INTELLIGENCEinnate mental ability. In line with his belief that geniuses are born, not
made, Galton thought his tests could encourage breeding between clever
folk and discourage it among the “feeble-minded” – a disturbing but
influential idea that developed into the eugenics movement.
Across the channel in turn-of-the-century France, universal education
was being introduced, and for the first time it was deemed necessary
to identify children with abnormally low intelligence. The psychologist
Alfred Binet, who’d read about and improved upon Galton’s techniques,
was given the responsibility by the French government for devising a
test that would identify children who were “retarded”. Together with his
colleague Théodore Simon, Binet devised a series of systematic mental
tasks that tapped language, abstract reasoning and other faculties, and
they pioneered the idea of comparing a child’s actual performance with
what he ought to be able to do given his age. In 1905, the Binet-Simon
test was born – the world’s first modern intelligence-test.
Around the same time as Binet and Simon were developing their test,
the English army officer and psychologist Charles Spearman discov-
ered that if a person is a skilful performer on one kind of mental task,
the chances are that he or she
will also excel on other mental
tasks – leading him to propose
and name the idea of g (general
intelligence), which has since
become a foundation stone of
intelligence testing.
Meanwhile, in the US, the
psychologist Henry Goddard
had started using a translation
of the Binet-Simon test to filter
immigrants arriving at Ellis
Island, and to classify “mentally-
retarded children”. But it was
the demands of World War I that
would give the intelligence test
an unstoppable momentum. At a
time when psychology was still a
nascent discipline, the American
Psychological Association’s Pres-
ident, Robert Yerkes, together
with Lewis Terman, Goddard Alfred Binet – the father of intelligence
testing.