Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet was born Alfredo Binetti on 8 July 1857 in Nice, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a medical family on both sides. A childhood incident in which his father forced him to touch a corpse for early anatomical instruction left him unable to pursue medicine, and he turned instead to law, taking his degree in Paris in 1878 before quietly teaching himself physiology at the Sorbonne. He read widely in the public libraries, became fascinated by John Stuart Mill and the British associationists, and decided to make a career of the mental sciences without the credentials they usually required. In 1883 Charles Fere introduced him to Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital, the great public asylum and laboratory of Paris, where he worked on hypnotism, animal magnetism and the so-called transfer phenomenon. He defended Charcot's positions in print and built an international reputation. When Joseph Delboeuf, a careful sceptic from Liege, demonstrated that the experimental findings depended on suggestion and the patients' compliance with implicit expectations, Binet had to admit the error in public. He resigned in 1890 and never again mentioned the Salpetriere or its director in his work.

What lifted him out of that defeat was the arrival of his two daughters, Marguerite and Alice, in 1885 and 1887. Calling them his objectivist and subjectivist, he began the close observation of child development that would occupy the next two decades and yield the concepts of introspection and externospection in anticipation of Carl Jung's psychological types. Between 1890 and 1911 he produced more than 200 papers and books across what we now call experimental, developmental, educational, social and differential psychology. In 1894 he became director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne, a post he held until death, and the same year co-founded L'Annee Psychologique, the first scientific journal in the field, where he served as director and editor in chief. With Victor Henri he investigated intellectual fatigue and metabolism; he studied the effects of suggestibility on testimony, sexual fetishism (a term he coined), and the mnemonic forms used by blindfold chess masters in his 1894 Psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d'echecs.

In 1899 he was asked to join the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. France had just made schooling compulsory from six to thirteen, and a public debate raged over whether children who could not keep up should be sent to asylums on psychiatric judgment, as Desire-Magloire Bourneville urged, or kept in regular schools on the strength of objective measurement, as Binet's Society demanded. With the young psychiatrist Theodore Simon, who had access to hundreds of children at an institution for the intellectually deficient, Binet built a graded set of thirty age-appropriate tasks: following a beam of light, naming body parts, repeating digits, completing sentences, finding rhymes for obeissance, interpreting short narratives. The preliminary scale appeared in 1905 in L'Annee Psychologique. The full standardised version in 1908 introduced the concept of mental age, allowing a child's performance to be compared to the norm for that chronological age. A final modest revision in 1911 came shortly before his death. Binet's own writing on the scale was guarded throughout: intelligence was qualitative not quantitative, malleable rather than fixed, the score was a working diagnostic tool for placement, not a verdict on the child.

This caution did not survive the Atlantic crossing. In 1908 Henry H. Goddard, an active eugenicist, took the scale to the United States and translated it. In 1916 Lewis Terman at Stanford restandardised it on an American sample as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, expressing results as a single Intelligence Quotient. Simon's name was effectively erased. The new American purpose, in Terman's own words, was "curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness" and reducing the supposed sources of crime, pauperism and industrial inefficiency. Binet's test became the engine of immigration screening at Ellis Island, US Army sorting in the First World War, tracking systems in public schools, and the eugenic sterilisation laws of the 1920s and 1930s, including the cases consolidated in Buck v. Bell. The pluralist, developmental tool became a hierarchic verdict, and Binet, dead since October 1911, was no longer there to protest.

His other work was wide. He co-wrote plays for the Grand Guignol theatre between 1904 and 1909 with Andre de Lorde, studied chiromancy with Valentine Dencausse, and wrote articles on a remarkable range of subjects. The Free Society was renamed La Societe Alfred Binet in 1917 in his honour, later La Societe Binet-Simon to credit his collaborator. In 1984 the magazine Science 84 listed the Binet-Simon scale among the twenty most significant scientific developments of the century. His insistence that intelligence is multiple, qualitative and educable resurfaces in Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences and Robert Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence, both explicitly opposed to single-score IQ. He is reported to have said in his last weeks that he wished he had five more years; the unfinished thought, that intelligence is plural and trainable and the scale is only a working tool, was inherited by the next generations of psychometricians.