Binet, Alfred
Binet, Alfred
Alfred Binet (1857–1911), French psychologist, was born in Nice. His father was a doctor, as were many of his ancestors on both sides of his family. If he owed to this medical tradition the concern for observing facts that was to mark all his work, it was no doubt from his mother, a painter, that he derived the artistic inclinations that later led to his interest in the psychological aspects of literature and art. He also wrote some quite successful plays. He studied at the lycée in Nice and then at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. Initially he studied law, received a diploma as licentiate, and at the age of 20 took his first examination for a doctorate in law. Then his intellectual interests shifted entirely.
The 1880s saw the beginnings of scientific psychology in France. Taine had blazed the trail in 1870 with the publication of Intelligence. Influenced by John Stuart Mill and English positivism, Taine laid particular stress on pathology. Charcot, a physician at the Salpétrière hospital, had begun to study hysteria in 1871, and then hypnosis. His clinical lectures attracted large audiences. Taine attended them, as did a young philosopher, Théodule Ribot, who was to become the true founder of scientific psychology in France. Ribot’s program was set forth in an article in Mind in 1877 in which he severely criticized official doctrine and proclaimed his adherence to Mill and Taine. He advocated that French psychologists should emu-late the work done in England and Germany and that they should use the natural sciences, physiology, and psychiatry as models. Psychology should be purely experimental and should not deal with the soul; its scope should include the behavior of animals and genetic development. This program was placed under the aegis of Herbert Spencer and Ribot was rewarded by appointment first to the Sorbonne in 1885 and then to a chair of experimental psychology at the Collège de France in 1892.
Binet met Ribot in 1877 and on his advice went into psychology, initially the field of psychopathology, which was traditionally French. “With a few rare exceptions,” Binet wrote in 1889, “the psychologists of my country have left psychophysical research to the Germans and the study of comparative psychology to the English. They have devoted themselves almost exclusively to the study of pathological psychology” (Delay 1958, p. 86). And so he went to the Salpétrière and worked there with Charles Féré, a pupil of Charcot’s. At that time the Salpétrière was the center of psychological research in France. In 1885 Charcot founded the Société Française de Psychologie Physiologique, and in 1889 the First International Congress of Psychology was held under his chairmanship. He was surrounded by eminent colleagues who were interested in psychology: the physiologist Charles Richet, a future Nobel laureate; the neurologist Babinski; Féré foreign physicians like Sigmund Freud who came to him to study; young philosophers like Pierre Janet who, under Ribot’s influence, were turning toward psychology.
The school of Charcot was interested above all in the neuroses, especially hysteria, and in hypnosis. It was to these subjects that Binet devoted himself; his resulting work is contained in a series of publications: The Psychology of Reasoning (1886); Animal Magnetism, in collaboration with Féré (1887); On Double Consciousness (1889); and Alterations of Personality (1892). It is hard to judge these works fairly without taking into consideration the atmosphere in which they were conceived. (Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele gives a picturesque, if not entirely faithful, idea of that atmosphere.) Charcot’s authoritarian personality, his proclivity for systematization, and his great prestige in both Parisian and international medical circles created in his students an attitude of complete submissiveness to his views. A result of this was the hystérie de culture, or artificially induced hysteria. Its symptoms accorded with Charcot’s definitive description but were produced in part by more or less conscious suggestions made to the patient by Charcot’s students during preliminary examinations prior to his appearance before Charcot himself. Later Binet was very critical of Charcot, accusing him of allowing his stu-dents to deceive him: “The masters of science,” he wrote in 1909, “are like kings, surrounded by skillful courtiers, who tint the truth” (Binet & Simon 1910, p. 70). Binet himself, as a member of Charcot’s court, was led, no doubt unconsciously, to believe in facts that supported his mentor’s theory, as when he asserted that “the magnet and other aesthesiogenic agents may affect the transfer of cataleptic attitudes” (Binet & Féré 1887, p. 125). All the work Binet did before he was 30 is good work of its kind, but too much marked with the Zeitgeist to have other than historical interest.
While working at the Salpétrière, Binet decided that he needed biological training. No doubt his marriage to the daughter of Balbiani, professor of histology at the Collège de France, had something to do with this decision. He obtained a licence ès sciences and then a doctorat ès sciences naturelles, with a thesis, “Système nerveux sous-intestinal des insectes,” written with Henneguy, the successor to his father-in-law. In 1888, when a chair of experi-mental psychology was created for Ribot at the Collége de France, a laboratory was attached to it. Ribot asked that it be given to the physiologist Beaunis, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Nancy. Beaunis, who knew Binet through his family, asked him to collaborate, and so in 1891 Binet abandoned the Salpétrière. The quarters of the laboratory were in the Sorbonne buildings, but administratively the laboratory was connected with a national research institution, the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Binet, at first préparateur, became assistant director and, upon the retirement of Beaunis in 1895, director, a position he retained until his death in 1911. The title was actually honorific, for practically no salary was attached to it. Fortunately, Binet had independent means that enabled him to carry on his work. His efforts to win more official university recognition were in vain. Although he was a candidate for the chair at the Collége de France left vacant by the departure of Ribot, Pierre Janet was chosen for it. He then ap-plied for a chair at the Sorbonne, but the objection was raised that he was a doctor of natural sciences and not a docteur ès lettres, and Georges Dumas was elected. In 1895 his former fellow student Take Jonescu, a Rumanian who had become an important political figure in his own country, secured an appointment for him at the University of Bucharest, and Binet taught psychology there for several months.
Between 1891 and 1900, Binet in effect established experimental psychology in France. Trained as he was in the school of the Salpétrière and by his reading of Mill, Taine, and Ribot, he was not interested in psychophysiology or, in particular, in the study of sensation that absorbed the first German psychologists. In contrast to Wundt, he affirmed that higher psychic processes can be studied experimentally. While Wundt developed a “general psychology,” Binet, for the rest of his life, was to construct an “individual,” or as we would now say, a differential psychology.
The direction of Binet’s interest derived from a number of sources. First, the scientific atmosphere of the time was dominated by evolutionist ideas. Spencer had acted as an intermediary between Darwin and Ribot. Now, evolution gave prominence to individual differences, which Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, had taken as the subject of his researches. Second, the industrial revolution had brought with it a social transformation, one of its most obvious aspects being the specialization of tasks within the framework of the division of labor. At the same time, the industrial revolution had made universal primary education indispensable. This development made it necessary to take into consideration individual differences, and it was in this context that Binet tried to develop an experimentally based differential psychology.
Under the influence of Ribot, Binet declared that “there is nothing much to be gained by turning the pages of authors who work apart from observation and experimentation” (1900, p. 330). It is only facts that count, and more than that, “We must always be hospitable to the facts that go counter to our theories” (1903, p. 130). At the outset of his career, Binet gave priority to facts gathered by introspection. He thought that the higher processes were accessible only by “the act by which we directly perceive what is going on in us, our thoughts, our memories, our emotions” (1894a, p. 95). But although it is necessary to take into account what the subject experiences, and in particular what he says, it is at the same time necessary to observe what he does. From a position initially dominated by Taine’s associationism, Binet’s thought gradu-ally evolved. In 1903 he published the Étude expérimentale de I intelligence, undoubtedly his best book, in which he studied his two daughters, Madeleine and Alice, from the perspective of differential psychology. By the painstaking observation of behavior, coupled with introspection, he came to contrast two types of intellectual functioning, “subjective” and “objective,” which foreshadowed Jung’s “introversion” and “extraversion.” But at the same time he recognized that “imageless thought” exists. Most important, he noted that the observation of an individual’s behavior with regard to a set task provides the best information about his intellectual performance. This was the first step along the road that was to lead Binet, at the end of his life, to recognize that “there are very large portions of our psychic life that are by their very nature inaccessible to consciousness” (1911c, p. 9), and to declare that psychology “has become a science of action” (Binet & Simon 1909, p. 146).
In 1905 Binet made the discovery that brought him fame. After 1900 he virtually abandoned his laboratory in favor of work in the schools and institutions for the feeble-minded, and at his suggestion, a commission was set up in the Ministry of Education to study the establishment of classes for the mentally abnormal. It was soon found that clinical methods could not detect accurately those children who could not profit by normal instruction. Within less than a year, Binet proposed a diagnostic method for determining the intelligence of children. In an article written with the psychiatrist Th. Simon, “Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux” (1905), which appeared in the Année psychologique, Binet presented a series of 30 intelligence tests of increasing difficulty; revisions and minor improvements appeared later (Binet & Simon 1908; Binet 1911b).
The success of Binet’s diagnostic method was im-mediate, and Cyril Burt has humorously described the astonishment and admiration of the English psychologists, who were surprised that Binet’s tests, unlike certain French wines, lost none of their qualities in crossing the Channel. Several factors contributed to this success. In the first place, Binet implicitly assumed the existence of a “general intelligence,” a hypothesis which ran counter to the psychology of “mental functions” that he had him-self used in his other works. This eclectic approach was noted with some acerbity by Charles Spear-man, whose first article on factorial analysis had appeared a year earlier than Binet’s article.
A little more than a year afterwards appeared the great work of Binet and Simon. Here, this paradoxical recommendation to make a hotchpot was actually adopted in practice. Nevertheless the elaborate correlational theory which had in point of fact generated the idea, and had supplied the sole evidence for its validity, was now passed over. The said authors employed a popular substitute. “Intelligence,” as measured by the pool, was depicted as a “general level” of ability. So far as doctrine is concerned, this is the only thing introduced by them that was novel. And most surprisingly Binet, although in actual testing he took account of this “general level” alone, still in all his theoretical psychology continued to rely altogether upon his old formal faculties, notwithstanding that these and the “general level” appear to involve doctrines quite incompatible with each other. (Spearman 1927, p. 60)
The second factor that contributed to Binet’s success was his opportunity to use the method of comparing groups, i.e., normal school children and the mentally retarded children of the hospital at Perray-Vaucluse. To be sure, there had been many psychologists before Binet who had used this method, starting with Galton. The work published by Bolton (1892), Gilbert (1894), and Bagley (1901) in the United States had compared the subjects’ test results with their performance in school. But here the third, and no doubt most important, factor in Binet’s success enters in. His predecessors, in the tradition of Wundt’s psychology, had employed tests that were presumed to be “elemental,” i.e., psychophysical, and the correlations they obtained were too low to have any practical value. This was true for Cattell’s researches in the United States as well as for those of Spearman in England. Binet declared instead that it was possible to get at the higher mental functions directly and above all to create suitable tests that would produce significant results. Finally, on the practical level, the success of the Binet scale was furthered by the discovery of the notion of mental age (which, incidentally, was not introduced until the 1908 revision). Whatever the drawbacks of this unit of measurement may be (and they have by now led to its almost total abandonment, even for children), when it was first proposed it could so easily be understood even by nontechnicians—e.g., teachers and physicians—that it facilitated the acceptance of the method of tests.
Within the total compass of Binet’s work on differential psychology, the scale of intelligence, which gave Binet his fame, occupies, quantitatively, only a small space. The diversity of his interests led him to take up the most varied subjects, and in every case he made an original contribution.
Binet played an important role in the development of biometrics and psychometrics. His concern with individual differences led him to propose a technique for assessing the variability of a particular trait, either over a population or for a single individual over time. He understood the inadequacy of describing an empirical distribution by its arithmetic mean and its extreme values, and he therefore abandoned Broca’s procedure (dividing the difference between the extreme values by the mean) and instead divided the difference between the means of the last and first quarters by the general mean. This method is characteristic of the period before the introduction into psychology of the standard deviation and the coefficient of variation as commonly used indexes of dispersion. Binet’s solution “may seem arbitrary, even over-simple, but on second thought it is no worse than various other measures of variability” (Schreider 1957, p. 309).
Binet tackled the problem of correlation as well as that of dispersion. One way in which he approached the problem was to use the “method of numerical scores”; a second way was to measure association as a function of ranks (Binet & Vaschide 1897; Binet & Henri 1898). The first method consists in selecting for reference one of two traits and subdividing the population into four subgroups that show this trait in order, from “weak” to “strong.” Then, for each subgroup one calculates the mean for the second trait. Inspection shows whether the variations for the two traits run parallel. The second method, which is more elaborate, is essentially identical with what was later called Spearman’s foot rule. However, it was abandoned by Binet, even though it was developed by a mathematician at his suggestion (Sée 1904).
Binet was one of the inventors of the questionnaire method. He also made the first scientific studies of graphology, of the psychology of arithmetic prodigies and chess players, and of the psychology of small groups (he even used the term “leader”), to cite only a few achievements of this “Paganini of psychology,” as Claparède called him. Toward the end of his life he again became interested in pathological psychology, having abandoned it after his days at the Salpétrière, and spent time at psychiatric hospitals and at a laboratory that he had set up in an elementary school in the Rue de la Grange aux Belles. He also studied pedagogical methods, to which his last book was devoted.
Binet had an essentially independent nature, and although he occasionally had collaborators, he never really had any students. Indeed, he lived in a kind of intellectual isolation that became painful to him toward the end of his life. He exerted an influence not so much by personal contacts, which he shunned (he never went to a scientific congress), as by his publications. In 1893 he established the Bulletin du idboratoire de psychologie physiologique de la Sorbonne as a vehicle for his works, and it was replaced two years later by the Année psychologique. This appeared annually, and most of it was edited by Binet, either alone or with some assistance, until his death. The Année psychologique played an important part in the diffusion of psychology, both by bringing together original work and by reviewing the world literature in the field.
Pierre Pichot
[For the historical context of Binet’s work, see the biographies ofCattell; Charcot; Galton; Mill; Spearman. For discussions of the subsequent development of Binet’s ideas, seeEducational psychology; Hysteria; intelligence and intelligence testing; statistics, descriptive; Terman.]
WORKS BY BINET
(1886) 1901 The Psychology of Reasoning. London: Routledge. ? First published as La psychologie du raisonnement.
(1887) 1892 Binet, Alfred; and FÉrÉ, Charles. Animal Magnetism. New York: Appleton. ? First published in French.
1889 On Double Consciousness. Chicago: Open Court. ? Published in English.
(1892) 1896 Alterations of Personality. New York: Appleton. ? First published as Les altérations de la personnalité.
1894a Introduction à la psychologie experimental. Paris: Alcan.
1894b La psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs échecs. Paris: Hachette.
1897 Binet, Alfred; and Vaschide, N. Corrélation des épreuves physiques. Année psychologique 4:142–172.
1898 Binet, Alfred; and Henri, V. La fatigue intellectuelle. Paris: Schleicher.
1900 La suggestibilité. Paris: Schleicher.
1903 L’étude expérimental de i’ntelligence. Paris: Schleicher.
1905 Binet, Alfred; and Simon, Th. Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux. Année psychologique 11:191–244.
(1906) 1907 Mind and the Brain. London: Routledge. ? First published as L’âme et le corps.
1908 Binet, Alfred; and Simon th. Le développement de I’intelligence chez les enfants. Année psychologique 14:1–94.
1909 Binet, Alfred; and Simon, Th. L’intelligence des imbéciles. Année psychologique 15:1–147.
1910 Binet, Alfred; and Simon. Th. Hystérie. Année psychologique 16:67–122.
1911a Les idées modernes sur les enfants. Paris: Flam-marion.
1911b Nouvelles recherches sur la mesure du niveau intellectuel chez les enfants d’école. Année psychologique 17:145–201.
1911c Qu’est-ce qu’un acte intellectuel? Année psychologique 17:1–47.
WORKS ABOUT BINET
[Alfred Binet.] 1957 Revue de psychologie appliquée 7:229–316. ? Contains five articles about Alfred Binet by Cyril Burt, Pierre Oléron, R. Perron and J. de Gobineau, E. A. Fleishman, and Eugène Schreider.
Bertrand, FranÇois-Louis 1930 Alfred Binet et son oeuvre. Paris: Alcan.
Delay, Jean 1958 La vie et I’oeuvre d’Alfred Binet. Psychologie française 3:85–88.
[La vie et I’oeuvre d’Alfred Binet.] 1958 Psychologie française 3:85–121. ? Contains five articles about Alfred Binet by Jean Delay, Henri Piéron, Piérre Pichot, Paul Fraisse, and René Zazzo.
Pichot, Pierre 1963 Alfred Binet. Volume 3, pages 209–220 in Kurt Kolle (editor), Grosse Nervenärzte. Stuttgart (Germany): Thieme.
Schreider, EugÈne 1957 La place d’Alfred Binet dans I’évolution de la biométrie. Revue de psychologie appliquée 7:305–316.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Année psychologique. ? Founded by Binet in 1894. Most of his work was published in this journal.
Bagley, William C. 1901 On the Correlation of Mental and Motor Activity in School Children. American Journal of Psychology 12:193–205.
Bolton, Thaddeus L. 1892 The Growth of Memory in School Children. American Journal of Psychology 4: 362–380.
Centenaire de Th. Ribot: Jubilé de la psychologie scientifique frangaise. 1939 Agen (France) : Imprimerie moderne.
Gilbert, J. Allen 1894 Researches on the Mental and Physical Development of School Children. Yale Psychological Laboratory, Studies 2:40–100.
SÉe, A. 1904 Une formule mathématique applicable aux recherches sur la psychologic. Société libre pour 1’étude psychologique de 1’enfant, Bulletin 4:492–498.
Spearman, Charles E. 1927 The Abilities of Man: Their Nature and Measurement. London: Macmillan.