Sick? Or slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of psychometrics as a discipline, using a history of the Binet-Simon test (precursor to the Stanford-Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a psychological object. To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857-1911) to identify mental testing as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Desire-Magloire Bourneville (1840-1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Societe libre de l'etude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a metric scale of intelligence and the associated testing apparatus to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating the abnormal. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are slow (arriere), but not sick. This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877-1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867-1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.