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Intelligence
In a previous article, we talked about the ‘Self’, personality, and traits. This brings us to another much-debated and highly controversial aspect of our self, intelligence.
Intelligence is generally considered to be the capacity in reasoning, solving problems, and acquiring new knowledge. Psychologists have long had an interest in measuring intelligence, mostly from what they were asked to do by others, like school systems and employers. In 1905, French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) and his colleague Théodore Simon (1873–1961) developed the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale. Their method was based on the idea that intelligence is best described as a collection of various mental abilities that are loosely related to each other. Their test was used foremost to identify children who were not profiting enough from their schooling and might benefit from special attention. Therefore it focused explicitly on skills required for schoolwork, like memory, vocabulary, common knowledge, use of numbers, understanding of time, and the ability to combine ideas. The outcomes of the Binet-Simon test were held against the teachers’ ratings of each child’s classroom performance to improve on the validity of the test, even though this method in itself is not ideal, because the test was compared to that which it sought to…
