Raymond B. Cattell

Brief Biography

Raymond Bernard Cattell was born in 1905 in the small town of Hill Top, not far from Birmingham, England, in the British midlands.

Cattell’s father was an inventor who worked on designing new machine parts, notably for automobile engines.

When he was five years old, Cattell’s family moved to Torquay in Devon, in southwestern England.

As a boy, Cattell developed a strong interest in science. He was also a devoted sailor, piloting a small sailboat along the Devon coast. Later on, he published his first book on his experiences sailing the Devon estuaries and coast of South Devon and Dartmoor.

Cattell was the first in his family to pursue higher education, receiving a scholarship to study chemistry at King’s College, London. He entered college in 1921 at the age of 16 and received his bachelor’s degree in science, with first-class honors, in 1924 at the age of 19.

Cattell has reported that his interest in psychology arose from his experience of living through World War I as a pre-teenager. He wanted to contribute to the scientific study of the human mind with a view to preventing another such catastrophe.

Cattell remained at King’s College for his graduate studies in psychology, receiving his PhD in 1929.

While pursuing his doctorate, Cattell accepted a teaching job in the Department of Education at the University of Exeter.

In 1937, Edward L. Thorndike invited Cattell to come to Columbia University in New York City. The British psychologist was to remain in the US for the remainder of his career.

In 1938, Cattell moved to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the invitation of G. Stanley Hall. Just three years later, in 1941, Cattell was invited by Gordon Allport to move to Harvard University.

Soon afterwards, the US entered World War II and Cattell worked during the next three years as a consultant for the US Army, helping to design personality tests to use in selecting candidates for officer training.

In 1945, Cattell was offered the opportunity to found his own research institute—the Laboratory of Personality Assessment and Group Behavior—at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This offer was particularly attractive to Cattell because Illinois had been the first US institution of higher education to develop its own digital computing system, the “Illinois Automatic Computer,” entirely on its own.

Over the years, Cattell’s original lab spawned more than 40 psychology labs today at the University of Illinois.

In 1949, Cattell also founded the independent Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT).

Cattell spent the remainder of his academic career at Illinois, until his retirement in 1973.

Cattell remained very active in writing books and journal articles in retirement, first from his home in Boulder, Colorado, and then, after 1977, from his home on the southern coast of the island of Oahu in the state of Hawaii, where he had constructed a house on a remote lagoon to indulge his life-long passion for sailing, which he did into advanced old age.

Cattell died in Honolulu in 1998 at the age of 92.

Cattell’s soaring reputation rests primarily upon his manifold contributions to the construction of psychology as an experimental science.

He was fond of expressing his empiricist convictions by citing one of his mentors, Edward L. Thorndike, to the effect that if something actually existed, then it existed in some amount and therefore could be measured.[1]

One recent psychologist has pointed to Cattell as the individual principally responsible for transforming psychology from a humanistically oriented field into a scientific discipline.

Cattell applied experimental methods to a wide variety of psychological phenomena, but probably his most important work lay at the intersection between personality and social psychology.

In the area of personality assessment, Cattell is famous for his 16-factor model of personality, the 16PF Questionnaire. He also pioneered the effort to make intelligence tests less culturally biased—that is, less influenced by knowledge presupposing membership in the dominant culture—by developing the Cultural Fair Intelligence Test.

In addition to advancing a more-complex model of personality (in comparison, for example, to that of the pioneering personality psychologist, Hans Eysenck), early in his career Cattell also helped, along with Charles Spearman, to refine the statistical field of multivariate analysis for application to personality assessment, where it is known as “factor analysis.”

To further this interest, in 196- Cattell founded the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP). SMEP publishes the journal Multivariate Behavioral Research.

In the area of the theory of cognitive ability, Cattell developed an important distinction between what he called “fluid intelligence” and “crystallized intelligence.” The former is the largely innate ability to solve problems, while the latter is the culturally acquired ability to learn and apply culturally acquired skills, such as, for example, automobile mechanics. The two forms of intelligence are complementary, not competitive, with each other.

Late in life, Cattell—a lifelong atheist—published several books and articles on a personal philosophy he developed, which he called “beyondism.”

Cattell proposed beyondism, which was based on Darwinian evolutionary theory, as a purely scientific foundation for the construction of a new morality and of a substitute for traditional organized religion.

Not only is Cattell the 16th-most-often-cited psychologist of the twentieth century, he was also one of the most prolific, publishing an astounding 60 books (as author, co-author, editor, or co-editor) and 500 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Note:

1. Paraphrasing a passage from Edward L. Thorndike, The Fundamentals of Learning (1932).

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Raymond Cattell are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Cattell’s many academic and popular writings.

Anxiety

Overt anxiety . . . [is] that part of anxiety of which the individual is aware and ready to speak.

Cattell on Cattell

[I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures—Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, [Julian] Huxley, and [George Bernard] Shaw being my favorite speakers (the last, in a meeting at King’s College, converted me to vegetarianism)—for almost two years!

In Britain, when I was growing up in the ’20s, it was common sense to place considerable importance upon heredity in choosing a person to marry, in choosing the occupation for which one was suited, and so on. I was astonished when I came to America to find that eugenics was almost a bad word. One may trace this situation to the sociologists, to [Franz] Boas and others, and to pressure from minority groups who oppose anything aristocratic.

Conversation

In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation. I find it quite easy to be original and make discoveries in conversation, but when it comes to writing down what I said, I don’t know why it is, but it suddenly becomes stilted and awkward.

Creativity

Creativity is closely correlated with personality factors of dominance, introversion, and ego strength. So I wouldn’t try to measure creativity by using a test of creativity per se, but rather by measuring personality factors that correlate highly with it. It has been shown that intelligence is also a precondition for creativity in any socially useful sense. So I would test for creativity with the 16 PF [Personality Factors] Test and a culture-fair intelligence test.

Greatness is something that is surely very different in different areas such as politics, art, music, and science. What I think is fundamental, however, is creativity and an ability to break away from conventional views, a combination of high intelligence with high ego strength. Great people are largely responsible for whatever progress society makes, yet they actually take quite a beating in the process. So qualities of endurance are necessary as well.

Diversity

Societies in the past that have become too pluralistic, like India, and the old Mediterranean countries like the Roman Empire, didn’t perceive the danger to moral standards that arose from having too many differing moral standards, too many differing religions, too many differing cultures. On the other hand, there are advantages to a country in having some diversity, in that each can be used as an experiment to see in which direction the group as a whole might advantageously go. I think that there’s a happy medium on this matter of diversity, and it has probably been overshot in the U.S. at the present.

Dominance

Dominance is negatively related to grades in high school and undergraduate work, but the opposite is true in graduate work—with dissertations and theses, the better work is done by high-dominance people who show more creativity and independence of mind. Of course, that dominance isn’t necessarily welcomed, because professors may still find docility in students to be a desirable trait. Incidentally, creative people have a personality profile which is not everybody’s cup of tea. They are often difficult people. Their combination of high dominance and introversion is not always easy to deal with.

Dominance . . . is shown in assertive, independent, confident and stubborn behaviour.

Scientific Analysis of Personality, second edition (1966).

Education

The current decline in educational achievement is, like most things, multiply determined. The evidence points, first, to about 50-100 years of genetic decline in ability. It doesn’t take much–perhaps a one-point decline every 30 years–to reduce substantially the percentage in the upper range of IQ. With our present mean IQ of 100, 1 person in 250 would exceed an IQ of 140. If, however, the average dropped to 85, you’d have only 1 in 8,000 who would exceed an IQ of 140. We must suppose that academic standards are much affected by the percentages of high IQ individuals, and that their becoming more scarce will lower academic performance. So part of the remedy for this problem definitely lies in eugenic practices. . . . But there are some environmental factors as well, such as the failure to do “streaming” in schools, in which children of much the same ability level are put together. And I think something in the way of general idleness and slackness has gotten into the system since the 1960s which could account for a part of the decline, particularly in the more precise subjects like mathematics.

The Future

The only immortality we know of is our children, and in that unfinished story of the acts of lives, which, forever expanding, like waves from a pebble in the lake, have their immortality in the acts of future generations.

A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (1972).

Genius

Genius is not so much about high intelligence as it is about the ability to sustain sustained intellectual curiosity.

Genius . . . means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Group Selection

The psychopath may do very well for himself as an individual—it’s only that a group with too many psychopaths wouldn’t survive. Group selection and individual selection work differently. Although individual selection may favor selfishness, for example, it’s caught up and corrected by group selection in the long run—one has to stress that. A society dies if it exceeds a certain degree of individual selfishness.

Human Behavior

Without resisting the temptation to generalize, one can say that for the human individual, the reward and punishment of reinforcement theory may be characterized as a series of subtle but persistent microrewards and microanxieties.

Subjectively the possession of a role factor is felt as a “mental set” which modifies all ordinary responses. The very same stimulus is perceived in a different way when one is in the role and when one is out of it. . . . Technically, we handle this change of perception the same way in a role as in a mood—both of which can intrude on the ordinary personality—by this special factor, L, which can be called a modulator factor. A modulator factor comes into action only when the usual ordinary ‘focal stimulus’ comes into the orbit of a set of role cues which we may call the ‘ambient’ or surrounding stimulus.

Scientific Analysis of Personality, second edition (1966).

The first way in which one notices that a sentiment structure is different from an erg is that the emotional (ergic goal) qualities which enter it are very diverse, whereas in an erg they are all of one quality, e. g., gregariousness, sex… The sentiment brings together attitudes, in fact, with several different ergic roots, but only one source of learning.

Scientific Analysis of Personality, second edition (1966).

Immigration

I think it might not be a bad idea to remove the inscription from the Statue of Liberty which calls for the “wretched refuse” of the other countries to migrate here. This is not what you want to build a nation of. If we have immigration, we ought to have it from the best sources. At the moment, the sociologists have won out on that issue with their claims that there are no differences among immigrants. But I would maintain that there are most marked differences, in both innate intelligence and personality, among people who enter the U.S.

The Intellect

Plato compared the intellect to a charioteer guiding the powerful horses of the passions, i.e., he gave it both the power of perception and the power of control.

Intelligence

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but to see quickly how to make them good.

The attempt to correlate intellect with knowledge is not new; it is the attempt to make one a measure of the other that is new and in my view indefensible.

The human being, the creature of education and culture, becomes “intelligent” by the manipulation of symbols.

The quality of our mental performance depends very largely on the quality of our concepts. A good vocabulary provides a conceptual framework for thinking.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

Intelligence is not synonymous with culture, but they both play together and against each other in any society.

Cited in Lyn Corno and Eric M. Anderman, Handbook of Educational Psychology, third edition (2016).

Intelligence is important in psychology for two reasons. First, it is one of the most scientifically developed corners of the subject, giving the student as complete a view as is possible anywhere of the way scientific method can be applied to psychological problems. Secondly, it is of immense practical importance, educationally, socially, and in regard to physiology and genetics.

Mind and Matter

The fact that the worlds of mind and matter are interconnected is an important insight for psychologists and philosophers.

Cited in Richard W. Robins, et al., eds., Handbook of Research Methods in Personality Psychology (2007).

Nature and Nurture

For example, there are five successive studies of criminal behavior cited in my 1982 book. They show that if a man in prison has an identical twin, it’s likely his cotwin will also be in prison. If the twin is fraternal [with 50 percent shared genes, on average], the likelihood is not nearly as great that he’ll be in prison, too, but it’s greater than chance. How could one possibly account for this difference with environmentalist explanations? The strong genetic component in criminality has already been proven up to the hilt.

There may also be deeper, unconscious sources of opposition to any form of biological determinism. For example, the individual may feel that heredity somehow restrains him, so he will prefer to deny its influence. But obviously the only reasonable way to deal with nature is to accommodate to its laws, as we do to the law of gravity. If one refuses to acknowledge the importance of gravity and blithely jumps off a cliff, one will find himself in serious trouble. Our society may be jumping off a cliff, so to speak, with regard to its denial of the role of genetics in human behavior.

Personality

Personality is not a single state, it’s a dynamic pattern, a process.

Personality is the individual’s characteristic reactions to social stimuli, and the quality of these reactions.

[Personality is] . . . that which tells what a man will do when placed in a given situation.

Scientific Analysis of Personality, second edition (1966).

Politicization of Science

The danger is not only that politicians and private institutions with axes to grind will find tame or corruptible social scientists to support their positions. The greater danger which recent experiences both here and abroad, e.g., Lysenkoism in Russia, have revealed is that partisans primarily political in interest and intention either accidentally or deliberately infiltrate the ranks of science. In the case of the Lysenko episode, and comparable events in Nazi Germany, the disturbing realization to scientists was that the exile or death of those ejected from their academic positions followed what seemed initially to be severe technical criticism by fellow scientists, but was actually politically staged.

A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (1972).

Psychology

To focus on psychology, in which I’ve been working for the last 50 years, I think the trouble lies in the mediocrity of the researchers and teachers. The whole subject is a very difficult one. [William] McDougall said that the trouble with psychology is that it is too difficult for psychologists. Quite advanced mathematics—actually quite beautiful mathematics, seemingly beyond the comprehension of most psychologists today—is necessary to solve the next issues awaiting us. We’ve got to get more acute selection in psychology, and take it out of the hands of the do-gooders and the social workers and really make a science of it.

In physical science, at least until recently, the layman could go a long way in understanding the essentials with little disciplining in method. But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, “describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands.”

Scientific Analysis of Personality, second edition (1966).

Psychology appeared to be a jungle of confusing, conflicting, and arbitrary concepts. These pre-scientific theories doubtless contained insights which still surpass in refinement those depended upon by psychiatrists or psychologists today. But who knows, among the many brilliant ideas offered, which are the true ones? Some will claim that the statements of one theorist are correct, but others will favour the views of another. Then there is no objective way of sorting out the truth except through scientific research.

Scientific Analysis of Personality (1965).

Of course, science lives by confusing theories, but what were accepted as “theories” even by the many professional psychologists and psychiatrists were very poor limitations of what physical scientists call a theory.

Scientific Analysis of Personality, second edition (1966).

Without psychological assessment there is no psychology. Without scales and tests, you are no better than a palm-reader.

If the comparatively coarse problems of the engineer can be mastered only by a thorough grounding in mathematics, how much more exquisite must be the mathematical sense of the practitioner concerned with the prediction or control of human behavior?

Public Issues

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Science

The important thing in any science is to do the work, to do it well and to convey results to other people.

A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories.

Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action (1987).

Success in Life

There is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.