FIVE
The Hereditarian
Theory of IQ
An American Invention
Alfred Binet and the original purposes of the Binet scale
Binet flirts with craniometry
When Alfred Binet (1857-1911), director of the psychology
laboratory at the Sorbonne, first decided to study the measurement
of intelligence, he turned naturally to the favored method of a
waning century and to the work of his great countryman Paul
Broca. He set out, in short, to measure skulls, never doubting at
first the basic conclusion of Broca's school:
The relationship between the intelligence of subjects and the volume
of their head ... is very real and has been confirmed by all methodical
investigators, without exception. ... As these works include observations
on several hundred subjects, we conclude that the preceding proposition
[of correlation between head size and intelligence] must be considered as
incontestable (Binet, 1898, pp. 294-295).
During the next three years, Binet published nine papers on
craniometry in L'Annee psychologique, the journal he had founded in
- By the end of this effort, he was no longer so sure. Five
studies on the heads of school children had destroyed his original
faith.
Binet went to various schools, making Broca's recommended
measurements on the heads of pupils designated by teachers as
their smartest and stupidest. In several studies, he increased his
sample from 62 to 230 subjects. "I began," he wrote, "with the idea