Raymond Cattell

Introduction

Raymond Bernard Cattell (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British-American psychologist who produced more than fifty books, five hundred articles and thirty standardised tests, and who did more than anyone else to make factor analysis the working method of personality and ability research. He gave the field the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, and the scree test. He also spent the last quarter of his life advancing a programme of evolutionary group selection he called "Beyondism," which is why the American Psychological Association's lifetime achievement award was never presented to him.

Cattell was a chemist by training who arrived in psychology with a conviction that the subject's problem was not a shortage of theories but a shortage of instruments. His career can be read as a single sustained attempt to build those instruments: better ways of measuring people, better ways of deciding how many dimensions a set of measurements contains, and better ways of testing whether a proposed structure is real.

He was enormously productive and enormously influential. In Haggbloom and colleagues' 2002 ranking of the most cited psychologists of the twentieth century, he placed seventh. Two of his findings — that general intelligence divides into a fluid and a crystallized component, and that personality can be described in a hierarchy of traits — are now background assumptions rather than contested claims. But the specific structure he argued for, sixteen primary personality factors, has largely been superseded by the five-factor model that his own second-order analyses anticipated, and his reputation carries a permanent, serious political stain.

Early Life and Education

Cattell was born at Hilltop, West Bromwich, in the English Midlands, on 20 March 1905. His father worked in engineering, and the family moved to Devon when he was young; he developed the sailing habit that stayed with him for life. He won a scholarship to King's College London at sixteen and took a first-class degree in chemistry at nineteen, in 1924.

The First World War, which he lived through as a child, turned him away from chemistry and toward what he saw as the more urgent problem of human behaviour. Lectures by Cyril Burt and Charles Spearman decided the direction. He took his PhD in psychology at the University of London in 1929 under Spearman, who was then developing factor analysis; he was also shaped by the statistician R. A. Fisher, from whom he took the analysis of variance and experimental design, and by Burt, from whom he took an interest in the social and political consequences of individual differences.

Academic and Professional Career

Britain

With a doctorate in hand at the start of the Depression, Cattell lectured in psychology at the University of Exeter, then spent five years running the child guidance clinic in Leicester, doing educational and clinical work with children. This is where he began collecting the personality data that occupied him for the rest of his life.

America

In 1937 he took a one-year postdoctoral position with Edward Thorndike at Columbia University — the first of a series of short appointments. He then spent three years at Clark University as the G. Stanley Hall Professor of Genetic Psychology, and four years as a lecturer at Harvard, where he was invited by Gordon Allport and began the work on personality structure proper. During the Second World War he also worked on psychological tests for selecting US Army officers.

Illinois and Hawaii

In 1945 he became Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois — "with great relief," as his obituarist put it, that he no longer had to teach undergraduates — and stayed until his retirement in 1973. There he founded the Laboratory of Personality Assessment and Group Behavior and did his most influential work, drawing researchers from around the world. In 1949 he and his second wife, Alberta Karen Schuettler, founded the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) to publish the tests. He also founded, in 1960, the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology and its journal Multivariate Behavioral Research.

After retiring he worked in Boulder, Colorado, and from 1978 held a position at the University of Hawaii, where he remained until his death in Honolulu on 2 February 1998, aged ninety-two.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Multivariate Research and the Data Box

Cattell's central argument was that psychology had been wrecked by studying one variable at a time in artificial laboratory conditions. Real behaviour — a depression, a divorce, a career — is the product of many variables acting together, and cannot be reconstructed from univariate experiments. Psychologists should study many variables at once, in natural settings, and let the structure emerge from the data rather than be imposed on it.

To organise this he proposed the "data box": the observation that any behavioural measurement has coordinates beyond the person measured. The familiar design correlates tests across people — R-technique. One can equally correlate people across tests (Q-technique), or tests across occasions for a single person (P-technique), and so on. He eventually extended the box from three dimensions to five, giving twenty distinct ways that data could covary. The point was taxonomic: not just a catalogue of individual differences, but a catalogue of the ways to study them.

Tools for Factor Analysis

Factor analysis was Cattell's instrument and he spent a career improving it. His 1966 paper on the scree test — judging how many factors to keep by looking for the elbow in the plot of successive eigenvalues — is the most cited paper in the history of Multivariate Behavioral Research and one of the most cited in psychology. He also developed the Procrustes rotation procedure for testing a hypothesised factor structure against data, the coefficient of profile similarity, and the Taxonome and Rotoplot programs. Richard Gorsuch and many others learned factor analysis in his laboratory.

The Sixteen Personality Factors

Cattell held that personality should be mapped the way chemistry mapped the elements: start with the complete vocabulary of the domain, measure it from every available angle, and factor it. He drew on Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert's 1936 list of several thousand trait words, and insisted that observations be gathered from three sources — L-data (life records and observer ratings), Q-data (questionnaires), and T-data (objective tests).

From this came sixteen primary factors, reported in 1943 and built into the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire in 1949, with parallel instruments for adolescents (the High School Personality Questionnaire) and children, and a Clinical Analysis Questionnaire for abnormal personality. The 16PF was among the most widely used personality instruments in the world and remains in print.

Factor-analysing the intercorrelations among the sixteen primaries produced five higher-order factors — Extraversion, Anxiety, Tough-Mindedness, Independence and Self-Control — which resemble the Big Five that later came to dominate the field.

Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

Against Spearman's single general factor, Cattell argued in 1943 and again in a 1963 paper in the Journal of Educational Psychology that intelligence divides into two broad second-order abilities. Fluid intelligence (Gf) is the capacity to reason and solve novel problems independently of what one has learned; it is closer to biological capacity, rises into early adulthood and then declines. Crystallized intelligence (Gc) is accumulated knowledge and skill, and it grows across the lifespan. Cattell's investment theory held that crystallized ability is built by investing fluid ability in learning — that Gc is, in effect, the sediment of a lifetime of Gf.

John L. Horn extended the scheme into a full Gf–Gc theory with more factors, and John Carroll's three-stratum model was later fused with it to produce the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory, which is the dominant framework in contemporary intelligence testing. Cattell's Culture Fair Intelligence Test, first published in 1949, was designed to measure Gf with minimal verbal and cultural loading.

The Dynamic Calculus

Less lasting, but characteristic: Cattell tried to do for motivation what he had done for traits. The dynamic calculus modelled motivational forces as vectors, distinguishing ergs (innate drives such as hunger, sex, curiosity and fear), sentiments (acquired interests in social institutions and people), and attitudes (specific intentions toward particular courses of action). It was one of the first attempts to give motivation a formal, quantitative treatment.

Major Publications

  • The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937)
  • The Description and Measurement of Personality (1946)
  • An Introduction to Personality Study (1949)
  • Personality: A Systematic, Theoretical, and Factual Study (1950)
  • Factor Analysis (1952)
  • Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement (1957)
  • The Meaning and Measurement of Neuroticism and Anxiety (with Ivan Scheier, 1961)
  • Personality Factors in Objective Test Devices (1965)
  • The Scientific Analysis of Personality (1965)
  • Handbook of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (1966)
  • Objective Personality and Motivation Tests (1967)
  • Abilities: Their Structure, Growth, and Action (1971)
  • Handbook for the Sixteen Personality Questionnaire (16PF) (with Herbert Eber and Maurice Tatsuoka, 1970)
  • Personality and Mood by Questionnaire (1973)
  • Motivation and Dynamic Structure (1975)
  • Handbook of Modern Personality Theory (1977)
  • The Scientific Analysis of Personality and Motivation (1977)
  • Personality Theory in Action: Handbook for the O-A Test Kit (1978)
  • The Scientific Use of Factor Analysis in Behavioral and Life Sciences (1978)
  • Personality and Learning Theory: Vols. 1 & 2 (1979–80)
  • Structured Personality-Learning Theory (1983)
  • Human Motivation and the Dynamic Calculus (1985)
  • Psychotherapy by Structured Learning Theory (1987)
  • Handbook of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (1988)

His most cited papers include "The description of personality: Basic traits resolved into clusters" (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1943), "The measurement of adult intelligence" (Psychological Bulletin, 1943), "Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment" (Journal of Educational Psychology, 1963), and "The scree test for the number of factors" (Multivariate Behavioral Research, 1966).

Impact and Legacy

The methodological legacy is unarguable. Factor analysis, the distinction between state and trait measurement, the Gf/Gc split, and the idea that personality has a hierarchical structure are now standard equipment. The Culture Fair Intelligence Test is still used. The 16PF is still in use in occupational and clinical settings, and it has been translated into dozens of languages.

The sixteen factors did not hold up as sixteen. The recurring finding, including in reanalyses of Cattell's own data, is that personality is adequately described at five higher-order factors, and that fifteen or sixteen primaries add detail that is hard to replicate and often redundant. Psychometricians have also objected that Cattell's route through exploratory factor analysis involved too many judgment calls — where to stop factoring, how to rotate — for his solutions to be independently reproducible. Cattell's reply was that five factors are too coarse to predict anything and that finer-grained primaries do better at predicting real outcomes; that argument is not settled, but the field has largely voted with five.

The objective-test programme failed. Cattell's T-data battery was meant to provide measures of personality free of the distortions of self-report. The factors that emerged from objective tests did not match those from questionnaires, and the two literatures never converged. The dynamic calculus, for all its ambition, was never widely adopted.

And then there is Beyondism. From the 1930s onward Cattell wrote in support of eugenics, arguing that psychology should take on the management of human evolution; his 1937 book The Fight for Our National Intelligence made the case in print. In the 1970s he developed this into Beyondism, presented as "a new morality from science": a framework in which human groups should be left to compete and diverge, with successful groups not subsidising failing ones, and in which he coined the term "genthanasia" for the painless extinction of groups that could not sustain themselves. He published in Mankind Quarterly, a journal founded with Pioneer Fund money, and two of his monographs were published by its editor, Roger Pearson. In Beyondism he thanked Pearson and Revilo P. Oliver, both central figures in scientific racism. In 1994 he was one of fifty-two signatories of the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" statement defending The Bell Curve.

In 1997 the American Psychological Association named him, at ninety-two, as the recipient of its Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Science of Psychology. Barry Mehler, through the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, ran a public campaign against the award, saying it would be "unconscionable to honor this man whose work helps to dignify the most destructive political ideas of the twentieth century." The APA convened a blue-ribbon committee to investigate. Before it reported, Cattell wrote an open letter stating that "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 withdrew his name from consideration. The committee was disbanded; he died months later. The medal was never awarded.

The dispute over how to read all this is not settled either. William Tucker's work is the strongest case that Cattell's eugenics was continuous with the mainstream of his discipline and never really repudiated. Cattell's biographer John Gillis argues that Tucker and Mehler exaggerated and quoted out of context, that Cattell called Hitler's ideas "lunacy," and that he opposed all coercive eugenics, favouring only voluntary measures. Richard Gorsuch, another of his students, wrote that "the charge of racism is 180 degrees off track," pointing out that Cattell was among the first to try to remove cultural bias from ability tests. Cattell himself said in 1984 that the sensible position on race was to be "noncommittal," because eugenics "should be concerned with individual differences."

What is not in dispute is that the award was never presented, and that any honest account has to hold two things at once: the psychometrics is genuinely foundational, and the evolutionary politics is genuinely indefensible.

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References

  • Cattell, R. B., Eber, H. W., & Tatsuoka, M. M. (1970). Handbook for the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire. IPAT.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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