Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [212]
An example of Cattell’s work: In an early stage, he found that a strong tendency to admit common faults was somewhat correlated with a high tendency to agree, and that both of these tendencies were correlated with emotionality, susceptibility to annoyance, critical severity, and certain other traits, plus such physical criteria as high heart rate. To Cattell the web of correlations among these “surface traits” suggested an underlying “source trait” that he designated “anxiety.”
Such research sounds austere and remote from real life, but Cattell, though urbane and aristocratic of mien, was no dry-as-dust pedant.42 The son of an English engineer, he thought—probably because of his father’s profession—that the physical sciences should be his field, and studied chemistry and physics at the University of London. But he was an omnivorous reader and an eager participant in the intellectual and political ferment of the times (the 1920s), and these activities eventually brought about an epiphany:
My laboratory bench began to seem small and the world’s problems vast. Yet, like someone in a railroad station, watching trains depart and knowing they are not his, I declined all the standard remedies by political parties or religious affiliations. Gradually I concluded that to get beyond human irrationality one had to study the workings of the mind itself…From that moment, a few months before my science degree, I realized that psychology was to be my life interest.43
Cattell plunged into graduate work in psychology, studying under Spearman at the university and acquiring expertise in factor analysis. Unfortunately, at the time he received his Ph.D. psychology had gained only a bare toehold in English universities, and for fifteen years he had to earn his living as a school psychologist and clinician. Doing so had its costs—the heavy workload and meager income wrecked his first marriage—and its rewards: it greatly added to his understanding of the complexity and richness of personality. But his real goal was to do the kind of research he believed in, factor analysis:
It was plain to me, as John Stuart Mill had stated it, that the only proof of structure and causal relation lies in covariation, and that correlation and the new tool of factor analysis which Spearman had created could now be advantageously applied on a wide front—to personality structure and to the difficult problem of finding the dynamic roots of behavior.
Cattell came to the United States in 1937, briefly held positions at several leading universities, remarried happily, and began to carry out factor analysis of personality traits. In 1945 his work went into high gear when he became director of the Laboratory of Personality Assessment at the University of Illinois. There, for twenty-seven years, and later at the University of Hawaii, he pushed ahead, doing ever more advanced factor analysis and deriving ever higher-level personality factors.
In the early years he was able to group 171 surface traits into sixty-two clusters. He found, however, that these clusters overlapped—correlated with one another—and later was able to consolidate them into thirty-five.44 Still later he and others—in his autobiography he generously credits some eighty associates—pressed the analysis still further, eventually concluding that sixteen source traits or factors were, in his words, “necessary and adequate to cover all kinds of individual differences of personality [i.e., surface traits] found in common speech and psychological literature. They leave out no important aspect of total personality.”45
Each of the sixteen personality factors is bipolar. Emotional stability, for instance, ranges from “affected by feelings” at one extreme to “emotionally stable” at the other, and suspiciousness from “trusting” at one end to “suspicious” at the other. Through procedures outlined in a manual, testers can draw a personality profile of a tested individual or of a category of individuals. The differences in such profiles are striking and illuminating. Here, for instance,