Louis Leon Thurstone facts for kids

Louis Leon Thurstone (born May 29, 1887 – died September 29, 1955) was an American scientist. He was a pioneer in studying how to measure things like intelligence and attitudes. This field is called psychometrics.

Thurstone created a special way to measure things called the law of comparative judgment. He is also famous for his work in factor analysis. This is a method used to find hidden patterns in data. In 2002, a survey ranked Thurstone as one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century.

Early Life and Education

Louis Leon Thurstone was born in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were immigrants from Sweden. When he was eight, his family moved back to Sweden for a while. They returned to the United States in 1901 and settled in Jamestown, New York.

Thurstone first studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University. He earned his master's degree in 1912. For a short time, he even worked as an assistant in the laboratory of the famous inventor Thomas Edison.

In 1914, Thurstone became a teacher of geometry and drafting at the University of Minnesota. Later, he decided to study psychology. He went to the University of Chicago and earned his PhD in psychology in 1917.

Career and Research

After finishing his studies, Thurstone returned to the University of Chicago in 1924. He taught and did research there until 1952. One of his students was James Watson, who later helped discover the structure of DNA.

In 1952, Thurstone started a special research center. It was called the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory. This lab is located at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

How Thurstone Measured Things

Thurstone developed a way to measure things that are hard to measure, like opinions or feelings. He called his method the law of comparative judgment.

Here's how it works: Imagine you want to know how much people like different types of music. Thurstone's method would have people compare each pair of music types. For example, they might compare rock to pop, then rock to classical, and so on. By looking at all these comparisons, scientists could figure out how much people liked each type of music on a scale.

Thurstone used this method to measure many things. This included how people felt about different ideas or how they judged physical things. He believed that even complex ideas could be measured if you broke them down into smaller comparisons.

Awards and Achievements

Louis Thurstone received many awards for his important work. Some of these include:

• Best Article from the American Psychological Association (1949)
• Centennial Award from Northwestern University (1951)
• Honorary Doctorate from the University of Göteborg (1954)

He was also a leader in his field. He served as the President of the American Psychological Association in 1933. In 1936, he became the first President of the American Psychometric Society. Thurstone was also elected to important groups like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Selected Works

• The Nature of Intelligence (1924)
• The Effect of Motion Pictures on the Social Attitudes of High School Children (with Ruth C. Peterson, 1932)
• Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children (with Ruth C. Peterson, 1933)
• The Vectors of Mind (1935)
• Primary mental abilities (1938)
• Multiple-Factor Analysis (1947)

See also

In Spanish: Louis Leon Thurstone para niños

• L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory
• Law of comparative judgment