Binet – A truly applied
Alfredpsychologist by Richard Howard*
Richard Howard on a psychologist who is remembered for educational testing, butwhose interests covered the full gamut of individual differences
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Citation: Howard, R. (2009). Alfred Binet: A truly applied psychologist. ThePsychologist, 22, 278–279.
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Alfred Binet, who died in Paris in 1911, will for ever be associated with intelligence testing, having developed the precursor of the Stanford–Binet IQ test, the Binet–Simon scale. Ironically he would have abhorred the idea of assigning a numericalvalue to a child’s mental capacity – his purpose in testing the intellectual capacity of school children was, he pointed out, to classify, not to quantify.
It is as a pioneer in the field of educational psychology that Binet tends to beremembered, largely due to the fact that his techniques for assessing mental (asopposed to chronological) age were exported to the United States and taken up byTerman. However, the aims and interests of Terman and Binet in relation to mental testing diverged considerably. In a commentary comparing Terman and Binet, HenryMinton (1998) pointed out that Binet saw the mental tests as diagnostic tools that could target such children for special compensatory education programmes that would improve their academic performance. They would even, in some cases, enable thesechildren to be channelled back to mainstream classrooms. Terman, on the other hand, was concerned with the need to identify the mildly retarded so that they could be segregated in special institutions.In the US, Binet’s techniques spawned an ‘educational testing’ industry that hasflourished ever since. Binet would have disapproved of the misuse to which his scale was put in the US, especially in the hands of members of the eugenics movement. The following quotation shows that Binet was primarily interested in what we wouldprobably nowadays call ‘social intelligence’:
It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment (Binet & Simon, 1916/1973,pp.42–43).
It is less widely appreciated that Binet’s interests covered the full gamut of individual differences, from deviant sexual interests – he originally coined the term ‘eroticfetishism’ (Binet, 1887) – through expert chess players, to chiromancers. This breadth of interest he combined with an experimental rigour that is exemplified in his work with schoolchildren on what we now call ‘interrogative suggestibility’. His interest in this topic probably reflected, in part, his early exposure to Charcot’s work onhypnosis at La Salpêtrière in Paris, which he abandoned to work at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne (in his latter years, as its director). In part it also reflected his interest in the law – he graduated as a lawyer aged 21, anddeveloped a keen interest in psychology and the law. Indeed, he might equally becalled a pioneer of forensic psychology. He was well aware of the problems of faulty memory in relation to eyewitness testimony, whose reliability he questioned in his bookLa Suggestibilité, published in 1900 (this has never been translated into English, which accounts for its unfamiliarity to the Anglophone world).
InLa SuggestibilitéBinet described a series of studies in which he manipulated, and measured, interrogative suggestibility in French schoolchildren. Using the technique of interrogative [279]pressure – ‘la memoire forcée’– both oral and written, Binet would present the child with simple objects such as those shown in Figure 1. Hewould then use suggestive questioning to induce memory errors. For example, thechild would be asked to reproduce, graphically, the two centimes stamp, indicating ‘the postmark that obscured the stamp’ (the stamp actually bore no postmark). The result was that many children would, under interrogative pressure, draw a stamp with a postmark, as shown in Figure 2.