Binet, Alfred

Dolph Kohnstamm

Emeritus, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

Glossary

cephalometry Methods and scientific motives to measure the size and form of the head of individuals in order to find characteristics of specific groups of human beings, e.g.of gifted children, early forms of mankind (in evolution), criminals, people belonging to different races, etcetera. Discredited because of Nazi theories and practice. In modern times replaced by measures of brain volume using MRI scans.

conservation Jean Piaget’s term for the ability of the child to recognize that certain properties of objects (e.g. mass, volume, number) do not change despite transformations in the spatial appearance of the objects.

mental age Stage and level in cognitive (mental) development that is typical for children of a given age, as determined in large and representative samples of children in a given population.

pedagogy From the Greek words pais (boy; child) and agoo (to lead), thus the art and science of educating children. In present days the concept comprises more than school education alone. It also encompasses the guidance parents give to their children, in all respects, not only their cognitive development.

 suggestibility A personality trait indicating the degree to which a child or adult is susceptible to suggestions made by others, children or adults.

Alfred Binet (1857-1911) found his true vocation in the new science of psychology after some years in law school and medical school. Driven by an extremely inquisitive mind he first studied psychopathology and suggestibility before settling in experimental psychology. A warm interest in the mentally retarded led him to the invention of a wide range of tasks to test individual differences in mental capacities between retarded and normal individuals, both adults and children. Commissioned by the ministry of education to devise selection criteria for schools of special education, and assisted by his young co-worker Théodore Simon, he developed the series of tasks that became known as the Binet-Simon scales for the measurement of intelligence. This invention of a practical method brought him - in France - the academic recognition he had sought in vain before, notwithstanding his international renown. Founder, in 1894, and long term editor of l’Année Psychologique, Binet published articles and books on an unbelievable wide range of subjects. His seminal work in education bears witness of his dedication to individual differences and their standardized assessment.

YOUTH OF ALFRED BINET

Born in Nice in 1857 Alfred Binet was the only child of a physician and his wife, an amateur painter. His father was not the first physician in the family. He himself was son of one and so was the grandfather of his mother. The latter, Mr. Jordan, served also as mayor of Marseille.
Little is known of Binet's childhood and adolescence. It is a pity that this great child psychologist never took the time to commit his own childhood memories to paper. Was it his characteristic modesty that prevented him to do so? Were his memories too painful to pass on to strangers? Or did he postpone this task too long and came his deathly illness too soon? Fact is that the marriage of his parents was unhappy and that after a few years at high school in Nice his mother took him, aged 15, to Paris for his further education. There, Alfred first attended a famous lycée (Louis le Grand) before entering law school, obtaining his license degree at age 21. Dissatisfied with the prospect of a career in law or public affairs he switched for a while to medical school. With all of his (fore)fathers behind him this may not have been a good choice for such an extremely inquisitive and original mind. After a year or so he embarked on a self-study of psychology at the national library, the famous Bibliothèque Nationale, soon finding his vocation in that area, so new it was not yet a field of study at the University. Binet's first enthusiasm was stirred by the then dominant current in cognitive psychology: associationism. Only one year later, in 1880, his first paper was published in the Revue philosophique, on the fusion of resemblant sensations.

EARLY CAREER

In 1882 a former schoolmate of Binet, the neurologist Joseph Babinski, introduced him to the psychiatrists of the famous hospital La Salpêtrière to work in the clinic of professor Charcot, where hysterical patients were treated with hypnosis. (see picture) Only three years later young Freud came from Vienna to study Charcot’s methods in this same clinic. Binet published about a dozen papers on this subject over the next seven years, most of them in the Revue philosophique . But at the same time he continued his work in cognitive psychology and published his first book in 1886, La psychologie du raisonnement, based strictly on the premises of association psychology.
With John Stuart Mill as his ‘hero’ the young Binet had to mitigate his extremely environmentalist beliefs by the influence of his father-in-law, E.G. Balbiani, a professor in embryology at the Collège de France. Binet adapted his lectures on heredity for publication. All this time Binet had no paid appointment. He must have had sufficient access to the family capital, being the only child to a wealthy father. This allowed him excursions into another new field: zoology. Studying and dissecting insects in a laboratory led him to write a doctoral thesis, entitled “A Contribution to the Study of the Subintestinal Nervous System of Insects” defended in1894. In the meanwhile he had made again another move by asking for and obtaining a non paid appointment at Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. Being accepted as a staff member by its director, Henri Beaunis, in 1891 he was to succeed him three years later, when Beaunis retired. In that same year, that also brought him his doctors title, he and Beaunis founded the first psychological journal in France, L’Année psychologique, of which Binet was to remain the editor until his death, seventeen years later. But that was not all. Two of his books went to print in that fruitful year, an introduction to experimental psychology and a study on the psychology of chess players and master calculators. Also, his first article on experimental child development appeared, in collaboration with his co-worker Victor Henri, foreboding what was to become the focus of his studies in child intelligence and education.
With this solid and impressive academic record it is amazing that Binet was never offered a chair in the French universities. Notwithstanding his international recognition, even long before his scales of mental tests brought him international fame. A course of twelve lectures he gave a the University of Bucharest, in 1895, progressed so good that the number of students, professors and interested citizens swelled so much that the course had to be continued in a larger audience hall. Also, a year before, he had been appointed member of the editorial board of the new Psychological Review, at a time when only American psychologists were appointed. One can imagine Binet’s great disappointment about not being given a chair in Paris.

A FATHER BECOMES A CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST

In 1884 Binet had married Laure Balbiani, daughter of the embryologist mentioned above, and in1885 and 1887 two children were born, Madeleine and Alice. The father began to observe the behavior of his little daughters, just as Piaget would do some twenty years later. Binet was struck by the differences in behavior patterns the two girls showed, especially their different styles of “voluntary attention”. Madeleine always concentrated firmly on whatever she was doing, whereas Alice was impulsive. He took notes and began writing reports on his observations, using the pseudonyms Marguerite for Madeleine and Armande for Alice. He published three of these reports in the Revue philosophique , when his eldest daughter was five years old. A quotation from the first report (1890), on motoric behavior:
“When M. was learning to walk she did not leave one support until she had discovered another near at hand to which she could direct herself (..) while A., in contrast, progressed into empty space without any attention to the consequences (of falling).” On their temperamental differences he noted that M. was “silent, cool, concentrated, while A. was a laughter, gay, thoughtless, frivolous, and turbulent (...) Now, (at their present age) the psychological differences (...) have not disappeared. On the contrary, they have disclosed a very clear character to their whole mental development.”
In child psychology of the past century - long after Binet’s time - people have tried to explain such individual differences between two sisters or brothers as resulting from their difference in birth order. The characteristic differences between Binet’s two daughters echo the typical differences found in some of those studies between first- and second-born children. But this research has practically come to a halt because wide scale confirmation failed to materialize. In Binet’s days this was not yet a hypothesis known to be reckoned with and neither had Freudian psychoanalytic thinking colonized the minds of child psychologists. The explanation that Madeleine was the first to establish an oedipal relation with her father, and might be suffering from anxiety for fear of the punishment from her mother, was not yet formulated.
So here we see a still innocent investigator of child behavior, a confirmed environmentalist in his student years, be impressed by the individual differences in personality characteristics as seen in the behavior patterns of his own children. Convinced that he and his wife had provided both girls with about the same environment and comparable experiences, no other conclusion could be inferred in these pre-Freudian decades, than differences in genetic predispositions. This unmistakable truth came to fathers mind in the same period that he edited the lectures on heredity by his father-in-law. Binet’s great interest in the development of individual differences was born. So impressed was he by the differences in approaching tasks by the two girls that it seems as if he initially failed to discern the important maturational differences between young children almost two years apart. To this amazing conclusion came his biographer, Theta H. Wolf in her admirable book on Binet’s professional development (Wolf, 1971). This article owes much to her fine study.

ASSESSMENT OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING 

Binet tried many cognitive tasks on his two daughters. Several tests of memory, from remembering colors seen to sentences spoken. From interpreting simulated emotions in expressions (using Darwin’s original pictures) to word definitions: “What is it? Tell me what it is?” From answers by his daughters such as “A snail is to step on” or “A dog bites”, their father was amazed to see how “utilitarian” children are. He made discoveries that nowadays are textbook knowledge in child development. He touched upon them in his articles but he did not bring them in a systematic framework, e.g. by writing a book on language development, or the development of memory. In this respect he differed from other child psychologists who came after him. For example, Binet touched upon the problems young children have to distinguish between what looks more and what is more. He arranged beads in different colors or sizes on the table and asked his daughters to make judgments on quantity, much as Piaget would do two decades later with his children. But Piaget, who must have known Binet’s publications, did not stop there, and devised many different tasks on number ‘conservation’, describing meticulously how children of different ages reacted to these tasks, embedding the results in an elaborate and complex theory on the growth of logical thought.
        An important change in Binet’s thinking came when he and his co-worker Victor Henri went to give cognitive tasks to schoolchildren differing much more in age then his two daughters. For example, he discovered how 12 year olds could resist false suggestions made by the experimenter, as to what would be the right answer to a problem of perception, whereas most 7 year olds could not. The misleading questions they presented to the children remind one of similar tricks played by Piaget in his conservation tasks. Binet came to see the growth of their faculty of attention, judgment and criticism as essential in children’s development of intelligence. He and Henri published a book on suggestibility in 1900. In this book they warn the reader how susceptible children are to suggestions, true or false, and that in many experimental situations insufficient attention is given to implicit suggestions caused by the experimenter’s words or acts, by the way the materials are arranged or by the behavior of other children present in the situation. This warning has not been heard or taken seriously by many researchers in cognitive development in the century following this publication. Even Piaget himself did not show sufficient caution against the use of ‘misleading’ questions in the cognitive problems he arranged for his subjects. Only since the 1980’s the suggestibility of young children came to be extensively researched, out of concern for the reliability of children’s testimony in court cases.
        From his earlier publications on his work in the Salpêtrière hospital Binet was widely known as a staunch supporter of hypnosis as a method to learn more about unconscious motives and thoughts. When publishing the book on his suggestibility experiments with children, headmasters of schools in Paris closed their doors for him, fearing he was bringing their pupils under hypnosis during his experiments.
Binet’s pioneering work on suggestibility was seen by him as essential for the psychology of court testimony. He even saw a wider application in the courtrooms, because also the judges were subject to suggestions and let their judgments be influenced by them. Thus Binet proposed the formulation of a psycho judicial science, and if he had continued on this road he might now have been regarded as the founder of experimental forensic psychology, in particular the validity of eyewitness testimony.
        This article cannot give an overview of the great variety of studies Binet undertook. Only some impressions can be given. Thus his study of creative imagination in novelists and playwrights, with the help of interviews and questionnaires. Famous authors, among whom Edmont de Goncourt and Alexander Dumas told Binet how inspiration appeared to come to them. Especially the “spontaneous inspirations” produced by the mind during sleep fascinated Binet. Later in his life he would become an author of fiction himself, writing plays for the theatre, one of which saw 30 performances in succession at the famous Sarah Bernhardt theatre in Paris.

ASSESSMENT OF INTELLIGENCE IN GROUPS OF CHILDREN AND MENTALLY RETARDED ADULTS

Not in the position to offer students grades and diplomas, nor to offer co-workers a salary, Binet was totally dependent on the enthusiasm of one or two volunteer assistants. Therefore, Theodore Simon was just the person he needed. Simon worked in a colony for retarded children and adolescents, all boys, and had permission to use them as subjects in tests. Binet first tested Simon, for his competence, persistence and good faith, as he used to do with prospective co-workers. Luckily Simon passed the high standards Binet had in mind for his assistants. A very fruitful period followed. Both the differences in age and the differences in mental capacities in this population yielded a mass of differential data on the many cognitive tasks Binet and Simon invented for them. Together with his co-worker Victor Henri Binet joined other European investigators in studying mental fatigue in school children. The introduction of compulsory education for all children, also from the working classes, caused concern about their endurance in long days of mental exertion. With another co-worker, Nicholas Vaschide, Binet set out to measure physical, physiological and anatomical characteristics of the boys, to study individual differences in physique and physical force. In order to find meaningful relations between the many different measures he invented a crude measure of correlation, using rank differences. It is fair to note that this research was met with devastating criticism, also in the Psychological Review (Franz, 1898) because of its many flaws in computations and the doubtful reliability of the measures used. A few years later Binet and Simon made extensive studies of the relation between certain measures of intelligence and head size. Cephalometry was very common in those days, in psychology as well as in criminology. Both men hoped to find significant correlations between head size and intelligence. But after many years of data collection and publications, among which Simon’s doctoral thesis on mentally retarded boys, they gave up, because in the normal ranges of intelligence the correlations were too small. It is only in the present time, with the more precise MRI scans of brain volume, that some psychologists return to this old hypothesis. It was their interest in the distinction between mentally retarded, normal and gifted children that they had spent so much time on the assessment of physical and anatomical measures. When they left this track it was because obtaining reliable measures from children was so difficult, not because they did no longer believe in their relatedness to cognitive capacities.
One other association they saw clearly, the relatedness between intelligence and success at school, notably in reading and arithmetic. Since studying the cognitive development in his own two daughters Binet was dedicated to the study of cognitive growth and to the necessity of a match between what teachers should expect from pupils and their developmental level. It was in fact his concern about such mismatches observed in schools he visited that first motivated him to create a series of age-appropriate cognitive tasks. Such an instrument would allow teachers to assess the cognitive level of each individual child and then to adapt their educational goals for each child, or group of children, according to its level of development. A second motivation to set out on this expedition was an invitation by the French Ministry of Education to devise a test to detect those children who were too retarded to profit from ordinary schooling. For this goal a ‘Ministerial commission for the Abnormal’ was set appointed in 1904. Binet and Simon began to devise series of six small cognitive tasks for each age, from age 3 onward. For example, a task for a three-year-old became the proper reaction to “show me where is your nose, your mouth, your eye”, thus a simple test of vocabulary development. Or they let children copy squares and triangles, setting criteria for pass or fail (see illustrations). Tasks were seen as age-appropriate when 75 percent of a given age group passed the criteria set and 25 percent failed. Binet thought in levels of cognitive development for each individual child and in standards for groups of a given age. Thus a child of five that passed all six tasks for age five and also three of the tasks for age six, showed to have a mental level of five and a half. Such knowledge would help the teacher to adapt his or her expectations of that child and to set the proper educational goals for that child accordingly. Children two or more years behind the standard levels for their age should be given special education in classes for the retarded. In 1905 Binet and Simon published their scales for the first time. The title of this publication refers to the usefulness of their instrument to distinguish between children of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ intellectual level. In their subsequent revisions of these scales this ‘commissioned’ goal was pushed into the background, as can be inferred from the change in titles, from ‘the development of intelligence in children’ (1908) into ‘the measurement of intellectual level in school children’ (1911).
       Although Binet’s first concern was with the retarded children, the deaf mutes and the visually handicapped, he was probably the first to ask special attention for the gifted child, suggesting the organization of special classes for the ‘above-averaged’. He argued that it is “ through the elite, and not through the efforts of the average that humanity invents and makes progress.”
        While many of those who later promoted the Binet-Simon scales, like Goddard and Terman in the USA, were ardent hereditarians, Binet held a more balanced view. He strongly believed in the potential of education for increasing intelligence as Siegler (1992) has documented in his fine biographical article on Binet.

OTHER OFFICES HELD IN EDUCATION

In 1899 Binet was asked to become an adviser of La Société libre pour l’Etude psychologique de l’Enfant, a society just established by Ferdinand Buisson, occupant of the chair of the science of education at the Sorbonne University, at the request of his students, who were teachers and professors attending his courses. These students had read about child study associations abroad, notably those initiated in the United States by G. Stanley Hall. In 1901 Binet became vice-president of this society and a year later he succeeded Buisson as president. He remained president until his death. Six years later the society was renamed in La Société Alfred Binet, and after Simon’s death, in 1961, it was again renamed, this time adding the name of Binet’s closest ally and successor Théodore Simon. This society exist to the present day. It has a bulletin that has covered more than a century in child psychology and education, under different names. Its present name is Eduquer. Revue de la Societé Binet/Simon under the direction of Bernard Andrieu of the University of Nancy.
In 1909, two years before his death, Binet presided the first international pedagogical congress, held in Liège (Belgium). He was then asked to chair an international commission studying pedagogical trends in different countries.

RECEPTION OF THE BINET-SIMON INTELLIGENCE SCALES 

Both in Europe and the United States the publication of the Binet-Simon scales in the l’Année Psychologique did not go unnoticed. To the contrary, it was as if the profession had been waiting for this invention. All over Europe psychologists and educators began to translate and adopt the scales. To mention only the best-known names: Alice Descoeudres in Geneva, Otto Bobertag in Breslau and Ovide Decroly in Brussels. It was William Stern, Bobertag’s colleague in Breslau who in 1911 coined the concept ‘mental age’ and proposed to compute a quotient by comparing mental age and chronological age. The IQ was born, albeit still without the multiplication by 100. Thus, a child in those days could obtain an IQ of 0.75!
Nowhere was the reception of the 1908 revision of the scales to measure intelligence so enthusiastic as in the United States. In that same year Henry H. Goddard of the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey, was introduced to the new scales by Ovide Decroly, and took them on board back to the States, where he published his adaptation in 1911. He was so enthusiastic about the discovery he made in old Europe that he compared the importance of the scales with Darwin’s theory of evolution and Mendel’s law of inheritance. (Bertrand, 1930) The most widely known American revision became the one developed by Lewis Terman, published in 1916 and standardized on about 2000 children. This test, known as the Stanford-Binet, later revised by Terman and Merrill in 1937, used the 100 as a multiplier. Terman’s standardization brought the normal distribution and standard deviation into Binet’s invention.
Binet’s biographer, Theta H. Wolf, quoted John E. Anderson (1956) in writing “it is impossible, unless we lived through the period, to recapture the enthusiasm, discussion, and controversy that the Binet tests started. Clearly [Binet’s work] substituted for the onus of moral blame, a measurable phenomenon within the child’s resources that [was] to be studied henceforth in its own right.” And she added herself: “These tests made it possible to show that measurable differences in mental levels, rather tan voluntary and thus punishable ‘moral weakness’, could be responsible for children’s [below standard] school achievement.” Not everyone was charmed by the triumphal progress of the intelligence scales in the U.S. Kuhlman (1912) was among the first to criticize the scales for their flaws. William Stern reported to have read in American publications about ‘binetists’ who tried to ‘binetize’ children and adults. Especially in France the reception of the Binet-Simon scales was met with reservation and disregard. Binet had no easy character and had been frank with many of his academic colleagues in giving his opinion on their work. After his death in 1911 Simon became the director of their now world famous laboratory. When at the end of the First World War the young biologist Jean Piaget, aged 22, came to Paris to study at Bleuler’s psychiatric clinic and at the Sorbonne, Simon offered him the opportunity to work in the laboratory. Simon asked Piaget to standardize Cyril Burt’s reasoning test on Parisian children. Although Piaget undertook this project without much enthusiasm, his interest grew when he began the actual testing. He found himself increasingly fascinated with the thought processes by which the child came to his answers, in particular the incorrect ones. Several years later, when his own children were born, he followed his predecessor Binet in probing their cognitive development by confronting them with simple problems and misleading questions. Although Piaget in his publications never explicitly recognized his being influenced and inspired by Binet, both Wolf and Siegler concluded that circumstantial evidence clearly shows so.
Over the next decades also his compatriots grew convinced of the seminal importance of Binet’s work. In the early sixties René Zazzo and his collaborators published a new scale to measure intelligence in children. As Theta Wolf has described and explained, Zazzo discovered that Binet himself had never used the concept ‘mental age’ and actually found it an inadequate notion, preferring ‘mental level’ instead.

Anderson , John E. (1956). Child Development, an historical perspective. ChildDevelopment 27, 181-196.

Andrieu, B. ( 2001). Alfred Binet (1857–1911), sa vie, son oeuvre. Oeuvres Complètes d’Alfred Binet. Editions Euredit, St Pierre du Mont, Landes, France.

Bertrand, F.L.(1930). Alfred Binet et son oeuvre. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris.

Binet, A. et Simon, Th.(1905). Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux. l’Année Psychologique11, 191-244.

Franz, S.I. (1898). Review of l’Année Psychologique, 1998, vol. 4, specifically the series of articles by A. Binet and N. Vasc hide. Psychological Review 5, 665 – 667.

Kuhlman, F. (1912). The present status of the Binet and Simon tests of intelligence of children. Journal of Psycho-Asthenics16, 113-139.

Siegler, R.S. (1992). The other Alfred Binet. Developmental Psychology28, 179-190

Stern, W.(1914,1928). Psychologie der Frühen Kindheit. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig

Stern, W.(1920,1928). Die Intelligenz der Kinder und Jugendlichen. Barth, Leipzig.

Wolf, Theta H. (197 3). Alfred Binet. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.

Note: An exhaustive bibliography of Alfred Binet can be found at:
www.univ-nancy2.fr/ACERHP/perso/andrieu/andrieu.html.

The author is indebted to an anonymous reviewer of this article for his critical notes and helpful suggestions.