CATTELL, JAMES MCKEEN

(b. Easton, Pennsylvania, 25 May 1860, d. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 20 January 1944), psychology, scientific journal editing. For the original article on Cattell see DSB, vol. 3.

Cattell’s scientific work and programmatic statements—with their focus on quantification, potential applicability, and a concern for human behavior—helped shape the course of twentieth-century “scientific” psychology. His editorial and institutional activities, especially his fifty-year editorship of Science, provided an organizational infrastructure that supported the American scientific community through the same period.

Education and Early Scientific Successes . At Lafayette College (AB, 1880), Cattell studied Baconian ideas with philologist Francis Andrew March and, on his own, Comtean positivism. His later approach to science combined a Comtean emphasis on quantification with a Baconian appreciation for the hypothesis-free collection of empirical “facts” and the usefulness of science. His scientific work thus featured methods that produced quantitative data about (potentially applicable) psychological phenomena, even if he often could not explain them. At Lafayette (which his father, William C. Cattell, served as president, and of which his maternal grandfather, James McKeen, was the major benefactor) Cattell also developed a self-righteous expectation of deference from others, an attitude that often alienated his peers and colleagues.

Hoping to emulate March’s scholarly career, Cattell studied at the universities of Göttingen and Leipzig before assuming a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 1882. There he showed great experimental skill by timing individuals’ reading of letters and words and claiming that people naturally read whole words, rather than syllables. (This study later reinforced the “whole-word” approach to reading education.) In 1883, he lost his fellowship and returned to Leipzig. In 1886, he became the first American to earn a German PhD in experimental psychology with Wilhelm Wundt, who is often credited with establishing the new science. Cattell’s dissertation research measured reaction times under varying conditions more precisely than any previous study. As he worked, he soon found that Wundt’s preferred methods—which involved innere wahrnehmung (internal perception, or simply perceiving subjective events, a procedure often confused with the more rigorous selbstbeobachtung and mistranslated as

introspection)—gave inconsistent results. He thus abandoned these procedures to emphasize the behavior of his subjects—a term he apparently introduced in reports on psychological experiments—and set a precedent that many later psychologists followed.

In 1886, Cattell became a Fellow-Commoner at St. Johns College, Cambridge. Following visits to Francis Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory in London, Cattell assimilated into his approach to science Galton’s interest in differences among individuals. Galton developed this interest into a program of positive eugenics, an idea that Cattell found congenial; Cattell and his wife—Josephine Owen, an Englishwoman who had studied music in Leipzig—had seven children.

Experimental Accomplishments and Disappointments . In 1889, Cattell assumed a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he performed two elaborate series of experiments. With biologist Charles S. Dolley, he continued his reaction-time studies in an attempt to measure the velocity of the nervous impulse. With philosopher George S. Fullerton, he extended traditional psychophysical techniques whose proponents claimed they measured the relation between (physical) stimulus and (mental) sensation, and used his results to argue against any mentalistic interpretation of his (or others’) experiments.

Cattell moved to Columbia University in 1891, where he developed an influential program of “mental tests.” He and his collaborators used standard laboratory procedures—measuring (among other traits) reaction times, short-term memory, and the sensitivity of the senses—to gather quantitative data on psychological differences. But the studies lacked a functional view of how these traits helped people live their lives, and because the tests produced no useful results, psychologists soon abandoned them. Cattell then left the laboratory, but in 1901 his earlier experimental achievement led to his election as the first psychologist in the National Academy of Sciences. Three years later, while addressing “The Conceptions and Methods of Psychology,” he urged his colleagues to apply their science to practical problems, and those who later developed an explicitly applied psychology often emphasized Cattell’s inspiration.

Editorial Achievements . From 1894, when he founded The Psychological Review with Princeton colleague James Mark Baldwin, Cattell owned, edited, and eventually published many major scientific journals. In late 1894, he took control of the failing weekly Science, and in 1900 it became—even though privately owned—the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This arrangement greatly increased AAAS membership, Science’s circulation, and Cattell’s advertising income. Before 1920, he used Science to initiate debates over major policy issues, including the work of federal scientific bureaus, plans for the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s $10 million endowment, and the governance of higher education. After 1915, Science emphasized discussions about support for scientific research and both the National Research Council and the AAAS’s own Committee of One Hundred on Scientific Research. These concerns attracted additional readers, and this growing readership (and its weekly publication schedule) in turn led many American scientists to publish their best work in Science.

Cattell took over another failing journal, The Popular Science Monthly, in 1900, and used his Science-based network to attract contributors. (In 1915, he sold the journal’s name, but continued it as The Scientific Monthly.) In 1903, Cattell began collecting data for what emerged in 1906 as the first edition of American Men of Science, a directory of the country’s scientific workers. He also used these data in his studies of scientific eminence, which he repeated, with modifications, for the six later American Men of Science editions he oversaw. In 1904, he sold his share of The Psychological Review and, in 1907, took over The American Naturalist. He initially hoped that the Naturalist would encourage positive eugenics, but he soon came to rely on the editorial guidance of Columbia colleague Thomas H. Morgan, and the journal instead promoted Mendelian genetics. In 1915, he founded School and Society to serve educators as Science served scientists. He edited these publications through the 1930s—and Science through the early 1940s—and they defined his position in the American scientific community.

Institutional Failures . Even as American scientists respected Cattell’s scientific and editorial achievements, they resented his self-righteous approach. This attitude at times emerged as a defense of academic freedom, and in 1913, he collected a series of Science articles in a volume, University Control. But his verbal and written statements often included public attacks on others, which cost him friends. When Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler tried to force Cattell to retire in 1913, friends admitted Cattell’s personal shortcomings but rushed to his defense. Nevertheless, he gradually alienated most of them, including his long-time supporters at Columbia, anthropologist Franz Boas and philosopher John Dewey. In 1917, when the university finally fired Cattell, ostensibly for opposing U.S. conscription policy during World War I, he found few supporters. He sued Columbia for libel and, in 1922, won a monetary settlement. He used some of it to found the Psychological Corporation, which tried to implement his interest in applied psychology. Cattell, however, emphasized the firm’s organization and never could explain how psychologists actually applied their science. The corporation floundered until 1926, when psychologists with significant experience with “real world” problems assumed its control.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Cattell continued to edit his journals and chair the AAAS Executive Committee, and he acted as psychology’s grand old man. His last years, however, proved disappointing. Science grew duller and attracted both growing criticism and fewer readers, younger scientists lost interest in his continued studies of scientific eminence, and he continued to alienate others. Under his leadership the AAAS hired and fired four permanent secretaries through the 1930s, and a public personal attack (as president of the 1929 International Congress of Psychology) on Duke University researcher William McDougall scandalized American psychologists. In 1941, the AAAS Executive Committee finally forced Cattell from its chair. Although he edited Science until his death, his continued relationships with AAAS officials were cool at best.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Library of Congress holds an exceptionally valuable collection of Cattell papers. (It tripled in size in the early 1970s,after Nathan Reingold submitted his original DSB article on Cattell. The original article also could not benefit from the post-1970 spurt of research on psychology’s past and—led largely by Reingold—on the twentieth-century American scientific community.) Cattell’s papers are also held in Central Files, Columbia University, New York. Although Columbia University’s Manuscripts Library and the Columbiana Collection both also hold collections of Cattell material, the records of all Columbia faculty and administrative officers available in the university’s Central Files are much more valuable.

WORKS BY CATTELL

James McKeen Cattell: Man of Science, edited by A. T. Poffenberger. 2 vols. Lancaster, PA: The Science Press, 1947. Collects many of Cattell’s most important scientific and programmatic papers and includes an incomplete bibliography.

“APA’s First Publication: Proceedings of the American Psychological Association, 1892–1893.” American Psychologist28 (1973): 277–292. A facsimile reprint of a major report that Cattell edited for publication in 1894.

An Education in Psychology: James McKeen Cattell’s Journal and Letters from Germany and England, 1880–1888, edited by Michael M. Sokal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.

OTHER SOURCES

Pillsbury, Walter B. “Biographical Memoir of James McKeen Cattell, 1860–1944.” National Academy of Science Biographical Memoirs 25 (1949): 1–16. Includes an incomplete bibliography.

The Psychological Researchers of James McKeen Cattell: A Review by Some of His Students. New York: The Science Press, 1914.

Sokal, Michael M. “The Unpublished Autobiography of James McKeen Cattell.” American Psychologist 26 (1971):626–635.

———. “Science and James McKeen Cattell, 1894–1945.”Science 209 (1980): 43–52.

———. “The Origins of the Psychological Corporation.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981): 54–67.

———. “James McKeen Cattell and the Failure of Anthropometric Mental Testing, 1890–1901.” In The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought, edited by William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash. New York: Praeger, 1982.

———. “James McKeen Cattell and American Psychology in the 1920s.” In Explorations in the History of Psychology in the United States, edited by Josef Bro ek. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1984.

———. “Life-Span Developmental Psychology and the History of Science.” In Beyond History of Science: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Schofield, edited by Elizabeth W. Garber. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1990. Provides an interpretive overview of Cattell’s life and career.

———. “James McKeen Cattell, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Psychological Association, 1891–1902.” In Aspects of the History of Psychology in America: 1892–1992, edited by Helmut E. Adler and Robert W. Rieber (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 727, 1994), pp. 13–35.

———. “Stargazing: James McKeen Cattell, American Men of Science, and the Reward Structure of the American Scientific Community, 1906–44.” In Psychology, Science, and Human Affairs: Essays in Honor of William Bevan, edited by Frank Kessel. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995.

———. “Baldwin, Cattell, and the Psychological Review: A Collaboration and Its Discontents.” History of the Human Sciences 10 (1997): 57–89.

———. “Promoting Science in a New Century: The Middle Years of the AAAS.” In The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Michael M. Sokal, and Bruce V. Lewenstein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

———, and Patrice A. Rafail, eds. A Guide to Manuscript Collections in the History of Psychology and Related Areas. Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1982. Describes collections in which much of Cattell’s correspondence with his psychological contemporaries may be found.

Michael M. Sokal