammarion, 1909). * ''L'intelligence des imbecile'' (L'année psychologique, 15, 1–147, 1909). Published in English as
The intelligence of the feeble-minded
(Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins company, 1916). Alfred Binet was one of the founding editors of ''L'année psychologique'', a yearly volume comprising original articles and reviews of the progress of psychology still in print.


Notes


References

* * * Klein, Alexandre (2011) '' d’Alfred Binet, Volume 2 – L’émergence de la psychologie scientifique (1884–1911)''. Nancy : Presses Universitaires de Nancy. http://www.lcdpu.fr/livre/?GCOI=27000100152160 * Klein, Alexandre (2011) "Les apports de la correspondance d’Alfred Binet à l’histoire de la psychologie", ''Recherches & éducations'', Hors-série Centenaire Binet, 53–75. http://rechercheseducations.revues.org/index803.html * Klein, Alexandre '' d'Alfred Binet -Jean Larguier des Bancels'', Nancy, PUN, 2008. http://www.lcdpu.fr/livre/?GCOI=27000100578310 * Klein, Alexandre (2009) "La philosophie scientifique d'Alfred Binet", ''Revue d'Histoire des sciences'', 2009/5, http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=RHS_622_0373 * Klein, Alexandre (2008) "Les écritures du moi en histoire des sciences : les apports de la correspondance d’Alfred Binet", Jahrbuch für Europäische Wissenschaftskultur (Yearbook for European Culture of Science), Bd. 4 (2008), p. 101–115. * * * * * * * * * * * * *


External links

* Webdocumentary (in French
Alfred Binet. Naissance de la psychologie scientifique

Short biography, bibliography, and links on digitized sources
in the
Virtual Laboratory The online project Virtual Laboratory. Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930, located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is dedicated to research in the history of the experimentalization of life. T ...
of the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (German: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte) is a scientific research institute founded in March 1994. It is dedicated to addressing fundamental questions of the history of knowledg ...

Human Intelligence: Alfred Binet

Stanford Binet IQ Test
* * * *

* ttp://www.pnl-nlp.org/download/binet/ ''Le Magnetisme Animal'' by Alfred Binet {{DEFAULTSORT:Binet, Alfred 1857 births 1911 deaths University of Paris alumni French psychologists Educational psychologists French graphologists Intelligence researchers 19th-century French people 20th-century French people