Alfred Binet – A truly applied psychologist (summary)

Alfred Binet – A truly applied psychologist

Howard, R. (2009). Alfred Binet - a truly applied psychologist. Psychologist, 22(3), 278–279. 

Alfred Binet, was a psychologist that created the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the Binet-Simon test. His aim in his tests was to classify the educational properties of the children, and not to quantify them.

Binet focused on a test that would improve, and possibly direct the academic future of the kids. Terman, on the contrary, identified the educational special needs of the mentally retarded.

Binet was more focused on what we call today as "Social intelligence". Binet believed that the key was good judgment, initiative and adaptation.

In addition to being a forensic psychologist, Binet made a study that proved that witnesses have a poor memory in regards to the events they witnessed, and thus their reliability may be questioned.

Binet also created a study on children, which applied interrogation and memory manipulation. In this study, Binet would show the children simple objects such as stamps and would then induce memory errors in the kids. He would ask them to reproduce a stamp by drawing it, while hiding a part of it. The result was that the kids completed the drawing of the stamp, with a postmark on it, although the actual stamp had no postmark.

Binet mentioned two types of memory errors- Logical and imagination. In logical errors, the child would answer a question using their imagination and with no logic. In the imagination error, the child would use their imagination to construct an object that had no connection to reality.

Loftus and colleagues found interrogative suggestibility as an apparatus that people use to integrate post-event information into their memory. "Discrepancy detection" is a dysfunctional central cognitive mechanism that mediates interrogative suggestibility.