Stanley Smith Stevens

Stanley Smith Stevens (4 November 1906 – 18 January 1973)^[1] was an American psychologist. He founded Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory and introduced Stevens' power law. He also wrote an important textbook, the 1400+ page "Handbook of Experimental Psychology" (1951).

Life

He was born in Ogden, Utah to Stanely and Adeline (Smith) Stevens and educated in LDS-affiliated schools in Salt Lake City, Utah. He spent much of his childhood in the household of his grandfather Orson Smith. At the death of his parents in 1924, he spent the next 3 years on an LDS mission in Switzerland and Belgium. He attended the University of Utah from 1927 to 1929 and Stanford University for the next two years, graduating with an A.B. in psychology from Stanford in 1931. He married Maxine Leonard in 1930 and had a son, Peter Smith, in 1936.^[2]

Works

• Stevens, Stanley Smith (1946). "On the theory of scales of measurement". Science. 103 (2684): 677–680. Bibcode:1946Sci...103..677S. doi:10.1126/science.103.2684.677. PMID 17750512.

References

1. Miller, George A. (1975). Biographical Memoirs. Vol. 47. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press. p. 524. ISBN 978-0-309-02245-3.
2. American Journal of Psychology, 1974, Vol. 87, Issue Nom. 1–2, pp. 279–288

• Smelser, Neil J.; and Paul B. Baltes (2001). International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (PDF). Amsterdam, New York: Elsevier. pp. 15105–15108. ISBN 0-08-043076-7.
• Nicholson, I. (2000). "S.S. Stevens". In Alan E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. ISBN 978-1557981875
• Nicholson, I. (2005). "From the Book of Mormon to the Operational Definition: The Existential Project of S.S. Stevens". In William Todd. Schultz (Ed.), Handbook of Psychobiography (pp. 285–298). New York: Oxford University Pres. ISBN 978-0195168273