| French psychologist Date of Birth: 08.07.1857 Country: France |
Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, was born as Alfredo Binetti in Nice, Kingdom of Sardinia. He was the only child in his family, and his parents divorced when he was a young child. After the divorce, Binet's mother took him to Paris, where he studied law for a while. In 1878, Alfred graduated with a degree in law. However, he soon realized that psychology was a much more interesting and promising field. Binet primarily studied psychology through books, which suited his introverted nature perfectly.
One of Binet's most interesting experiments involved chess and blindfolds. By studying how well chess players could play with blindfolds, Alfred obtained clear results - only true masters could play decently in this mode. Some of Binet's subjects visualized the chessboard and the positions of the pieces, while others preferred to memorize an abstract game scheme. In the end, Binet concluded that the ability to play blindfolded directly depended on the player's memory and their ability to work with it.
In 1883, Binet met Jean-Martin Charcot, the director of a Parisian clinic. Charcot became Binet's teacher and employer, and his ideas, particularly those related to hypnosis, deeply fascinated Binet. Eventually, the fallacy of Charcot's theories became apparent, and Binet had to publicly distance himself from the wrong school of thought. Nevertheless, by that time, Binet had already gained significant recognition for his work. Over the course of 21 years, Binet published more than 200 books, articles, and reviews on various psychological topics.
Binet's most renowned contributions lie in his study of human intelligence and methods of its assessment. Part of his interest in this field stemmed from the fact that Binet himself did not receive formal education or hold any academic degrees. In 1899, Binet embarked on developing a testing system that could identify learning and information perception problems in children. He started by attempting to distinguish between "ordinary" and "backward" children and formally describe (and, more importantly, measure) their differences.
In 1903, Binet published a book describing the initial results of his work titled "L'Etude experimentale de l'intelligence." He continued his research with Theodore Simon, a medical student, and together they created a new test to measure the level of intelligence, which was named after both scientists. Simon and Binet continued to develop their assessment system, expanding and improving the tests to cater to different age groups from 3 to 13 years old. Binet's work on assessing children's intelligence was not his last project, as he continued to conduct experiments and research in various areas of psychology. However, he continued working on the Binet-Simon tests until his death, releasing the third edition shortly before his passing.