Psychologists and Their Theories | Binet, Alfred - Introduction

Introduction

1857–1911

FRENCH PSYCHOLOGIST, INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHER

SORBONNE, DOCTORATE IN NATURAL SCIENCE, 1894

Alfred Binet is best remembered as the developer of the first useful test for measuring intelligence. Along with Théodore Simon, Binet developed the Binet-Simon Scale, the forerunner of modern IQ tests. Binet's original goal for the scale was relatively modest and very practical. In the early years of the 1900s, the French government had just enacted laws requiring that all children be given a public education. For the first time, mentally "subnormal" children—those who today might be called mentally retarded or developmentally disabled—were to be provided with special classes, rather than simply ignored by the schools. However, this raised the issue of how to identify which children would benefit from special programs. Binet and Simon set out to solve this problem. In the process, they developed a revolutionary approach to testing mental abilities.

Yet intelligence testing was only one small part of Binet's highly productive career. Although his work was cut short when he died at age 54, he still managed to author almost 300 published books, articles, and reviews. His wide-ranging interests included sensitivity to touch, mental associations, hypnosis, child development, personality, memory, eyewitness testimony, and creativity, to name just a few. The breadth of his interests led him to study a wide spectrum of the population, including schoolchildren, experts at chess and mental arithmetic, authors, mentally retarded individuals, and his own two daughters.

Nevertheless, Binet is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking intelligence test. It was so useful for predicting school performance that a variation, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, is still in use today. In a 1930 essay, Lewis Terman, the American psychologist who developed the Stanford-Binet, described his great predecessor this way: "My favorite of all psychologists is Binet; not because of his intelligence test, which was only a by-product of his life work, but because of his originality, insight, and openmindedness, and because of the rare charm of personality that shines through all his writings."