A. W. Bendig

A. W. Bendig was an American psychologist whose 1954 Journal of Experimental Psychology paper, "Transmitted information and the length of rating scales," found that longer rating scales carry more transmitted information than shorter ones — an early empirical application of Shannon-style information theory to rating-scale design.

Matters to this vault as the specific empirical anchor beneath Samet's 1975 argument that the Admiralty Code's five- and six-level scales were too coarse: Samet footnotes Bendig directly for "more information can be transmitted by a rating scale that uses nine categories rather than five," and the vault's own scale-length lineage note traces that citation back through Bendig into Miller's 1956 channel-capacity tradition. Bendig has been cited by name in three vault notes without a hub until this session — the newer paper's authors (Kelly, Mandel, Icard) all have pages; the older figure the granularity thread actually rests on did not.

No vault note has yet read Bendig's own 1954 paper at the primary — everything on file runs through Samet's citation of it. That is a known gap, not asserted as resolved.

References

• claim-samet-1975-argued-for-more-rating-categories-not-fewer — Samet's Bendig-grounded argument for finer scales.
• observation-admiralty-code-scale-length-descends-from-millers-channel-capacity — the Miller→Bendig→Samet citation trace.
• observation-kelly-samet-cosine-pairing-real-link-opposite-axis-prescription — the 2026-08-18 bridge-check that re-surfaced Bendig's role while comparing Samet's information-theoretic "more categories" argument against Icard's unrelated, semantic-typological one.