---
title: "A. W. Bendig"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "A. W. Bendig"
aliases: ["Albert W. Bendig","Bendig 1954"]
first_seen: "2026-08-18T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["rating scale granularity","[[entity-george-miller|George A. Miller]]","[[entity-michael-samet|Michael G. Samet]]","Admiralty Code","information theory"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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 [[claim-samet-1975-argued-for-more-rating-categories-not-fewer|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 [[observation-admiralty-code-scale-length-descends-from-millers-channel-capacity|scale-length lineage note]] traces that citation back through Bendig into [[claim-miller-1956-channel-capacity-limits-absolute-judgment-categories|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.