Louis Leon Thurstone (29 May 1887 – 29 September 1955) was an American pioneer in the fields of
psychometrics
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...
and
psychophysics
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, m ...
. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the
law of comparative judgment The law of comparative judgment was conceived by L. L. Thurstone. In modern-day terminology, it is more aptly described as a model that is used to obtain measurements from any process of pairwise comparison. Examples of such processes are the compar ...
, and is well known for his contributions to
factor analysis
Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. For example, it is possible that variations in six observed ...
. A ''
Review of General Psychology
''Review of General Psychology'' is the quarterly scientific journal of the American Psychological Association Division 1: The Society for General Psychology. The journal publishes cross-disciplinary psychological articles that are conceptual, th ...
'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with
John Garcia
John is a common English name and surname:
* John (given name)
* John (surname)
John may also refer to:
New Testament
Works
* Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John
* First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John
* Second E ...
,
James J. Gibson
James Jerome Gibson (; January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979) was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system ...
,
David Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...
,
Margaret Floy Washburn
Margaret Floy Washburn (July 25, 1871 – October 29, 1939), leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in ethology, animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to ...
, and
Robert S. Woodworth
Robert Sessions Woodworth (October 17, 1869 – July 4, 1962) was an American academic psychologist and the creator of the personality test which bears his name. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he studied under William James along with othe ...
.
Background and history
Louis Leon Thurstone was born in
Chicago, Illinois
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, coordinates =
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, subdivision_name ...
, to Swedish immigrant parents. Thurstone originally received a master's degree in
mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, and ...
from
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
in 1912. Thurstone was offered a brief assistantship in the laboratory of
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
. In 1914, after two years as an instructor of geometry and drafting at the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...
, he enrolled as a graduate student in psychology at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
(PhD, 1917). He later returned to the University of Chicago (1924–1952) where he taught and conducted research; among his students was
James Watson
James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and ...
, who co-discovered
the structure of DNA. 1952, he established the
L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the
University of North Carolina
The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC Sy ...
at
Chapel Hill Chapel Hill or Chapelhill may refer to:
Places Antarctica
* Chapel Hill (Antarctica) Australia
*Chapel Hill, Queensland, a suburb of Brisbane
*Chapel Hill, South Australia, in the Mount Barker council area
Canada
* Chapel Hill, Ottawa, a neighbo ...
.
Factor analysis and work on intelligence
Thurstone was responsible for the standardized mean and
standard deviation
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while ...
of
IQ scores used today, as opposed to the
Intelligence Test
An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term ''Intelligenzqu ...
system originally used by
Alfred Binet
Alfred Binet (; 8 July 1857 – 18 October 1911), born Alfredo Binetti, was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to ...
. He is also known for the development of the
Thurstone scale
Louis Leon Thurstone (29 May 1887 – 29 September 1955) was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his cont ...
.
Thurstone's work in factor analysis led him to formulate a model of intelligence centered on "Primary Mental Abilities" (PMAs), which were independent group factors of intelligence that different individuals possessed in varying degrees. He opposed the notion of a singular
general intelligence
The ''g'' factor (also known as general intelligence, general mental ability or general intelligence factor) is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of Cognitive skill, cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable ...
that factored into the scores of all psychometric tests and was expressed as a
mental age
Mental age is a concept related to intelligence. It looks at how a specific individual, at a specific age, performs intellectually, compared to average intellectual performance for that individual's actual chronological age (i.e. time elapsed sin ...
. In 1935 Thurstone, together with
EL Thorndike and
JP Guilford, founded the journal ''
Psychometrika
''Psychometrika'' is the official journal of the Psychometric Society, a professional body devoted to psychometrics and quantitative psychology. The journal covers quantitative methods for measurement and evaluation of human behavior, including st ...
'' and also the Psychometric Society, going on to become the society's first president in 1936. Thurstone's contributions to methods of factor analysis have proved valuable in establishing and verifying later psychometric factor structures, and have influenced the hierarchical models of intelligence in use in intelligence tests such as
WAIS and the modern
Stanford-Binet IQ test.
The seven primary mental abilities in Thurstone's model were ''verbal comprehension'', ''word fluency'', ''number facility'', ''spatial visualization'', ''associative memory'', ''perceptual speed'', and ''reasoning''.
Contributions to measurement
Despite his contributions to factor analysis, Thurstone (1959, p. 267) cautioned: "When a problem is so involved that no rational formulation is available, then some quantification is still possible by the coefficients of correlation of contingency and the like. But such statistical procedures constitute an acknowledgement of failure to rationalize the problem and to establish functions that underlie the data. We want to measure the separation between the two opinions on the attitude continuum and we want to test the validity of the assumed continuum by means of its internal consistency". Thurstone's approach to measurement was termed the
law of comparative judgment The law of comparative judgment was conceived by L. L. Thurstone. In modern-day terminology, it is more aptly described as a model that is used to obtain measurements from any process of pairwise comparison. Examples of such processes are the compar ...
. He applied the approach in
psychophysics
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, m ...
, and later to the
measurement
Measurement is the quantification of attributes of an object or event, which can be used to compare with other objects or events.
In other words, measurement is a process of determining how large or small a physical quantity is as compared ...
of psychological values. The so-called 'Law', which can be regarded as a measurement model, involves subjects making a
comparison
Comparison or comparing is the act of evaluating two or more things by determining the relevant, comparable characteristics of each thing, and then determining which characteristics of each are similar to the other, which are different, and t ...
between each of a number of pairs of stimuli with respect to magnitude of a property, attribute, or attitude. Methods based on the approach to measurement can be used to estimate such scale values.
Thurstone's Law of comparative judgment has important links to modern approaches to social and psychological measurement. In particular, the approach bears a close conceptual relation to the
Rasch model
The Rasch model, named after Georg Rasch, is a psychometric model for analyzing categorical data, such as answers to questions on a reading assessment or questionnaire responses, as a function of the trade-off between the respondent's abilities, at ...
(Andrich, 1978), although Thurstone typically employed the
normal distribution
In statistics, a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a real-valued random variable. The general form of its probability density function is
:
f(x) = \frac e^
The parameter \mu ...
in applications of the Law of comparative judgment whereas the Rasch model is a simple
logistic function
A logistic function or logistic curve is a common S-shaped curve (sigmoid curve) with equation
f(x) = \frac,
where
For values of x in the domain of real numbers from -\infty to +\infty, the S-curve shown on the right is obtained, with the ...
. Thurstone anticipated a key
epistemological
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
requirement of measurement later articulated by Rasch, which is that relative scale locations must 'transcend' the group measured; i.e. scale locations must be invariant to (or independent of) the particular group of persons instrumental to comparisons between the stimuli. Thurstone (1929) also articulated what he referred to as the ''additivity criterion'' for scale differences, a criterion which must be satisfied in order to obtain interval-level measurements.
Awards and honors
Thurstone received numerous awards, including: Best Article,
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
(1949); Centennial Award,
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
(1951); Honorary Doctorate,
University of Göteborg
The University of Gothenburg ( sv, Göteborgs universitet) is a university in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg. Founded in 1891, the university is the third-oldest of the current Swedish universities and with 37,000 students and 6000 st ...
(1954). Thurstone was President of
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
(1933) and first President of the American Psychometric Society (1936).
''L.L. Thurstone'' (Human Intelligence)
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Selected works
* ''The Nature of Intelligence'' (London: Routledge. 1924)
* ''The Effect of Motion Pictures on the Social Attitudes of High School Children'' Ruth C. Peterson & L.L. Thurstone, MacMillan, 1932
* ''Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children'' Ruth C. Peterson & L.L. Thurstone, MacMillan, 1933
*''The Vectors of Mind. Address of the president before the American Psychological Association, Chicago meeting, September, 1933'' ( Psychological Review, 41, 1–32. 1934)
* ''The Vectors of Mind
''The Vectors of Mind'' is a book published by American psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone in 1935 that summarized Thurstone's methodology for multiple factor analysis.
Overview
''The Vectors of Mind'' presents Thurstone's methods for conductin ...
'' (Chicago, IL, US: University of Chicago Press 1935)
*''Primary mental abilities'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1938)
* ''Multiple-Factor Analysis'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1947)
* ''The Fundamentals of Statistics'' (MacMillan: Norwood Press. 1925)
See also
* L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory
*Law of comparative judgment The law of comparative judgment was conceived by L. L. Thurstone. In modern-day terminology, it is more aptly described as a model that is used to obtain measurements from any process of pairwise comparison. Examples of such processes are the compar ...
References
Sources
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External links
The Vectors of Mind 1934
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thurstone, Louis Leon
Cornell University College of Engineering alumni
University of Chicago alumni
Intelligence researchers
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
American people of Swedish descent
1887 births
1955 deaths
Presidents of the American Psychological Association