Dr. Stanley Coren - Academics

Having performed well during his undergraduate degree, Stanley was permitted to enrol in a PhD program without a Master’s degree. Al Hastorf, the chair of the department at the time, told Dr. Coren his first day, “What we can offer you is faculty, and it’s your job to take advantage of them.” Luckily for Stanley there was plenty to take advantage of, between distinguished professors and award-winning psychologists in the department at the time.

Stanley wanted to study “How the light out there turned into an idea in your head,” and how much of personality is governed by perceptions. Stanley decided against animal research because, he says, “I needed a beast that could talk. I needed something that could tell me what it saw. That is the essence of perception.”