A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: ALFRED BINET

By Gale and Cengage

Perfect for research assignments in psychology, science, and history, this concise study guide is a one-stop source for in-depth coverage of major psychological theories and the people who developed them. Consistently formatted entries typically cover the following: biographical sketch and personal data, theory outline, analysis of psychologist's place in history, summary of critical response to the theory, the theory in action, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535831505

Book preview

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BIOGRAPHY

Binet's life is notable for both its successes and its failures. On one hand, Binet's intelligence test became one of the most influential tests in the history of psychology. On the other hand, his innovative ideas about child development and memory had a much more limited impact. Both of these results can be traced, at least in part, to the independence that marked Binet's career. Self-taught in psychology, he never held a position as a university professor. This kept him from building alliances with other professors and from training many students to follow in his footsteps. Yet it also gave him free rein to nurture his own tremendous curiosity and creativity.

The early years

Binet was born on July 8, 1857, in Nice, France. He was the only child of a father who was a physician and a mother who dabbled in art. His wealthy parents separated when he was young, leaving his mother, Moïna Binet, with most of the responsibility for raising him. Until age 15, Binet attended school in Nice. He also spent some summers at a boardinghouse in England, where he undoubtedly improved his fluency in English. This paid off later, when he was able to read the English and American psychological literature.

Once Binet turned 15, his mother took him to Paris so that he could attend a renowned school, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Binet studied there for three years. Upon graduating, he had trouble deciding what career path he wanted to pursue. He first earned a law license in 1878; however, he seems to have almost immediately concluded that practicing law was not for him. Next came a brief stint studying medicine. There was a strong medical tradition in his family; his father and both of his grandfathers had been physicians. This choice, too, proved short-lived. Binet suffered an emotional breakdown and dropped out of medical school.

False starts and lessons learned

Discouraged and directionless, Binet began spending time in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a great library in Paris. There, he started browsing through books on psychology. He was fascinated by what he found. In particular, his interest was drawn to experiments on the two-point threshold, the smallest distance at which touching the skin at two different points at once is felt as two sensations rather than just one. Previous research had shown that this distance varied from one part of the body to another. For example, the distance was about 30 times greater on the small of the back than on the tip of the index finger. Several theories had been proposed explaining the differences. After trying a few simple experiments on himself and his friends, Binet concluded that these theories contained some errors. In 1880, he published his ideas in a paper titled On the Fusion of Similar Sensations. He soon learned a lesson about the hazards of rushing into print. Joseph Delboeuf, a Belgian physiologist who had already done much more complex research on the subject, published an article outlining the flaws in Binet's work. Fortunately, Binet's interest in psychology was strong enough to withstand the blow.

Early on, Binet became an avid reader of British philosopher John Stuart Mill. In his theory of associationism, Mill had proposed that the flow of thoughts and ideas through a person's consciousness was controlled by the associations among these ideas. Mill had also outlined the basic laws that he believed determined which ideas would arise from a particular thought. In 1886, Binet published his first book, a fervent defense of associationism. In the book, titled The Psychology of Reasoning, Binet argued that the laws of associationism could explain everything that happened in the mind. Yet cracks in this theory had already become apparent. For example, associationism was unable to explain how one starting idea might lead to totally different trains of thought under different circumstances. Binet realized that he was on shaky ground once again. He soon gave up the position that associationism alone could explain all mental phenomena. However, he never stopped believing in the great, although incomplete, power of mental associations. Years later, he would argue that intelligence could not be studied without considering an individual's personal associations, circumstances, and experiences.

Not all of Binet's early ideas about psychology came from books. In 1883, Binet began working as an unpaid researcher for Jean Martin Charcot, director of the Salpêtrière, a famous hospital in Paris. Charcot was one of the most esteemed neurologists in the world. At the time, he was studying hypnosis, a temporary state of altered attention. Charcot noted that, under hypnosis, good subjects often became unable to move, insensitive to pain, or unable to remember what had happened. These were very much like the symptoms seen in patients with hysteria, a mental disorder in which people had physical ailments when no physical cause could be found. In fact, the similarities were so striking that Charcot jumped to some wrong conclusions. He believed that the ability to be hypnotized was actually a sign of hysteria. He also believed that the unusual behavior seen under hypnosis was caused by some underlying feature of the nervous system. In fact, it turned out to be caused by nothing more than the subject's response to suggestions given by the hypnotist.

When Binet first arrived at the Salpêtrière, however, he accepted the older man's theories without question. Binet and a young doctor named Charles Féré spent the next seven years doing research under Charcot's guidance. The two researchers were assigned to study a woman named Blanche Wittmann, called Wit in their writings. Recalling the days when hypnotism was known as animal magnetism, Binet and Féré found that they could reverse Wit's physical symptoms or emotional state under hypnosis simply by reversing a magnet. One minute, Wit would be laughing. The next minute, with a turn of the magnet, she was sobbing. Not surprisingly, when Binet and Féré published their findings, other scientists reacted with skepticism. One skeptic was Delboeuf, the same physiologist