Ross Stagner

Introduction

Ross Stagner (1909–1997) was an American psychologist who worked across three fields that later came apart: personality, industrial-organizational psychology, and political attitudes. His textbook Psychology of Personality ran through four editions across four decades and is often described as marking the beginning of personality study from an explicitly scientific standpoint. In the mid-1930s he conducted what is regarded as the first American research on fascist attitudes, building a measure of antidemocratic sentiment that anticipated the California F-scale described in The Authoritarian Personality. He spent the last two decades of his career at Wayne State University, where he built the doctoral program and chaired the department for fifteen years, and he served as president of two APA divisions and of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Early Life and Education

Stagner was born on June 15, 1909, near Waco, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 1929, a few months after marrying Margaret Wieland and a few months before the stock market crash. He then entered graduate training in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, receiving his PhD in 1932.

Money was tight throughout the Depression, and Stagner supported his family with odd jobs and by writing stories for pulp science fiction magazines under the pen name "Doc Cartwright." In the early 1930s he collaborated with Harry Harlow on studies using curare to test the role of practice in learning, one of several early projects that gave him a lasting preference for experimentally tractable questions over purely theoretical ones.

Academic and Professional Career

Stagner's first teaching post was at People's Junior College in Chicago (1934–35). He then moved to the University of Akron, rising to full professor between 1935 and 1939, followed by Dartmouth College (1939–49) and the University of Illinois (1949–57). During the Second World War he took a leave from Dartmouth to serve as assistant personnel manager at the Koppers Company in Pittsburgh (1943–45), an episode that pushed him further into applied work.

Akron turned out to be the more formative posting. He arrived in 1935, the year the United Rubber Workers organized, and by his own account became involved in the union's educational and organizational efforts almost immediately — he described his enthusiasm on seeing a banner welcoming the Rubber Workers Organizing Committee on his first day in the city, and he was in town for the 1936 Goodyear sit-down strike that shut down production for five weeks. Zickar's history of the field notes that Stagner went on to become one of only a handful of early industrial researchers to take an openly pro-union stance, and his subsequent program of work on union commitment, collective bargaining, and union socialization followed from it. He also corresponded with Abraham Maslow as early as 1936, and he worked with David Krech and others to found the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues that same year.

In 1957 he arrived at Wayne State University as chair of the psychology department, a position he held until 1972; he retired in 1979 and was named professor emeritus. He later served as a visiting professor at Texas A&M University (1985–86). At Wayne State he inherited a joint doctoral arrangement spanning psychology, education, social work, and sociology, and rebuilt it into separate doctoral programs in industrial-organizational, clinical, experimental, and social psychology. Colleagues credited him with recruiting faculty and raising the department's national profile, and the university later established the Ross and Margaret Stagner Endowed Memorial Scholarship Fund to recognize the best all-around graduate student in the department. He and Margaret both died in 1997; he died on March 18, at the age of 87, and was memorialized in the American Psychologist by Sheldon Lachman.

Stagner's breadth was deliberate rather than accidental. He worked from an explicit principle: psychologists should be psychologists first and research specialists second, and psychological concepts should be directed at understanding the decision-making of individuals, leaders, and citizens, with research then used to identify the conditions under which those concepts can clarify and integrate decision processes and thereby reduce social conflict. That commitment explains why the same person who wrote a personality textbook also studied fascist attitudes and union-management relations, and it shaped how he built the Wayne State department, which he insisted should be strong across all four doctoral areas rather than in one specialty.

Stagner held a Fulbright research award to the University of Rome (1955–56) and a Fulbright award to the London School of Economics (1965–66). He served as president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association, Personality and Social Psychology (1960–61) and Industrial Psychology, as president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (1965–66), and as president of the Illinois Psychological Association and the Midwestern Psychological Association. He sat on the APA Board of Directors, was a founding figure in SPSSI, later serving on its executive council and board of editors, and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He published more than ninety research and theoretical articles and more than twenty-five chapters and encyclopedia sections.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Measuring political attitudes

In the mid-1930s Stagner developed questionnaires assessing political attitudes, including a measure of fascist attitudes. The work is generally regarded as the first American empirical research on the topic, and it appeared before The Authoritarian Personality. The two instruments converged on an antidemocratic personality type, on its core components, and on the strategy of assessing fascist attitudes without appearing to do so.

Personality as a scientific object

Psychology of Personality (1937) stated the field's subject matter in testable terms at a moment when it was still dominated by case study and speculation. Notably, the book's chapter on personality and patterns of culture was written by Maslow, then at the start of his career. The book went through four editions over roughly forty years, each substantially revised.

Industrial conflict and union-management relations

Stagner's applied work treated industrial conflict as a psychological problem of divergent goals rather than a failure of communication. He and his colleagues built Guttman-type scales for union and management attitudes toward each other, quantifying how far each side misread the other, and he argued that industrial psychology should serve the decision-making of individuals, leaders, and citizens rather than any single party. His 1958 study with W. E. Chalmers and Milton Derber showed that union and management respondents held systematically distorted pictures of the other side's position, and he later extended the analysis to the future of union psychology as union membership declined. Psychology of Union-Management Relations (1965, with Hjalmar Rosen) was translated into Japanese and became the synthesis of two decades of applied work.

Egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and altrocentrism

In the 1970s Stagner returned to the problem of conflict at a larger scale, proposing that egocentrism and ethnocentrism function as cognitive biases that foster violence at both the individual and the group level, characterized by a failure to see reality as it appears to others. He paired these with a third construct, altrocentrism, as the capacity to take another's perspective, treating it as a learnable counterweight rather than as a matter of goodwill. The paper applied the same assumption that ran through his labor-relations work, that conflict is sustained by systematic failures of perspective-taking and can therefore be studied with experimental methods.

Major Publications

Psychology of Personality (1937; 2nd ed. 1948; 3rd ed. 1961) — McGraw-Hill. Stagner's best-known work, with a chapter on personality and culture contributed by Abraham Maslow.
Psychology (1952, with T. F. Karwoski) — McGraw-Hill. A general introductory text written at the height of his interest in unifying the subfields.
Psychology of Industrial Conflict (1956) — Wiley. His systematic treatment of workplace conflict as a problem of competing goals and perceptions.
"Guttman-type scales for union and management attitudes toward each other" (1958, with W. E. Chalmers and Milton Derber) — Journal of Applied Psychology. The empirical core of his labor-relations research program.
Psychology of Union-Management Relations (1965, with Hjalmar Rosen) — Wadsworth. Later translated into Japanese; a synthesis of his two decades of applied work.
"Egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and altrocentrism" (1970s) — his late attempt to extend the perspective-taking analysis of industrial conflict to group violence.
"Past and future of industrial/organizational psychology" (1982) — Professional Psychology. His retrospective assessment of where the field had succeeded and where its identity was unstable.

Impact and Legacy

Stagner's durable influence is institutional as much as intellectual. The Wayne State doctoral programs he built produced generations of I/O and social psychologists, and his textbook gave personality psychology an early scientific framing. His fascism research established a measurement tradition that the authoritarian-personality literature later made famous, and his labor-relations work is unusual in the history of American I/O psychology for having been conducted, in substantial part, from the union side.

His work also attracted the criticisms that eventually pushed his three fields apart. Psychology of Personality was eclectic by design, drawing on psychoanalytic, Gestalt, and trait traditions without committing to a testable mechanism, and later commentators judged the synthesis unsuccessful: personality psychology's crisis of the late 1960s, when the consistency of traits across situations was called into question, was fought out over frameworks other than his, and his textbook is now read as a period document rather than a live position.

The fascism-and-personality line of work came under heavy fire as well. Critics argued that treating an ideological orientation as a personality pathology reifies politics as individual psychopathology, and that instruments in this tradition — Stagner's included — were blind to authoritarianism of the left. The measurement strategy the obituary literature praises, assessing fascist attitudes without appearing to, is the same feature later critics identified as a problem of construct validity: a scale that conceals what it measures cannot be checked against the thing it purports to measure. The measurement problem Stagner ran into in 1936 has never been resolved, and the 2020s reopened it rather than closed it. Edwards objected in 1941 that a scale built from fascist principles measures reactions to a label as much as to the principles beneath it, and Jost and colleagues generalised the complaint in 2003: instruments in this tradition tend to embed the political criteria they are meant to predict. Three groups published new instruments in 2025, each arguing that the current standard is inadequate in a different direction. Sorrentino, Banse and colleagues went back to the California F-scale and rebuilt all nine of its original facets into a nine-item measure (MCF-9), on the grounds that Altemeyer's three-facet Right-Wing Authoritarianism no longer captures attraction to contemporary right-wing movements; in German (N = 469) and American (N = 314) samples it explained additional variance in antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-democratic attitudes beyond two established RWA scales (Measurement Instruments for the Social Sciences, 7:1-22). Nicieza-Cueto and Moral-Jimenez built a Neoliberal Authoritarianism Scale in Spain (N = 232) and reported that its conventionalism subscale was the weak one (Social Sciences, 14(7):431). Jager, Knasmuller, Brunner and Heller argued from the Frankfurt-School side that the authoritarian character has been replaced under post-Fordist capitalism by an adaptive "affirmative character," and built a 28-item scale for it in a German sample (N = 1,196). The net result is a field with more measures and no more agreement about what is being measured. The blind spot Stagner's own critics identified - instruments blind to authoritarianism of the left - has been addressed directly and inconclusively: Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, Tasimi and Lilienfeld reported in 2022 that left-wing authoritarianism shows the same three-factor structure as the right-wing construct (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(1):135-170), and a shortened index followed in 2023.

His industrial work sits in an awkward position. The standard critique of I/O psychology — that a field funded largely by management serves managerial ends — applies to him less directly than to most of his contemporaries, and his union-side publications and advocacy are a genuine exception in the period. But the aim he declared for the work was the reduction of industrial conflict, which critics read as a framing that takes the preservation of the enterprise as given and treats organized labor's leverage as a problem to be managed rather than a claim to be adjudicated. The empirical core is also dated: the mutual-misperception finding depends on samples from an era of mass industrial unionism that has largely disappeared, and his late construct of altrocentrism never attracted a research program of its own.

Finally, the early experimental work has not aged well on its own terms. The curare studies with Harlow belong to a period before institutional review, and a technique that paralyzes a subject while consciousness is preserved would not pass ethical review now; they are cited today as part of the prehistory of the study of practice rather than as evidence.

Colleagues remembered him as a lucid and judicious writer rather than an advocate, and his own summary of the field's trajectory — that I/O psychology had never settled whether it was a science, a profession, or a service — remains a fair description of the argument he spent his career inside.

Learn More

Abraham Maslow — who wrote the culture-and-personality chapter of Stagner's textbook at the start of his own career.
Harry Harlow — his collaborator on the 1930s curare experiments on practice and learning.
History of Psychology — the longer development of the discipline this work belongs to.
Social Psychology — the wider field this research belongs to.

References

Stagner, R. (1948). Psychology of Personality. McGraw-Hill.