James McKeen Cattell

Introduction

James McKeen Cattell (May 25, 1860 – January 20, 1944) was the entrepreneur of American psychology. He coined the term mental test, held the first professorship of psychology in the United States, produced more psychology doctorates than anyone of his generation, founded or bought the journals that carried American science for half a century, and built the commercial apparatus that turned psychological testing into an industry. He also, in 1901, saw his life's research programme shown to be worthless — and said so, and stopped.

He is remembered for the institutions more than for the findings, which is fair. But his career also contains the sharpest single episode in the history of American academic freedom: he was dismissed from Columbia University in 1917 for opposing conscription, and the battle over that dismissal helped establish the principle that professors cannot be fired for their politics.

Early Life and Education

Cattell was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, into an academic family. His father was a Presbyterian minister who became president of Lafayette College, and Cattell was educated largely at home and then in the college classroom, graduating in 1880.

He went to Germany in 1881 intending to study philosophy with Rudolf Lotze at Göttingen. Lotze died soon after he arrived, and Cattell finished the year at Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt. He returned to the United States for a year at Johns Hopkins, then went back to Wundt's laboratory and took his doctorate at Leipzig in 1886. His letters home from this period show a young man who did not think much of Wundt as a scientist, and they have been used to paint him as arrogant — a charge his adult career did little to dispel.

In England he went to Cambridge briefly to study medicine, abandoned it, and met Francis Galton. Galton's anthropometric laboratory convinced him of two things that shaped the rest of his working life: that individual differences are measurable, and that measurement is the way to make psychology useful. Between 1883 and 1886 he published nine papers on reaction time and individual differences.

Academic and Professional Career

Cattell returned to America and, from 1888 to 1891, held the first professorship of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to Columbia University in 1891, where he founded another laboratory, chaired the department, and became dean of the faculty. He was elected the first psychologist in the National Academy of Sciences in 1901, and served as the fourth president of the American Psychological Association in 1895.

What he did at Columbia was less research than construction. With James Mark Baldwin he founded Psychological Review in 1894. He acquired the financially failing journal Science from Alexander Graham Bell and made it, within five years, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; he then edited it for nearly fifty years. He bought Popular Science Monthly in 1900, sold the title in 1915, and replaced it with The Scientific Monthly. He founded School and Society and edited The American Naturalist. He compiled and edited six editions of American Men of Science between 1906 and 1938, and set up the Science Press to print all of it. As his publishing grew, his research diminished — a trade he made deliberately and never regretted.

He was also, by all accounts, difficult. He was described as combative, blunt and entirely without tact; he criticised university governance openly; and several attempts had already been made to remove him before 1917.

The war finished it. Cattell opposed American entry from the start, and in 1917 he wrote to several members of Congress urging them to support a measure against sending conscripts to fight in Europe against their will. He had already joined the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council and was working on military psychology, but the letter was the last straw. The trustees dismissed him on October 1, 1917. He sued for libel and won a settlement reported as $40,000, which he used to found the Psychological Corporation in 1921; the company was intended to promote applied psychology and, in its first two years, earned about fifty dollars. It prospered only after others took it over.

There is an irony in the sequence that his defenders and critics have both seized on. Cattell was not a pacifist who refused to contribute; he was helping to organise American psychology for the war effort while arguing that men should not be compelled to fight in it. The trustees did not dismiss him because he hindered the war; they dismissed him because he used his position to lobby against it. That distinction is what made the case usable as a precedent, and it is why colleagues who disliked him and disagreed with him defended him anyway.

The case became a landmark. Many colleagues who disliked him defended him anyway, and the newly founded American Association of University Professors used his dismissal to press the argument that academic freedom protects a professor's political speech. He remained active in applied psychology until his death in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1944.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The mental test

Cattell introduced the phrase "mental test" in an 1890 article in Mind, and it stuck. At Pennsylvania he administered a battery of ten tests to student volunteers — dynamometer pressure, rate of movement, two-point threshold, least noticeable difference in weight, reaction time for sound, time to name colours, bisection of a line, judgement of ten seconds, and number of letters remembered on one hearing — and made the battery compulsory for Columbia freshmen. The premise was Galton's: that the efficiency of the senses and the speed of simple mental processes index intelligence.

The premise was wrong. It fell to Cattell's own student at Columbia, Clark Wissler, to analyse the accumulated data. Using Galton's new method of correlation, Wissler reported in 1901 that Cattell's measures did not correlate with each other and did not correlate with academic achievement. Cattell stopped collecting the data. The programme was dead, and the future belonged to Alfred Binet, who had taken the opposite approach — complex judgements rather than simple sensations. Ironically, Charles Spearman argued in 1904 that Cattell's tests had failed because the measurement was poor, not because the idea was wrong, and went on to find substantial correlations with better instruments and to argue for general intelligence.

Individual differences and psychometrics

The failure was more productive than it looks. Cattell established the study of individual differences as a legitimate object of psychology at a moment when the Wundtian laboratory studied the average subject in depth and treated variation as error. He introduced correlation, ranking and the order-of-merit method to American psychology, and the entire apparatus of differential psychology and psychometrics descends from the programme he set running even though its first hypothesis failed.

His work on reading and perception also survives in its own right: that the eyes move in jumps during reading, that words are perceived only during the pauses, that words are easier to learn and remember than letters, and that words and phrases can be read in a small fraction of a second. These findings changed how reading was taught.

The scientific establishment

Cattell's third contribution is organisational, and it is not minor. By making Science viable he gave American science a general journal; by building American Men of Science and his star-rating system he created a mechanism for ranking scientific reputation; by founding the Psychological Corporation he created a permanent, if commercially entangled, channel between academic psychology and the market for tests.

Major Publications

  • Cattell, J. M. (1890). Mental tests and measurements. Mind, 15(59), 373–381.
  • Cattell, J. M. (1893). Mental measurement. Philosophical Review, 2(2), 163–173.
  • Cattell, J. M. (1903). A statistical study of American men of science. Science, 17(428), 454–456.
  • Cattell, J. M. (1906). American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory. New York: Science Press.
  • Cattell, J. M. (1910). American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory (2nd ed.). New York: Science Press.
  • Wissler, C. (1901). The correlation of mental and physical tests. Psychological Review Monograph Supplements, 3(6).

Impact and Legacy

Cattell's legacy is institutional and it is permanent. The journals he built are the journals the field still reads; the doctorates he supervised at Columbia outnumbered anyone else's in his era; the Psychological Corporation, in its later incarnations, marketed the tests used in American schools and industry for most of the twentieth century. His 1917 dismissal is a standard case in the history of academic freedom in the United States.

His research programme, however, ended in a documented failure that is worth stating plainly, because it is the most instructive thing in his biography. The mental tests he devised to measure intelligence did not correlate with each other and did not predict academic performance. This was established by his own student, using the founder's own data and the founder's own statistical method, and Cattell's response was to abandon the work rather than reinterpret it. The enterprise he founded survived, but the specific hypothesis he tested did not.

The second charge concerns his ranking projects and his eugenics. Cattell devoted enormous effort from 1900 onward to grading scientists by eminence, culminating in the star ratings of American Men of Science and in a list of the thousand most eminent men in history. The method was his own judgement, dressed as measurement, and it was used to argue that scientific ability is inherited: he reported that men of science disproportionately had fathers who were clergymen or professors — noting, in his own writing, that his father had been both. He accepted Galton's premise that science should be applied to improving the genetic composition of the population, and he went so far as to offer his own children $1,000 each if they married the offspring of a university professor. The ranking apparatus and the eugenics were not separate projects; the first supplied the data for the second.

The ranking apparatus was also circular in a way that compounded the heredity claim. The directory was titled American Men of Science and was, in practice, what it said: women were largely excluded from consideration, and those who were included were under-ranked. When Cattell then reported that scientific eminence runs in families and that the sons of professors become professors, he was describing a network he had himself done a great deal to construct and to certify. A star system devised by one man, applied to a population he selected, and used as evidence for a genetic conclusion, is measurement in appearance only — and it is a striking contrast with his willingness, twenty years earlier, to abandon the mental-test programme the moment the data contradicted it.

Finally, there is the commercial structure he created. The Psychological Corporation was founded to be a nonprofit cooperative returning profits to research, and Cattell held that research support should sit in scientific organisations rather than in government or universities. In practice the corporation became a test publisher with a financial interest in the wide use of instruments built by the psychologists who had a stake in it. That conflict of interest — the same people owning the tests, marketing them, and certifying their validity — is still with the field, and it began here. Cattell's own version of the arrangement was idealistic and lost money; the versions that followed were neither.

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References

  • Cattell, J. M. (1886). The time it takes to see and name objects. Mind, 11(41), 220-242.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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