Biographical Memoirs Volume 47 (1975) / Chapter Skim
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12 Stanley Smith Stevens
12 Stanley Smith Stevens
Pages 424-459
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From page 425... ...
The following year he spent studying physiology under Hallowell Davis at the Harvard Medical School, on a National Research Council Fellowship; in 1935-1936 a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled him to become a Research Fellow in physics at Harvard. Psychology had achieved departmental status at Harvard in 1934, and in 1936 Stevens accepted a position as instructor in experimental psychology.
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From page 426... ...
In 1930 Stevens married Maxine Leonard, and in 1936 they had a son, Peter Smith Stevens. Shortly afterward Maxine was overwhelmed by a postpartum depression that devastated their lives; she returned to Utah to live with her parents and died two decades later.
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From page 427... ...
His interest in these activities declined after 1952, however, as he increasingly preferred to devote his major efforts to his own research. Stevens was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Acoustical Society of America, the Optical Society of America, the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, the American Physiological Society, the Psychonomic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Philosophy of Science Association, the Society for Neuroscience, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi.
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From page 428... ...
Stevens occurred in August 1942. I was a new graduate student, interested in speech and hearing; the teacher who had sent me to Harvard recommended me for
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From page 429... ...
Stevens's office and found him in what I came later to recognize as a characteristic posture—legs extended, ankles crossed, feet on corner of desk. As he sat up and turned to greet me I saw a handsome man in his mid-thirties—tall and muscular, round-shouldered with long arms and large hands, a 4-4-4 on the somatotype scales; a long face with a high forehead and excellent features; wavy black hair and a natty moustache; an open, level gaze and an expression that in repose seemed sad, even disapproving, but could break into an irresistibly winning smile.
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From page 430... ...
Indeed, he often used it as proof of his incompetence when he wanted to avoid administrative responsibilities. He had an intense dislike for administration—for making decisions, for accommodating superiors, for compromising his own opinions, for interrupting, his work to cope with the crisis of the day.
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From page 431... ...
The head of this extended family was concerned for the welfare of his kindred, and he rewarded them or disciplined them for their own good and the good of the group. This family provided not only for work, but also for the social life of its members—dinner at the Faculty Club; in the early days, a group foray to Boston's Chinatown or three carloads of incompetent but enthusiastic beginners invading the Fresh Pond Municipal Golf Course; later, weekends at "the farm" in New Hampshire, with maintenance work in the summers and skiing in the winters.
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From page 432... ...
He disliked discarding or replacing personal possessions. He disliked lending books.
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From page 433... ...
As a young instructor at Harvard, he taught the laboratory course in experimental psychology and sections of Boring's introductory course. Later he added a course in mathematics ~ ~~ 1__ ~ r ~ · ~ ~
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From page 434... ...
. I told Conant, as I had already told Allport, that I would teach my courses faithfully, but to enjoy standing before classes was beyond my power." Smitty summarized his educational philosophy in one sentence: "Anyone worth teaching doesn't need to be taught." As with all his strong opinions, there was a well-developed network of arguments linking this sentence to his more general views of life and people.
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From page 435... ...
___ no appeal tor Smutty. His unsuccessful efforts to reform Harvard were a continuing source of frustration to him Stevens believed firmly in the primacy of nature over nurture, in the inheritance of intelligence, in the dependence of personality on body type, in the genetic basis of schizophrenia.
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From page 436... ...
436 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS at work only when you stand before a group with your mouth moving." Working with Smitty on an experiment—setting up the equipment, running each other as judges, pulling people out of the halls to serve as subjects, plotting the data, and arguing what they meant—was a rich experience for a young student. When it came to writing up the results, the interaction intensified.
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From page 437... ...
He spent three years editing the Handbook of Experimental Psychology when he could easily have done it in one if he had not felt compelled to educate even the most distinguished contributors. In his own way, and for the limited audience he commanded, he was one of the most effective teachers of his generation.
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From page 438... ...
Smitty felt that the fission of the department gave the real scientists a chance to concentrate on the serious business of psychology. He never really forgave those of us who worked to reunite the interesting problems of social psychology with the scientific methods of experimental psychology.
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From page 439... ...
Bridgman's operationism showed Smitty the way, and, with Boring's considerable help, the three papers were written in 1935. The argument, briefly stated, was that scientific concepts are defined by the operations scientists perform; that discrimination is the basic operation of all scientists; that psychology is the science whose responsibility it is to test and measure discrimination; and that psychology can accomplish this by analizin~, mentalistic concepts such as experience, sensation, and sensory attributes in terms of the operations available to study them.
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From page 440... ...
Between 1932 and 1940 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had debated the question: Is it possible to measure human sensation? In its final report, the committee chose Stevens's scale of loudness as a concrete example, one which was said by its author to have all the formal properties of other basic scales, such as those used to measure length and weight.
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From page 441... ...
But Stevens's problem was to make explicit the various rules for assigning numerals, the group structure of the resulting scales, and the statistical operations applicable to measurements made with each type of scale. At a Congress for the Unity of Science in 1939, Stevens made a preliminary attempt to classify types of scales and illustrate them by examples from sensory psychophysics.
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From page 442... ...
In 1940 he and Rudolf Carnap organized a monthly discussion group at Harvard on the Unity of Science, but his growing responsibilities for the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory reduced his participation in such discussions to a sometime thing. After the war he published several articles expanding on his classification of scales, but his philosophical ideas dwindled into odd paragraphs tucked away here and there in the more popular summarizations of his scientific work.
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From page 443... ...
Skilled hands and a knack for coaxing experimental equipment to perform were valuable tools in Stevens's scientist's kit. He never forgot the skills learned at the Idaho Power Company.
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From page 444... ...
In the measurement of sensory magnitudes, Stevens's own area of central concern, tradition was against him. In the nineteenth century, G
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From page 445... ...
Although the argument seemed somewhat backwards, it was plausible enough to persuade psychologists for at least a century that sensory magnitudes are a logarithmic function of stimulus intensity. What bothered Stevens was that it wasn't true.
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From page 446... ...
In his autobiography Smitty speaks of the years from 1945 to 1952 as "seven lean years." He was busy planning and supervising the renovation of the basement in Memorial Hall, directing the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, commuting to the high councils of science in Washington, enjoying the honors and recognition he received, rebuilding the farmhouse in New Hampshire into a ski lodge and experimenting with skis, and for Free or those years his major preoccupation, with the skilled editorial assistance of Didi Stone, was the 1 400-page Handbook of Experimental Psychology. But his scientific publications during those years were accounts of prewar work on the theory of measurement or experiments conducted during the war.
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From page 447... ...
The loudness, L, was proportional to the energy to the 0.3 power: L kl03. From this it follows that the underlying invariance is the simple principle that equal stimulus ratios produce equal subjective ratios.
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From page 448... ...
Discrepant results obtained by other, more complex judgmental operations were rationalized away—at least to Stevens's satisfaction—and the whole psychophysical structure built on variability by Fechner and Thurstone was replaced by the power law, or, as many now call it, "Stevens' Law." Science has been likened to a vessel that the crew must continually rebuild during the voyage. This particular bit of reconstruction concerned a vital part of the craft, and it was not accomplished without considerable complaint from the other passengers.
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From page 449... ...
As an experimental fact, the power law is established beyond any reasonable doubt, possibly more firmly established than anything else in psychology. Stevens continued active work on these problems until he died.
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From page 450... ...
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Vision Res. = Vision Research 1934 The relation of saturation to the size of the retinal image.
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From page 451... ...
Am., 8: 185-90. On hearing by electrical stimulation.
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From page 452... ...
Rectilinear rectification applied to voltage integration. Electronics 15:40~1.
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From page 453... ...
Handbook of Experimental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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From page 454... ...
Ratio scales and category scales for a dozen perceptual continua.
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From page 455... ...
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 1: 27-35Ratio scales, partition scales and confusion scales. In: Psychological Scaling: Theory and Applications, ed.
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From page 456... ...
Concerning the psychophysical power law.
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From page 457... ...
Effect of glare angle on the brightness function for a small target. Vision Res., 5:649-59.
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From page 458... ...
of Washington Press. 1971 Sensory power functions and neural events.
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From page 459... ...
i. Sound Vib 21: 35-56.
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