Alfred Binet

1857-1911 · French · Experimental and Intelligence Psychology

To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well, these are the essential activities of intelligence.

Alfred Binet was a French experimental psychologist, the founder of the first practical scale of intelligence and one of the most careful and self-correcting minds in the young science. Largely self-taught in psychology after training in law and science, he worked first at the Salpêtrière on hypnosis and hysteria — an episode he later disavowed when he saw how much of the "results" were the products of suggestion — then established at the Sorbonne a laboratory devoted to the experimental study of the higher mental processes: reasoning, judgment, memory, imagination, and above all intelligence.

Topics Alfred Binet addresses

• the metric scale of intelligence
• the Binet-Simon scale
• mental level
• mental orthopedics
• the malleability of intelligence
• brutal pessimism
• intelligence is not a fixed quantity
• diagnosis, not a sentence
• individual differences
• the higher mental processes
• complex judgment versus sensory tests
• alterations of personality
• double consciousness
• suggestibility and experimenter error
• the Salpêtrière and hypnosis
• the psychology of reasoning
• imageless thought
• types of mind
• the completion test
• child psychology
• the educability of the child
• the reality of the divided self
• the criterion of prediction
• the psychic life of micro-organisms

Questions to put to Alfred Binet

The Intelligence Scale and Its Purpose

• What exactly does your scale measure?
• How did you come up with the tasks for the Binet-Simon scale?
• What's the difference between mental level and what others later called IQ?
• Why do you insist the scale is for diagnosis, not for ranking children?
• How should teachers and schools actually use your test results?

The Malleability of Intelligence

• What do you mean by calling the fixed-intelligence view 'brutal pessimism'?
• Can you really increase a child's intelligence, or just teach them more facts?
• What is mental orthopedics and how does it work?
• What results have you seen from training backward children?
• How do you respond to those who say intelligence is innate and unchangeable?

The Higher Mental Processes

• Why do you think sensory tests fail to predict school performance?
• What makes a judgment task different from a reaction-time test?
• What did you learn from studying your daughters' thinking?
• What do you mean by imageless thought?
• How can reasoning be studied experimentally?

Suggestion, Hypnosis, and Experimental Error

• What went wrong with your early work at the Salpêtrière?
• How can an experimenter's expectations create false results?
• What's the difference between real hypnotic phenomena and suggestion artifacts?
• How should a psychologist guard against contaminating their own observations?
• Do you still believe in the reality of double consciousness?

Individual Differences and Types of Mind

• What did you discover about the different types of intelligence in your daughters?
• How do individual minds differ beyond just being more or less intelligent?
• What role does personality play in how someone thinks?
• Can two children with the same mental level still think in completely different ways?

Converse with Alfred Binet on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Alfred Binet's own writing, cited to the page.