ABSTRACT
Allow me to transport all of us to the Paris of 1900 – La Belle Époque. Around 1900 the city fathers of Paris approached a psychologist named Alfred Binet with an unusual request: could he devise some kind of measure which would predict which youngsters would succeed and which would fail in the primary grades of Paris schools? As almost everybody knows, Binet succeeded. He produced a set of test items that could predict a child’s success or failure in school. In short order, his discovery came to be called the “intelligence test,” his measure the “IQ.” Like other Parisian fashions, the IQ soon made its way to the United States, where it enjoyed a modest success until the First World War. Then it was used to test over one million American recruits, and it had truly arrived. From that day on, the IQ test has looked like psychology’s biggest success – a genuinely useful scientific tool.
