This French Psychologist Created the First IQ Test to Help Young Students; Then it Got into the Hands of an American Eugenicist.
Alfred Binet and the Binet-Simon Scale
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On June 22, I published a piece about the eugenically-tinged concept of “normalcy” and “average”: Are You A Normal Person; Are You Average? Read This Fascinating Piece of History & Discover Your True Individual Nature.
In 1943, a celebrated gynecologist named Robert Dickinson created a statue based on averaging the body dimensions of over 15,000 women. He (and many others) considered the final form the true representation of the “ideal woman.”
The statue, named Norma, became the centerpiece of a contest for women. To enter, women sent in their body measurements. Whoever closely matched Norma would win money or war bonds.
I found this story in Todd Rose’s superb book, The End of Average.
The piece was part of my continuing investment in debunking the harmful and insidious idea that there exists one right way to be a person.
By presenting the preposterous premise upon which the Norma contest was predicated, I wanted to highlight the fundamental incompatibility between our systems and the people they are supposed to serve, to foreground the fictional premise—that there exists an average student, an average worker, an average person—upon which many current institutions and organizations are based.
Two days after the piece went live, Roe was overturned.
Americans live in a country built on male savagery. To get what they wanted, in this case, land, white Europeans massacred the people who lived on the land they wanted and used enslaved people, who were also stolen and now considered “property,” to build on that stolen land. This was cultural genocide.
These are basic facts.
The overturning of Roe by men, many of whom have been accused of rape and sexual assault, got me thinking about broader issues of control and how across time, women and people of color have been considered inanimate objects for men to move, control, destroy, and eliminate.
I often think about the history of IQ testing and the eugenic notions woven into the determinations made of one’s score.
Today, I am writing about the origin of the IQ testing movement and the very first IQ test, which was created with the intention of helping those who needed it.
It was corrupted by an American eugenicist, H.H. Goddard, who used it to create a new type of standardization upon which he based our workplace and educational system and whose legacy remains with us today: the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test.
Important note! I am using a new punctuation mark: a strikethrough of a word, and I am using it to indicate that the word was used unobjectionably in the past but is now objectionable and no longer used.
The French government was concerned about its kids.
In 1882, the Jules Ferry Laws were passed, mandating all children to attend public school. This included children with severe mental differences, children who were constantly overlooked and excluded from activities that made up everyday life.
The inclusion of these students caused an imbalance in the classroom. Teachers were struggling. They didn’t know how to teach uniformly when some students couldn’t comprehend basic math and others were zipping through equations. Something had to be done, but what, and more importantly—how?
The government assembled a special commission of experts to help sort out this conundrum. Among them was Alfred Binet, the psychologist and director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne.
With a background in individual psychology, Binet took the lead, and the solution Binet landed on would mark the start of the modern IQ testing movement.
Alfred Binet was a self-taught psychologist without a doctor’s degree or the proper diplomas that would allow him to teach.
His non-traditional career path, diverse interests, and experimental ideas about childhood development—namely, that observation was more critical than theory and that environment and circumstance must be taken into account when it came to studying children—held him at a distance from the psychological community, forcing him, for long stretches of time, to develop his own techniques and methods alone.
Born in Nice, France, on July 8, 1857, the only son of wealthy parents, Binet’s various interests drove him to pursue various careers until he settled upon psychology.
Spikes and dips marked that path. He started and then left law school, he started and then left medical school.
The French Embassy | Insta
Unemployed and concerned for his future, he spent most days in the National Library in Paris, where he came across the ideas of John Stuart Mill, whose ideas on associationism particularly lit him up.
But the emerging avant-garde field of experimental psychology coming out of France and Germany struck Binet–finally!–with the feeling of purpose. A purpose whose bullseye was childhood development.
In 1883, the year before he’d marry Laure Balbiani and start a family, Binet accepted work as an unpaid researcher for the foremost neurologist of the time, Jean-Martin Charcot, who was the head of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris (and who had a reputation for caring more about identifying diseases than treating them).
At the time, Charcot was studying hypnosis, once called animal magnetism, and magnets were a centerpiece of his methods. Charcot believed that the ability to become hypnotized indicated an underlying disease.
While the scientific community turned its nose at Charcot’s hypnosis, Binet fell under his spell, so to speak, publishing four articles about his work and avidly championing Charcot’s belief that people who were susceptible to hypnosis had weak nervous systems.
Sadly for Binet, Charcot’s work did not stand up under public, professional, or scientific scrutiny, and Binet was forced, tail between legs, to admit he'd been wrong.
It took seven years for him to register that Charcot’s hypnosis was charlatan medicine. He realized patients were not influenced by the magnet, as Charcot led everyone to believe, but by the suggestions made by the hypnotist. By 1890, he was too disenchanted to stay, so he left.
Walking away from Charcot allowed him to develop his interest in childhood mental development. Instead of finding outside work, he focused on his own passions, conducting home experiments on his two young daughters, Madeleine and Alice. (It’s not as creepy as it sounds).
Their different responses, varying degrees of suggestibility, and ability to pay attention informed and shaped the tests he’d ultimately create. He was able to observe their distinct personality differences in real-time, and it was this observation that led to his belief that personal style informed how people solved problems.
In 1892, after two years at home, Binet found himself, once again for free, apprenticing at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. This was a fortuitous accident because in 1895, the director retired three years later, and Binet was promoted to his position.
This was what launched Binet and allowed him to flourish professionally. He published papers and saw his work published in a book and served on the French Commission for Retarded Children.
On top of all this, he founded and edited the very first psychology journal, L'Année Psychologique.
Binet was fascinated by children, and now that he was in a position where people were taking him seriously, he could advance his study beyond his two children to studying and testing groups of school children.
His current aim was to create a series of tests that could be administered in less than two hours.
The assessment areas were vast, covering ten psychological processes: memory, imagery, imagination, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic sentiment, moral sentiment, muscular strength and willpower, and motor ability and eye-hand coordination.
The tests were a flop but not a waste, as they’d lay the groundwork for the work to come and place his name in history.
Unlike his contemporaries, Binet didn’t believe in a single factor of intelligence, nor did he believe intelligence was fixed. He found, based on the study of his two daughters, that children learn by tucking new experiences into their existing ways of thinking.
In 1899, Binet was invited to join the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. This group made up of psychologists and educators, aimed to study struggling students and figure out how to identify the ones who needed help.
Binet went to work establishing methods to identify the “normal” children and the “abnormal” children, creating a system of measuring the difference between the two groups.
In 1903, he published L'Etude experimentale de l'intelligence (Experimental Studies of Intelligence), describing his methods.
Around this time, he took a French psychologist named Theodore Simon under his wing. Simon was an intern at the asylum at Perray-Vaucluse where he studied mentally disabled children.
Together, they continued to pursue Binet’s interest: studying the correlation between physical growth and intellectual development by testing the “abnormal” children and creating a number of mental tests.
Meanwhile, one of the French government’s most pressing issues was carrying out the Jules Ferry Law, requiring all French children to attend school.
Classrooms were now teeming with children of drastically different aptitude, competence, and intelligence levels.
They wanted to identify the children who needed the most help. Instead of doing what would have been done before the Jules Ferry Law, which was to send these kids to asylums, they planned to educate them in separate schools.
The problem was identifying the kids who were struggling the most.
So in 1904, they appointed a Commission on the Education of retarded Children. Their task was to create a mechanism to identify children who needed alternative education. Binet was an appointed member.
This was his wheelhouse.
Unlike his contemporaries, Binet didn’t believe in a single factor of intelligence, nor did he believe intelligence was fixed. He found, based on the study of his two daughters, that children learn by tucking new experiences into their existing ways of thinking.
Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon began creating the very first intelligence test.
Binet and Simon had groups of children perform a variety of tasks. His goal was to identify the tasks that differentiated one group from another, but that fell apart when there was too much overlap in the results.
That’s when Binet realized that age was a vital factor. What he understood, in a flash of insight, was that the tasks themselves were second to the age at which these tasks could be completed.
The children with “normal” intelligence completed the tasks at a much younger age.
Alfred Binet by Edwina White
From there, they devised a series of increasingly difficult tasks, 30 in all. The easiest tasks were considered basic intelligence. This level would be seen in normal infants or profoundly challenged children of any age.
The most difficult tasks could be passed by “normal” 11- and 12-year-olds but were beyond the oldest and most adept challenged child.
These tasks were called items; their score delineated a child’s mental age. If an 11-year-old could only pass the tasks meant for a 5-year-old, their mental age was 5.
Because they were interested in psychology and felt it played a role here, they intentionally shied away from questions that might mark their test “educational.”
They focused on real-world issues and things that might identify mental capacity and avoided anything that might be taught in a classroom. They were interested in issues of attention, memory, and problem-solving.
In under a year, they determined which questions would best identify the kids who needed more help.
When they were done, they had what they deemed an “objective” test that purportedly sidestepped bias and inconsistency.
Their final test was 30 questions, which included questions like, “What is the difference between weariness and boredom?”
Binet made clear that it was common for a child’s mental age to lag slightly behind their biological age. If a child’s lag were at least two years, then they would receive a diagnosis of mental retardation.
Alfred Binet did not believe that intelligence was inherited or that it was fixed and stable. He believed ardently that a single test could not measure intelligence. More important was his belief that intelligence couldn’t be “measured” at all, as it wasn’t linear or inanimate. To him, intelligence was rooted in experience; therefore, his test, the Binet-Simon Test, did not measure intelligence but mental age.
To Binet, the very essence of intelligence was rooted in practical experience, and he was vehement in his knowledge that intelligence was variable.
While the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test was a major achievement, it left Binet fearful that the tests would be misused.
Binet knew that his test was flawed, which aggravated his fear that people might take a child’s score as a definition of the child’s intellectual ability and use the results to rank and confine children to certain positions in life.
Worse yet, he was afraid a score would be used against a child, that young mental age would relegate them to a life of being labeled “stupid.”
Not everyone believed, as he did, that intelligence could change. Binet recommended that children get retested frequently to offset some of his worries.
It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or 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. To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well, these are the essential activities of intelligence.
Binet and Simon twice revised the test before Binet died in 1911.
*What follows is verbatim from the Encyclopedia (click "The Binet-Simon Scale of 1905" link to view source)
Test-giving procedures: Binet and Simon provided general instructions on administering their test. Many of these echo the procedures still used in individual testing today.
For example, the test was to be given in a quiet room with no distractions. When the child met the examiner for the first time, a familiar person, such as a relative or the school principal, was to be present.
The examiner was to greet the child with "friendly familiarity" to help put the child at ease.
Binet realized that the child's emotional state and motivation could affect the results, so he stressed that these factors should not be ignored.
Le regard. This item tested a child's ability to follow a lighted match with his or her eyes. The goal was to assess a very basic capacity for attention.
Prehension provoked by a tactile stimulus. This item tested a child's ability to grasp a small object placed in his or her hand, hold it without letting it fall, and carry it to the mouth.
Prehension provoked by a visual perception. This item was similar to the previous one; however, it tested a child's ability to reach for and grab an object placed within his or her view.
Recognition of food. In this task, a piece of chocolate was placed next to a little cube of wood. The aim was to see whether the child could tell by sight alone which of the objects was food.
Quest of food, complicated by a slight mechanical difficulty. In this task, a piece of candy was shown to the child and then wrapped in paper. The aim was to see whether the child would unwrap the candy.
Execution of simple commands and imitation of simple gestures. This item tested whether the child knew how to shake hands with the examiner and comply with simple spoken or gestured commands.
The goal was to assess very basic social and language skills. Children with normal intelligence could pass the first six items on the test by age 2. Some of the items, however, were too difficult for the most profoundly retarded children.
Therefore, profound retardation came to be defined as a mental level no higher than that of a 2-year-old with normal intelligence, including the inability to interact socially and use language.
Verbal knowledge of objects. In this task, the examiner asked the child to point to various parts of the body. The child was then asked to give the examiner various common objects, such as a cup and a key.
Verbal knowledge of pictures. In this task, the child was asked to point to familiar objects in a picture, such as a window and a broom.
Naming of designated objects. This item was the opposite of the previous one. Using another picture, the examiner pointed to familiar objects and asked the child to name them.
Immediate comparison of two lines of unequal lengths. In this task, the child was shown pieces of paper with pairs of lines on them. One line was always 4 cm long; the other, 3 cm. The child was asked to indicate which line was longer.
Repetition of three figures. This item tested a child's ability to repeat back a string of three numbers.
Comparison of two weights. In this task, the child was shown two boxes that looked identical, but were of different weights. The child was asked to decide which box was heavier.
Suggestibility. In some of the previous tasks, the examiner would make false suggestions to see how the child would respond. For example, after asking the child to point to various common objects, the examiner would ask the child about an object that was not there.
Verbal definition of known objects. This item tested a child's ability to give simple definitions for familiar things, such as a house and a fork.
Repetition of sentences of 15 words. This item tested a child's ability to repeat back sentences averaging 15 words long.
Children with normal intelligence could pass these last nine items on the test by age 5. The items assessed simple vocabulary, language skills, basic judgment, and memory.
This particular item was considered the cut-off point for moderate retardation. That is, moderately retarded children were thought to operate at the level of a 2- to 5-year-old with normal intelligence.
Comparison of known objects from memory. In this task, the child was asked to state the differences between pairs of common objects, such as a piece of wood and a piece of glass.
Exercise of memory on pictures. In this task, the child was shown several pictures of familiar objects for a brief time. The child was then asked to name the objects from memory.
Drawing a design from memory. In this task, the child was briefly shown two geometric designs, then asked to draw them from memory.
Immediate repetition of figures. This item was identical to the earlier one in which the examiner asked the child to repeat back a string of three numbers. Now, however, the examiner gave greater weight to the nature of any errors.
Resemblances of several known objects given from memory. In this task, the child was asked to state the similarities between sets of objects, such as a fly, an ant, a butterfly, and a flea.
Comparison of lengths. In this task, the child was shown pieces of paper with pairs of lines on them. The child was asked to indicate which line was longer. While this was similar to an earlier task, the differences in line lengths were smaller this time.
Five weights to be placed in order. This item required the child to arrange five identical-looking boxes in order of heaviness. The boxes varied in weight from 3 grams to 15 grams.
Gap in weights. After the previous task, one of the middle boxes was removed while the child closed his or her eyes. The child was then asked to figure out which box was missing by hand-weighing.
Exercise upon rhymes. This item tested the child's ability to name words that rhymed with the French word obéissance.
Verbal gaps to be filled. This item tested the child's ability to fill in the blanks in simple spoken sentences. For example, one sentence was: "The weather is clear, the sky is (blue)."
Synthesis of three words in one sentence. In this task, the child was given three words: "Paris," "river," and "fortune." The child was then asked to make a sentence using all the words.
Reply to an abstract question. This item tested the child's ability to answer 25 questions about practical problem-solving and social judgment. The questions ranged from very easy to fairly difficult.
For example, one medium-difficulty question asked: "When anyone has offended you and asks you to excuse him, what ought you to do?"
Reversal of the hands of a clock. This item tested the child's ability to figure out in his or her head what time it would be if the large and small hands on a clock were reversed various times.
Paper cutting. In front of the child, the examiner folded a paper into quarters and then cut out a triangle at the edge with a single fold. Without actually unfolding the paper, the child was then asked to draw the design he would see if the paper were opened.
Definitions of abstract terms. In this task, the child was asked to state the differences between two abstract terms: weariness and sadness.
These last 15 items on the test contained the boundary line between mild retardation and normal intelligence.
In general, these items could be passed by children of normal intelligence between the ages of 5 and 11.
However, some of the most difficult tasks near the end were not always passed by even 11-year-olds with normal intelligence.
In 1908, H.H. “Henry” Goddard, the director of research for the New Jersey Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls (yes, really), where his job was to conduct a “psychological study of the feeble-minded children” was interested in Binet’s work and whether it might be useful in advancing his social agenda, known then and now as eugenics.
He flew to Europe to become better acquainted with the material. While Goddard claimed to want to help the “feeble-minded” children, he was, by all accounts, a eugenicist who wanted to eliminate feeble-minded people in the long term.
He brought the test back to America and translated it, making changes to help him “prove” that the white race was superior. He proposed adding definitions to each IQ range. Numbered scores soon had to identify markers, whose results were fixed and used to institutionalize and sterilize those who performed poorly.
This was the version of the Binet-Simon Test that got revised by others, and it’s upon the corrupted tests that our current IQ tests, like the Stanford Binet, are based.
Obviously, there is MUCH more to be said about all this.
If you're not subscribed, do so now so you can stay tuned for future pieces about the men who corrupted this test and how eugenics is baked into the tests we still take to this day.
And you? Do you know about this history, and have you ever taken an IQ test?
Until next week, I remain…
Amanda
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Nope, I am not a licensed therapist or medical professional. I am simply a person who struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues for over two decades and spent 23 years in therapy learning how to live. Now, I'm sharing the best of what I learned to spare others from needless suffering.
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