How old are IQ tests? I feel like they’ve been around forever, but when were they actually invented? Are we talking decades or over a century at this point?
Didn’t Alfred Binet create the first one in 1905 in France? So wouldn’t that make IQ tests over 120 years old now? That’s wild considering how much psychology and neuroscience have advanced since then. Are we really still using a framework from that era?
Yep, 1905 is when Binet and Simon published the first test. So IQ testing is about 120 years old. The tests have been updated and refined over time like the Stanford-Binet revisions and the Wechsler scales, but the core concept is from the early 1900s. It’s pretty remarkable that something developed before airplanes were common is still used to measure cognitive ability today, though obviously the methodology has evolved significantly.
The modern IQ test is about 120 years old, but I think the desire to rank human intelligence is far older. What 1905 gave us was not a new curiosity, but simply the first standardised tool to act on it. Whether that was a breakthrough or a shortcut is still being debated.
Old enough to have been called revolutionary, then outdated, then revolutionary again. Officially, we date them to 1905. But like many 120-year-old institutions, the real question isn’t their age, it’s whether they’ve aged well.