maturation, and development in animal sexual behavior. He and his students addressed both the neural and the hormonal control of this behavior.
Stone’s comparative work not only was pursued for its intrinsic interest and value, but also was justified as having value for the understanding of human sexual behavior.
Yerkes and his students at Yale studied pri- mate sexual behavior in a program that greatly expanded after Yerkes received a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $500,000 in 1929 to es- tablish a primate research station in Florida.
Yerkes and his students developed a program that was founded on the belief that comparative research was the best way to understand human sexual behavior and so offered the possibility of controlling sexuality.
Both Stone and Yerkes embraced the goals of addressing social problems through scien- tific research. This was, as we saw in the case of developmental psychology, the intent of the philanthropies that funded their work. Sexu- ality research was science in the service of social order.
PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
‘‘Personality’’ in the contemporary sense of the word is a 20th-century term. Much of what it came to refer to in Psychology had been covered by the term ‘‘character’’ in earlier times. One of the earliest usages of ‘‘personality’’ as a scientific term in the United States was by Frederic Lyman Wells (1884–1964), whom you met inChapter 5.
Wells was influenced in his use of the word by the theoretical and clinical work of Sigmund Freud.
As historian of psychology Ian Nicholson (1998) has shown, in the 1920s and 1930s ‘‘personality’’
as a term came to signify something new: an American identity appropriate for a new era dominated by urban concerns.
It was Gordon Allport (1897–1967) who brought the term personality into regular use by academic psychologists. Allport was also instru- mental in the development of social psychology
as an organized research field within American psychology, along with his older brother, Floyd Henry Allport (1890–1978). The Allports grew up in a devoutly religious Midwestern home, with some expectation that they might become missionaries. However, both Floyd and Gordon ended up earning their graduate degrees in psy- chology. Gordon completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1919, the year Floyd earned his doctorate there. After teaching in Istanbul for a year, Gordon returned to graduate work in psy- chology at Harvard, where he studied personality traits for his doctoral dissertation. His literature reviews of research and writing on personality in the 1920s remain among the most important documents for understanding the field at the time he entered it.
The important personality theories in aca- demic circulation at the time of Gordon Allport’s entry into psychology included the type theories of Carl Jung (1875–1961), the body–personality typologies of German psychi- atrist Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964) and Amer- ican William H. Sheldon (1898–1977), and of course, the approach of Freud. Allport brought personality, however, into the research domain of academic psychology and made it an impor- tant area of research and application. Methods for assessing personality became the domain of the academic psychologist.
Assessing Personality
The popularization of the results of the army intelligence tests created a craze for psychological tests of all kinds in the 1920s.
Some tests were legitimate, and many were the work of charlatans. Personality in its new usage as an indicator of a new kind of American self was one of the most popular applications of the testing craze. Magazines in the 1920s carried many advertisements urging the reader to take the latest personality test. The term became so popular that it became nearly synonymous with the word ‘‘psychology’’ during this era. Academic
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psychologists were among those who developed these tests.
Woodworth, whom we mentioned inChapter 6, developed what is probably the first per- sonality test by an American psychologist. His Psychoneurotic Test (1917), later renamed the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, was an early attempt to capture problems of personality.
Many personality tests followed. Gordon Allport published his Test of Ascendance–Submission in 1928, and Robert G. Bernreuter’s Personality Inventory (1933) incorporated some of Wood- worth’s Personal Data Sheet and was used for assessment of normal and neurotic personality functioning.
Most of these early personality tests were derived rationally. That is, the test developer be- gan with logical categories that were intended to capture either normal psychological functioning or disordered psychological functioning as it was understood at the time. Attitudes, emotions, and psychopathology were all part of the mix. It is not surprising, then, that difficulties often arose in standardizing such instruments and that many came to view these devices skeptically.
In the 1930s, at the University of Minnesota, work began on another approach to assessing the disordered personality, or at least discrim- inating between normal and abnormal person- ality functioning. Psychologist Starke Hathaway (1903–1984), assisted by psychology student and later American psychology leader Paul Meehl (1920–2003) and neuropsychiatrist J. Charnley McKinley (1891–1950), gathered data from ob- servations of mental patients in the psychiatric unit at the University of Minnesota Hospital to construct the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The test was constructed as a series of true-or-false statements, such as, ‘‘I like to play drop the handkerchief.’’ No single item indicated pathology or its absence; rather, it was a pattern of responding that held meaning.
The items were grouped into scales, known only to the assessor, which indicated depression, psy- chosis, or even whether people were masculine or feminine in their responses. The MMPI proved
to be of professional value for both psychiatrists and psychologists. For the former, it was thought to remove the vagueness that was characteristic of psychodynamic tests, such as the Rorschach Projective Technique, and reduce the time de- mands on the psychiatrist. For the psychologist, it meant an expanded professional role as a part of a medical team, since the psychologists were expected to have expertise in assessment work. In the hierarchy of American medicine, this meant that the psychiatrist always held the superior position.
The Rorschach Projective Technique was developed by the psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) shortly before his untimely death. Rorschach had been deeply influenced by the ideas of both Freud and Jung and developed the test as a way to elicit unconscious material by providing ambigu- ous stimuli on which the person would ‘‘project’’
responses that reflected underlying issues. The test was brought to the United States in the 1920s, and its usage by psychologists in medical and other clinical settings became widespread.
By the late 1930s, as psychologists were estab- lishing their usefulness as test specialists in such settings, their understanding and skill with the Rorschach often greatly enhanced their status with other medical personnel, especially since it appeared to offer psychologists some unique insight into the patient that was inaccessible to other professionals.
Henry Murray, the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and the TAT
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was developed in the Harvard PsychologicalClinic in the mid-1930s. It was aprojective testproduced as a result of efforts to find a psychometric approach to eliciting unconscious motivation.
Christiana Morgan (1897–1967) developed the test from an idea generated by one of the graduate students,Cecilia Roberts, who was working with her. Roberts had taken time off to be with her ill
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son. Out of boredom, she asked him one day to tell her a story based on a picture in a magazine.
He generated a rich fantasy and was able to continue doing so with new pictures. Morgan took this idea and, using both original art and copies of pictures and photographs from popular periodicals and literature, created the TAT. The clinic staff began using the test in the mid-1930s, and it formed an important part of their major book from this period,Explorations in Personality.
The book was an indicator of the creative matrix of ideas and innovation that was happening at this time in the clinic, inspired and nurtured by Henry Murray (1893–1988).
Murray was born in New York City to an English father and an American mother. He earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1915. As he reported in his autobiography, his undergraduate interests were rowing and social life. He walked out of the only course in psychol- ogy he ever took, after one class. After marriage in 1916, he earned his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons and later earned his PhD in biochemistry from Harvard.
During this period, Murray met Morgan, a woman who was to become his spiritual partner, collaborator in psychology, and paramour for the next 40 years. In 1925 he traveled to Switzerland and met with Jung, who encouraged him to pursue his interests with Morgan, and that summer they became lovers. In 1926 he returned to Harvard, where he was assistant director of the new PsychologicalClinic. In 1928 he succeeded Morton Prince (1854–1929) as the director and soon developed the clinic into the major center for the study of personality in America. He gave Homburger (later Erikson) his first job (1933) and was B. F. Skinner’s first psychology professor.
Murray attracted a remarkable group of stu- dents and colleagues over the next two decades;
many of them went on to become leaders in the development of personality psychology. This group included Robert White (1904–2001), Donald McKinnon (1903–1987), Isabelle Kendig (b. 1889), Sam Beck (1896–1980), Nevitt Sanford
FIGURE 7.3 Henry Murray
Courtesy of Harvard University Archives, call # HUP Murray, Henry A. (3).
(1909–1996), Saul Rosenzweig (1907–2004), and Homburger (Erikson). Why did Murray have such success with his work at the clinic in these years? Those whom he had worked with later recalled that Murray provided a creative environ- ment, that he was interested in great recurrent problems of human life, that he gave his students and colleagues great latitude to work on problems of interest to them, that he was generous with his time, and that he encouraged an interdisci- plinary approach. Murray was also an outsider to academic psychology and often took an approach meant to shake up his academic colleagues.
For example, he once remarked, ‘‘Academic psychology is a mountain of ritual bringing forth a mouse of a fact’’(Murray, 1967, p. 305).
Murray built up the clinic as a center for Freudian and Jungian analysis. In doing so, he created numerous professional opportunities for women and, as noted, collaborated with Morgan in the development of the TAT. In 1938 he published the first volume of research from the clinic, Explorations in Personality. In the book, Murray and his team explored only a handful of cases with a series of remarkable assessments, using multiple measures from the TAT to Homburger’s Dramatic Productions Test. Their in-depth analyses offered a rich and thick description of the strengths and problems of the people studied. The book remains a landmark in personality assessment. However, it is likely never to be repeated, partly because the sheer cost of bringing together so many people with such varied expertise would be prohibitive.
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Murray was never interested in being part of the mainstream of American psychology or even of American life; he remained the outsider who nevertheless changed the direction of the main currents of psychological thought. One of Murray’s mantras may be the best way to end this account. Murray was fond of saying, ‘‘Every man knows something about himself which he is willing to tell; he knows something about himself that he is not willing to tell; and there is some- thing about himself that he doesn’t know and can’t tell’’ (as cited in Robinson, 1992, p. 176).
Personality, Personnel, and the Management of the Worker
A major concern of business, industrial, and political leaders during the interwar period was industrial unrest and worker dissatisfaction. After the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia and its depiction of the worker as social hero, industrial leaders were fearful of the spread of Communist ideas in the United States. The struggle to establish effective unions in some of the country’s largest industries had been marked by conflict, at times violent, but by the 1920s and 1930s such unions were in place in many industries. The Great Depression of the 1930s did lead to labor unrest, as millions of workers lost their jobs.
Psychologists had already established their sci- ence as a potential aid to social management (see Chapter 6). The growth of applied psychology in business and industry was further opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of the field. The use of personality tests and the development of personnel management were examples of this utility. Industrial problems were almost always linked by management to the maladjustment of the individual worker. What psychology offered was a way to identify this maladjustment and to ameliorate the problem or remove the worker.
One method of doing so was through the use of personality tests. Most early personality tests were oriented toward identifying negative or neurotic characteristics. Specialized language
was drawn from test results to describe the per- son (e.g., hysteroid and epileptoid). The focus on neurotic tendencies, of course, made it ap- pear that the source of workplace problems lay within the worker, not in the structure of the work, much of which had become highly repet- itive and was closely supervised in accordance with the scientific management principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Nev- ertheless, personality assessment of workers was widespread, with tests like the Bernreuter Per- sonality Inventory and the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale each administered to more than 2 million workers in the first few years after their development.
Personnel counseling and management was another facet of psychology’s application in this era. While it had diverse roots, the most salient example is the research and application that derived from what was called the Hawthorne effect and the theorizing of psychologist Elton Mayo (1880–1949). Mayo was an Australian psychologist who came to the United States in 1923. For a few years, he was associated with the University of Pennsylvania and then in 1926 was invited to join the Harvard Business School faculty, where he remained until his retirement in 1947. His early research and consultation focused on reducing worker fatigue through the use of rest schedules, in the hope of reducing worker dissatisfaction.
In 1927, Mayo was asked by the personnel director of the Western Electric Company to review some recent research that had been con- ducted at the company’s plant in Hawthorne, Illinois. It was this research that came to be la- beled the Hawthorne effect. Briefly, research on improved lighting, as part of a series of stud- ies on improving worker productivity, revealed that while improved lighting itself had little ef- fect, the increased attention paid to the workers did result in higher worker morale and produc- tivity, the so-called Hawthorne effect. Mayo’s review of this research provided an entr´ee for him into consulting work with Western Electric, where he could test his theories of interviewing,
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counseling, and worker adjustment. The next phase of the research was an examination of the impact of a series of workplace improvements (rest periods, shorter hours, etc.) on six women workers in the relay assembly test room. Inter- views with the women revealed that it was the increased attention they received, not the work- place improvements alone, that led to increased satisfaction and productivity. The interview pro- gram was extended to workplace supervisors, which provided such favorable results that West- ern Electric decided to expand it to the entire plant. Under Mayo’s direction, the interviews were modified to move away from a survey of attitudes to an in-depth exploration of personal- ity and psychological awareness. His method of interviewing was based on the approach used by Piaget to conduct his child interviews. Mayo did not believe that the workers’ complaints about wages or working conditions reflected real problems; rather, the problem was internal maladjustment within the workers. Mayo be- lieved that the benefit of the interviewing lay in the reduction of worker dissatisfaction through workers’ verbalization of discontent.
The expanded interview program was led by Mayo’s student Fritz Roethlisberger (1898–1974). Over the next few years, it was recalibrated several times due to financial pres- sure but was considered a success nonetheless.
Mayo argued that it improved productivity by 30 to 40 percent. By the late 1930s, the Western Electric program was being emulated in several other industries and corporations. It gave rise to a new profession, the personnel consultant.
Psychologists became the leaders of this new profession, often serving as the supervisors of the workplace counselors. Out of this trend grew the modern field of human relations.