AFTER BINET - FRENCH INTELLIGENCE-TESTING, 1900-1950

This article (based on published writings of the researchers plus unpublished data and reports in recently opened archives) examines why Alfred Binet's concept of multifaceted intelligence requiring lengthy and varied testing continued and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in the laboratories of Henri Pieron, Henri Laugier and other French psychologists and psychotechnicians. While the Americans and British evolved theories and practices of intelligence measurement reducible to a single number, most French psychologists used a much more subtle and complex understanding of the phenomenon. This hindered mass applications of intelligence tests which did not occur in France until the end of the Second World War. The Terman version of Binet's test did not re-enter France until 1950.