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BINET, ALFRED (1857-1911)

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Binet is best known to psychologists for initiating the modern approach to intelligence testing

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As a rule of thumb (but with the proviso that test results should never be the sole criterion for diagnosing subnormality), Binet suggested that children whose mental ages lagged more than 2 years behind their actual ages should be targeted for further investigation. Implicit here was the notion that mental deficiency in children can be conceptualized as a retardation in the normal rate of intellectual development.

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In due course Binet himself conceded that his hypnotic experiments had been fatally tainted by the effects of unintended suggestion, which he referred to as the “cholera of psychology.”

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Binet’s 1900 book, La Suggestibilite, elaborated by demonstrating how sensitive children are to the style as well as the content of questions put to them. This work is now recognized as a pioneering and still valid warning about the potential unreliability of children’s eye-witness testimony

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Furthermore, he firmly believed that the intelligence measured by his tests was not a fixed entity, but could be enhanced by appropriate training, which he called mental orthopedics.

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The German psychologist Louis William Stern (1871-1938) proposed computing an “intelligence quotient” for each child by taking the ratio of mental age over chronological age, and the American Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) multiplied Stern’s quotient by 100 and abbreviated the result as the now famous “IQ.”

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BINGHAM, WALTER VAN DYKE (1880-1952), American psychologist and founder of industrial/organizational psychology.

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The Army commissioned Bingham as a lieutenant colonel at the end of the war. and, in World War II, as its chief psychologist

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