Ribot, Binet, and the emergence from the anthropological shadow

摘要

In the drive to establish a naturalistic psychology in France, anthropological assumptions about a hierarchy of physically determined racial groups with inherent psychological characteristics and about the nearly insurmountable retardation of primitive cultures permeated the work of the founder of French empirical psychology, Theodule Ribot. Assumptions about the correlation of brain mass and head size with intelligence affected Alfred Binet. The rise of sociology and challenges to existing theories of inheritance led Ribot to surrender fitfully some hereditarian assumptions. Binet's experimental caution and contemporary critiques of anthropornetry tempered, but did not fully extinguish, his enthusiasm for psychophysical correlations. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.