BINET, ALFRED
(1857–1911)

Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, was born at Nice. The son of a doctor and an artist, Binet studied at the Sorbonne, qualifying in 1878 in both law and science. He embarked immediately on a doctorate under Edouard Balbiani, embryologist and professor at the Collège de France, whose daughter Binet married in 1884. In the same year he submitted an article on the fusion of images to La revue philosophique. The editor, Théodule Ribot, persuaded him in due course to devote his energies to psychology. Through Charles Féré, Binet came to work with Jean Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital.

Binet is known mainly for his work, with his younger colleague Théodore Simon, in devising tests for assessing children's intelligence. The Binet-Simon scale, published in 1905 and revised in 1908 and 1911, constituted the first systematic, effective, and widely accepted attempt to devise sets of simple verbal and nonverbal tasks, performance on which could be quantified with a fair degree of objectivity, and on which norms for different age groups in the school population were carefully worked out. The principal American versions were produced, revised, and restandardized by L. M. Terman and his colleagues at Stanford University in 1916 and 1937. It was, however, Binet and Simon's careful studies that showed the necessity of valid data to ascertain the intellectual skills and concepts normally to be expected of children at each age before any assessment of a child's retardation can fairly be made. The revised tests are still employed for research and clinical purposes, although increasing use is now being made of the Wechsler tests.

Binet himself was well aware that cultural factors have a bearing on test performance and that interestingly different patterns of results on various subtests might be shown by children achieving similar overall scores. Hence, the conception of an intelligence quotient (IQ) as
popularly linked with Binet's name, in fact runs counter to his stress on studying and appreciating individual differences.

The practical utility of the Binet-Simon scale has overshadowed to a large extent the rich background of inquiries from which the tests were developed. A man of wide theoretical and practical interests, Binet wrote in lucid and lively French a dozen books and some 250 articles, many of which appeared in La revue philosophique and in L'année psychologique, of which he was the editor. Seven of his books and a few articles appeared in English, which Binet wrote and spoke fluently. The Psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d'échec (Paris, 1894), and L'étude expérimentale de l'intelligence (Paris, 1903), the latter reporting studies of his own children, remain neglected classics of French psychology. Both works provided evidence of individual differences in imagery and evidence that images could be less important in thinking than the associationists supposed. Furthermore, these studies, especially the former, showed that the subsequent line of thought was affected by the nature and presentation of the problem a thinker was asked to solve, by the mental set induced by that problem, and by his attitudes in other respects. The studies of his young daughters illustrate Binet's patient, systematic mode of inquiry into children's thought processes, and they enhance understanding of the developmental approach to psychology to which Jean Piaget was the heir.

Chronological scrutiny of his writing shows Binet's work on intelligence to have been the practical outcome of prolonged theoretical and experimental study of the nature of thought processes—subnormal, normal, outstanding, and abnormal. These investigations were carried out in hospitals, notably the Salpêtrière, in schools, and in the psychological laboratory at the Sorbonne, of which Binet became director. Influenced by Hippolyte Taine in France and by the British empirical tradition (including J. S. Mill, Alexander Bain, and Francis Galton), Binet had started as a narrowly orthodox associationist. His evidence for conceptual processes not involving visual imagery anticipated some of the Würzburg experimental findings on "imageless thought." This evidence and that found by Binet and his collaborators for central factors, for unconscious processes, and for attitudes influencing a train of thought led Binet slowly to change his standpoint. In doing so, he moved from treating thinking by analogy with visual inspection to emphasizing the affinities of thought and action and to stressing the importance of developmental studies. Such an approach has proved more acceptable in the 1960s than when Binet died, unfortunately leaving his own research and theory incomplete.

See also Bain, Alexander; Empiricism; Mill, John Stuart; Piaget, Jean; Psychology; Scientific Method; Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe.

Bibliography

works by binet

"Mental Imagery." Fortnightly Review 52 (1892): 95–104.

"The Mechanism of Thought." Fortnightly Review 55 (1894): 785–799. Except for this and the preceding reference, all of Binet's works are listed in the Varon monograph (see below).

"L'intelligence des imbéciles." L'année psychologique 15 (1909): 1–147. Written with Théodore Simon. This and the following article are of salient importance for understanding Binet's later treatment of thinking.

"Qu'est ce qu'une émotion? Qu'est ce qu'un acte intellectuel?" L'année psychologique 17 (1911): 1–47.

works on binet

Bertrand, F. L. Alfred Binet et son oeuvre. Paris, 1930.

Groot, A. D. de. Thought and Choice in Chess. The Hague: Mouton, 1965.

Reeves, Joan Wynn. Thinking about Thinking. London, 1965. Ch. 7.

Varon, Edith J. The Development of Alfred Binet's Psychology. Psychological Monographs, Vol. 46 (No. 207). Princeton, NJ, and Albany, NY: Psychological Review, 1935. Includes a full bibliography of Binet's works except for the first two cited above.

Wolf, Theta A. "An Individual Who Made a Difference." American Psychologist 16 (5) (1961): 245–248.

Joan Wynn Reeves (1967)