The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology (review)

This is an interesting, if somewhat technical, book about a famous psychologist, Raymond B. Cattell, a British born and educated scholar who became famous in America for his prodigious outpouring of books and articles on the subject of the human personality. The author, himself a psychologist, has found it necessary to "expose" his subject for that eminence's writings on race and eugenics. This is a case with some parallels with that of the famous British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt and the question of Burt's likely fudging of data—even of inventing fictive subjects and co-investigators—to prove that nature prevailed over nurture in the forming of intelligence. In his early years Cattell was, as a fledgling practitioner in Britain, in fact a protégé of Burt's, as well as a student of Charles Spearman and a devotee of William McDougall, both eminences in British psychology. All three were highly intelligent and well-known, albeit unapologetic, supporters of eugenics and similar racist nostrums.

As a publishing scholar Cattell was no slouch; he published fifty-six books, more than five hundred journal articles and book chapters, and approximately thirty standardized instruments for evaluating personality in his seventy-year career, spent mainly as a research professor at the University of Illinois. In August 1997, the American Psychological Association announced that Cattell had been selected as that year's recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science. Two days before the award ceremony, the Foundation abruptly postponed, and eventually denied, the award to Cattell because of concerns about his views on racial segregation and eugenics.

What the author is at pains to show, and does so very well, is that there was no contradiction between Cattell's technical work and his racist politics. Factor analysis is a statistical technique in which the investigator attempts to discern, by a series of parallel measurements, whether there is or is not an underlying core of common traits. What Cattell proposed to do was to devise a series of instruments that would show an underlying basis of personality traits, which, he asserted, were therefore innate. Thus there could be personality types among different individuals and even nations could have personalities. This is something like the old story in which, if one has a hammer, one is always searching for a nail. The difficult, if rewarding, part of the book comes with the author's careful dissection of Cattell's scientific work, and curious readers are referred to this large chapter. Apparently Cattell was honored for being a pioneer in personality assessment, but few, if any, could replicate his findings—a devastating finding for any scientist—and almost all who followed him in the field paid homage to his pioneering work which they nevertheless concluded was, at best, problematic and not useful to those who did not share his assumptions.

It turns out that Cattell wrote pieces in which he endorsed eugenics, racial segregation, and even the prewar National Socialist regime in Germany—and it was these actions, performed throughout his career as parallel to his scientific work, that scotched his chances for that Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation. The author deals with these matters dispassionately and in an expert manner.