Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet (July 8, 1857- October 18, 1911) was a French Psychologist, student of Charcot, who influenced the work of Terman and Goddard.

Student of: Charcot
Influenced by: Mill
Influenced: Simon, Terman, Goddard
Time Period: The Great Schools' Influence

Education:
Received his law degree in 1878
Subsequently studied natural sciences at the Sorbonne
Self-taught in psychology

Career:
Researcher, neurological clinic, Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris (1883-1889)
Researcher and Associate Director, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Sorbonne University (1891-1894)
Director, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Sorbonne University (1894-1911)
Member, Commission on the Education of Retarded Children, appointed by the French Ministry of Public Instruction (1904)

Definition of Intelligence:
"It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment" (Binet & Simon, 1916, 1973, pp.42-43).

Major Contributions:
The Binet-Simon Scale

Ideas and Interests:
After receiving his law degree in 1878, Alfred Binet began to study science at the Sorbonne. However, he was not overly interested in his formal schooling, and started educating himself by reading psychology texts at the National Library in Paris. He soon became fascinated with the ideas of John Stuart Mill, who believed that that the operations of intelligence could be explained by the the laws of associationism. Binet eventually realized the limitations of this theory, but Mill's ideas continued to influence his work. In 1883, Binet began to work in Jean-Martin Charcot's neurological laboratory at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. At the time of Binet's tenure, Charcot was experimenting with hypnotism. Binet was strongly influenced by this great man, and published four articles about his work in this area. Unfortunately, Charcot's conclusions did not hold up under professional scrutiny, and Binet was forced to make an embarrassing public admission that he had been wrong in supporting his teacher. When his intrigue with hypnosis waned as a result of failure to establish professional acceptance, he turned to the study of development spurred on by the birth of his two daughters, Madeleine and Alice (born in 1885 and 1887, respectively). 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" (Siegler, 1992). Bergin and Cizek (2001) suggest that this work may have influenced Jean Piaget, who later studied with Binet's collaborator Theodore Simon 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. Wolf (1973) postulates that this is the result of his not being affiliation 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 (Siegler, 1992). Additionally, his more progressive theories did not provide the practical utility that his intelligence scale would evoke. In 1891, Binet began working at the Sorbonne's Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and was appointed its Director in 1894. In that same year, he co-founded L'Annee Psychologique, a major psychology journal. While directing the Laboratory, Theodore Simon applied to do doctoral research under Binet's supervision. This was the beginning of their long, fruitful collaboration. 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. 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 (Siegler, 1992). The scale consisted of thirty tasks of increasing complexity. The easiest of these could be accomplished by all children, even those who were severely retarded. Some of the simplest test items assessed whether or not a child could follow a lighted match with his eyes or shake hands with the examiner. Slightly harder tasks required children to point to various named body parts, repeat back a series of 3 digits, repeat simple sentences, and to 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 obéisance 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 upfront 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, could be impacted by the environment and was therefore not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be used on children with comparable backgrounds (Siegler, 1992). 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 (Siegler,1992) while continuing to underline the ideals of the white 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 who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The new Standford-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 (p.7)" (White, 2000). It follows that we should question why Binet did not speak out concerning the newfound uses of his measure. Siegler (1992) pointed out that Binet was somewhat of an isolationist in that he never traveled outside of 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 (White, 2000).

Selected Publications

Binet, A. (1916). New methods for the diagnosis of the intellectual level of subnormals. In E. S. Kite (Trans.), The development of intelligence in children. Vineland, NJ: Publications of the Training School at Vineland. (Originally published 1905 in L'Année Psychologique, 12, 191-244.) See related introduction and commentary by Henry L. Minton.

Binet. A., & Simon, T. (1916). The development of intelligence in children. Baltimore, Williams & Wilkins. (Reprinted 1973, New York: Arno Press; 1983, Salem, NH: Ayer Company). The 1973 volume includes reprints of many of Binet's articles on testing.

References

Bergin, D. A., & Cizek, G. J. (2001). Alfred Binet. In J. A. Palmer (Ed.), Fifty major thinkers on education: From Confucius to Dewey (pp. 160-164). London: Routledge.

Fancher, R. E. (1985). The intelligence men: Makers of the IQ controversy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

www.intelltheory.com

Siegler, R. S. (1992). The other Alfred Binet. Developmental Psychology, 28, 179-190.

White, S. (2000). Conceptual foundations of IQ testing. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 6(1), 33-43.

Wolf, T.H. (1973). Alfred Binet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.