Raymond Cattell

Cattell and Heather Birkett Cattell lived on a lagoon in the southeast corner of Oahu where he kept a small sailing boat. Around 1990, he had to give up his sailing career because of navigational challenges resulting from old age. He died at home in Honolulu on 2 February 1998, at age 92 years. He is buried in the Valley of the Temples on a hillside overlooking the sea. His will provided for his remaining funds to build a school for underprivileged children in Cambodia. He was an agnostic.

In 1997, Cattell was chosen by the American Psychological Association (APA) for its "Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Science of Psychology." Before the medal was presented, Mehler launched a publicity campaign against Cattell through his nonprofit foundation ISAR, accusing Cattell of being sympathetic to racist and fascist ideas. Mehler claimed that "it is unconscionable to honor this man whose work helps to dignify the most destructive political ideas of the twentieth century". A blue-ribbon committee was convened by the APA to investigate the legitimacy of the charges. Before the committee reached a decision, Cattell issued an open letter to the committee saying "I believe in equal opportunity for all individuals, and I abhor racism and discrimination based on race. Any other belief would be antithetical to my life's work" and saying that "it is unfortunate that the APA announcement ... has brought misguided critics' statements a great deal of publicity." Cattell refused the award, withdrawing his name from consideration, and the committee was disbanded. Cattell died months later at the age of 92.

In 1994, Cattell was one of 52 signatories of "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal. In the letter the signers, some of whom were intelligence researchers, defended the publication of the book The Bell Curve. There was sharp pushback on the letter, with a number of signers (not Cattell) having received funding from white supremacist organizations.

In 1984, Cattell said that: "The only reasonable thing is to be noncommittal on the race question – that's not the central issue, and it would be a great mistake to be sidetracked into all the emotional upsets that go on in discussions of racial differences. We should be quite careful to dissociate eugenics from it – eugenics' real concern should be with individual differences." Richard L. Gorsuch (1997) wrote (in a letter to the American Psychological Foundation, para. 4) that: "The charge of racism is 180 degrees off track. [Cattell] was the first one to challenge the racial bias in tests and to attempt to reduce that problem."

During World War II, Cattell served as a civilian consultant to the U.S. government researching and developing tests for selecting officers in the armed forces. Cattell returned to teaching at Harvard and married Alberta Karen Schuettler, a PhD student in mathematics at Radcliffe College. Over the years, she worked with Cattell on many aspects of his research, writing, and test development. They had three daughters and a son. They divorced in 1980.

In 1977, Cattell moved to Hawaii, largely because of his love of the ocean and sailing. He continued his career as a part-time professor and adviser at the University of Hawaii. He also served as adjunct faculty of the Hawaii School of Professional Psychology. After settling in Hawaii he married Heather Birkett, a clinical psychologist, who later carried out extensive research using the 16PF and other tests. During the last two decades of his life in Hawaii, Cattell continued to publish a variety of scientific articles, as well as books on motivation, the scientific use of factor analysis, two volumes of personality and learning theory, the inheritance of personality, and co-edited a book on functional psychological testing, as well as a complete revision of his highly renowned Handbook of Multivariate Experimental Psychology.

Cattell found that constructs used by early psychological theorists tended to be somewhat subjective and poorly defined. For example, after examining over 400 published papers on the topic of "anxiety" in 1965, Cattell stated: "The studies showed so many fundamentally different meanings used for anxiety and different ways of measuring it, that the studies could not even be integrated." Early personality theorists tended to provide little objective evidence or research bases for their theories. Cattell wanted psychology to become more like other sciences, whereby a theory could be tested in an objective way that could be understood and replicated by others. In Cattell's words:

In regard to statistical methodology, in 1960 Cattell founded the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP), and its journal Multivariate Behavioral Research, in order to bring together, encourage, and support scientists interested in multi-variate research. He was an early and frequent user of factor analysis (a statistical procedure for finding underlying factors in data). Cattell also developed new factor analytic techniques, for example, by inventing the scree test, which uses the curve of latent roots to judge the optimal number of factors to extract. He also developed a new factor analysis rotation procedure—the "Procrustes" or non-orthogonal rotation, designed to let the data itself determine the best location of factors, rather than requiring orthogonal factors. Additional contributions include the Coefficient of Profile Similarity (taking account of shape, scatter, and level of two score profiles); P-technique factor analysis based on repeated measurements of a single individual (sampling of variables, rather than sampling of persons); dR-technique factor analysis for elucidating change dimensions (including transitory emotional states, and longer-lasting mood states); the Taxonome program for ascertaining the number and contents of clusters in a data set; the Rotoplot program for attaining maximum simple structure factor pattern solutions. As well, he put forward the Dynamic Calculus for assessing interests and motivation, the Basic Data Relations Box (assessing dimensions of experimental designs), the group syntality construct ("personality" of a group), the triadic theory of cognitive abilities, the Ability Dimension Analysis Chart (ADAC), and Multiple Abstract Variance Analysis (MAVA), with "specification equations" to embody genetic and environmental variables and their interactions.

In 1960, Cattell organized and convened an international symposium to increase communication and cooperation among researchers who were using multivariate statistics to study human behavior. This resulted in the foundation of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP) and its flagship journal, Multivariate Behavioral Research. He brought many researchers from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America to work in his lab at the University of Illinois. Many of his books involving multivariate experimental research were written in collaboration with notable colleagues.

One reason that Cattell moved to the University of Illinois was because the first electronic computer built and owned entirely by a US educational institution – "Illinois Automatic Computer" – was being developed there, which made it possible for him to complete large-scale factor analyses. Cattell founded the Laboratory of Personality Assessment and Group Behavior. In 1949, he and his wife founded the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT). Karen Cattell served as director of IPAT until 1993. Cattell remained in the Illinois research professorship until he reached the university's mandatory retirement age in 1973. A few years after he retired from the University of Illinois he built a home in Boulder, Colorado, where he wrote and published the results of a variety of research projects that had been left unfinished in Illinois.

Herbert Woodrow, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was searching for someone with a background in multivariate methods to establish a research laboratory. Cattell was invited to assume this position in 1945. With this newly created research professorship in psychology, he was able to obtain sufficient grant support for two PhD associates, four graduate research assistants, and clerical assistance.

Cattell's programmatic multivariate research which extended from the 1940s through the 70's resulted in several books that have been widely recognized as identifying fundamental taxonomic dimensions of human personality and motivation and their organizing principles:

In 1937, Cattell left England and moved to the United States when he was invited by Edward Thorndike to come to Columbia University. When the G. Stanley Hall professorship in psychology became available at Clark University in 1938, Cattell was recommended by Thorndike and was appointed to the position. However, he conducted little research there and was "continually depressed." Cattell was invited by Gordon Allport to join the Harvard University faculty in 1941. While at Harvard he began some of the research in personality that would become the foundation for much of his later scientific work.

As he observed first-hand the terrible destruction and suffering after World War I, Cattell was increasingly attracted to the idea of applying the tools of science to the serious human problems that he saw around him. He stated that in the cultural upheaval after WWI, he felt that his laboratory table had begun to seem too small and the world's problems so vast. Thus, he decided to change his field of study and pursue a PhD in psychology at King's College, London, which he received in 1929. The title of his PhD dissertation was "The Subjective Character of Cognition and Pre-Sensational Development of Perception". His PhD advisor at King's College, London, was Francis Aveling, D.D., D.Sc., PhD, D.Litt., who was also President of the British Psychological Society from 1926 until 1929. In 1939, Cattell was honored for his outstanding contributions to psychological research with conferral of the prestigious higher doctorate – D.Sc. from the University of London.

Raymond Cattell's papers and books are the 7th most highly referenced in peer-reviewed psychology journals over the past century. His 25 most cited publications are:

When Cattell was about five years old, his family moved to Torquay, Devon, in the south-west of England, where he grew up with strong interests in science and spent a lot of time sailing around the coastline. He was the first of his family (and the only one in his generation) to attend university: in 1921, he was awarded a scholarship to study chemistry at King's College, London, where he obtained a BSc (Hons) degree with 1st-class honors at age 19 years. While studying physics and chemistry at university he learned from influential people in many other fields, who visited or lived in London. He writes:

When Cattell began his career in psychology in the 1920s, he felt that the domain of personality was dominated by speculative ideas that were largely intuitive with little/no empirical research basis. Cattell accepted E.L. Thorndike's empiricist viewpoint that "If something actually did exist, it existed in some amount and hence could be measured.".

Cattell noted that in the hard sciences such as chemistry, physics, astronomy, as well as in medical science, unsubstantiated theories were historically widespread until new instruments were developed to improve scientific observation and measurement. In the 1920s, Cattell worked with Charles Spearman who was developing the new statistical technique of factor analysis in his effort to understand the basic dimensions and structure of human abilities. Factor analysis became a powerful tool to help uncover the basic dimensions underlying a confusing array of surface variables within a particular domain.

Raymond Bernard Cattell (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure. His work also explored the basic dimensions of personality and temperament, the range of cognitive abilities, the dynamic dimensions of motivation and emotion, the clinical dimensions of abnormal personality, patterns of group syntality and social behavior, applications of personality research to psychotherapy and learning theory, predictors of creativity and achievement, and many multivariate research methods including the refinement of factor analytic methods for exploring and measuring these domains. Cattell authored, co-authored, or edited almost 60 scholarly books, more than 500 research articles, and over 30 standardized psychometric tests, questionnaires, and rating scales. According to a widely cited ranking, Cattell was the 16th most eminent, 7th most cited in the scientific journal literature, and among the most productive psychologists of the 20th century. He was, however, a controversial figure, due in part to his friendships with and intellectual respect for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Raymond Cattell was born on 20 March 1905 in Hill Top, West Bromwich, a small town in England near Birmingham where his father's family was involved in inventing new parts for engines, automobiles and other machines. Thus, his growing up years were a time when great technological and scientific ideas and advances were taking place and this greatly influenced his perspective on how a few people could actually make a difference in the world. He wrote: "1905 was a felicitous year in which to be born. The airplane was just a year old. The Curies and Rutherford in that year penetrated the heart of the atom and the mystery of its radiations, Alfred Binet launched the first intelligence test, and Einstein, the theory of relativity.