Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon scale.His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum.
Binet was forthright about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates and could be influenced by the environment; therefore, intelligence was not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be found in children with comparable backgrounds.
Binet deplored the idea of the test being used as a ranking for a judging the intelligence. When Binet bcame aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.
