Binet, Alfred

(b. Nice, France, 8 July 1857; d. Paris, France, 18 October 1911)

psychology.

The career of Binet, the founder of French experimental psychology, developed on the periphery of the traditional institutions and established frameworks. His training was unusual: he was a licentiate in jurisprudence and a doctor of natural sciences, but he did no teaching, with the exception of a course in psychology at the University of Bucharest, where he had been invited in 1895. In 1892 he was named assistant director of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology created at the Sorbonne in 1889 and directed by Henri Beaunis. In 1895 Binet and Beaunis founded the first French journal of psychology, Année psychologique. In the same year he succeeded Beaunis at the Laboratory, now connected with the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he worked until his death.

About 1900 Binet’s experiments began to go beyond the somewhat narrow framework of the Laboratory. He interviewed children in nurseries, schools, and school camps. In 1898 he and Ferdinand Buisson founded the Société Libre pour I’Étude Psychologique de l’Enfant, which after his death became the Société Alfred Binet. In 1904 the minister for public education appointed Binet to a commission for the study of problems connected with the education of retarded children. This appointment resulted in a series of studies leading to the creation of the metric intelligence scale.

Young Binet was interested in psychiatry; frequented the Salpêtrière, where Charcot taught; and studied Hippolyte Taine, Théodule Ribot, and John Stuart Mill. His first book, Psychologie du raisonnement (1886), based on experiments with hypnosis, related the reasoning process to an organization of images and taught associationism. It also touched off a long series of researches into intelligence and the thought process. To this series belong his studies on mathematical prodigies and chess players, retarded children, and especially the Étude expérimentale de l’intelligence (1903), which completed his break with Ribot’s associationism. The work described experiments with and observations of Binet’s two daughters, to whom he presented simple problems, insisting on justification of the replies as well as on the solution itself. These experiments demonstrated the impossibility of translating reasoning in sensory terms and proved the unity and activity of thought and its independence with respect to images. R. S. Woodworth and K. Bühler were to arrive at analogous results in 1907. Binet’s study was also a fine in-depth investigation of the individual differences of the two subjects; the experiment was made complete by introspection and was oriented toward a qualitative typology.

Binet expanded the idea of experimentation in psychology. Although he worked on esthesiometric thresholds, tactile sensibility, and optic illusions, he preferred to proceed by means of questionnaires, investigations, and personal interviews rather than the complicated apparatus and artificial techniques of the laboratory. His research covered much ground: he wrote on personality changes, suggestibility, intellectual fatigue, and graphology.

His major contribution to psychology consists in the introduction of new methods of measuring intelligence. When expansion of the educational system created the need to find criteria for detecting the mentally defective, Binet, at the government’s request, pursued his former work on the evaluation of intelligence in children. He proposed the metric intelligence scale, based on the idea of classifying the subjects according to the observed differences between individual performances. In 1905 Binet drew up a whole series of tests: a large number of short, varied problems related to daily situations, bringing into play “superior processes” such as memory and ratiocination. The series was arranged according to mental levels, and the measure of intelligence was established by comparison of the results and their classification. A revision of the scale in 1908 resulted in an important innovation: assuming that intelligence increases with age, Binet ranked the tests in accordance with age levels corresponding to performances by the average child. The mental age (the age the child attains on the scale) was distinguished from chronological age. This latter work of Binet, in collaboration with Théodore Simon, enjoyed wide popularity. It was translated, adapted, imitated, and administered on a large scale. It was the beginning of a new era in testing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Binet’s writings include La psychologie du raisonnement, recherches experimentales par l’hypnotisme (paris, 1886); Le magnétisme animal (Paris, 1887), written with C. Féré On Double Consciousness (Chicago, 1889); Les altérations de la personnalité (Paris, 1892); Contribution à l’étude du système nerveux sous-intestinal des insectes(Paris, 1894), his thesis at the Sorbonne; Introduction à la psychologie expérimentale (Paris, 1894), written with P. Courtier and V. Henri; Psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d’échecs (Paris, 1894); La fatigue intellectuelle (Paris, 1898), written with V. Henri; La suggestibilityé (Paris, 1900); L’étude expérimentale de l’inlelligence (Paris, 1903); L’âme et le corps (Paris, 1906); and Les idéas modernes sur les enfants (Paris, 1911). Binet and Simon’s tests were published in Année psychologique, 11 (1905–1906), 163–336, and 14 (1908–1909), 1–94, and in the final form, in their La mesure du développement de l’intelligence chez les enfants (Paris, 1911), which has gone through numerous editions.

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Binet are F.-L. Bertrand, Alfred Binet et son oeuvre (Paris, 1930), which contains a bibliography of Binet’s writings; R. Martin, Alfred Binet (Paris, 1924); E. Varon, The Development of Alfred Binet’s Psychology, Psychological Monographs, Vol. XLVI (Lancaster, N. Y., 1935); and F. Zuza, Alfred Binet et la pédagogie expérimentale (Paris, 1948), with a bibliography of Binet’s works and secondary literature.

Jan Sebestik