Alfred Binet, intelligence testing

Alfred Binet and the Age of Intelligence Testing

“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”. This excerpt from Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon’s writings, sums up their experiments done in the early 20th century to test intelligence. With the help of Alfred Binet’s colleagues, he set the stage for the world’s earliest forms of IQ tests.
Alfred Binet was bored in 1857 and was raised in Nice and Paris by his artistic mother. As a child he thought he was going to enter the world of medicine like his father; a well-kn...