47 Facts About Raymond Cattell

Raymond Cattell was an early proponent of using factor analytic methods instead of what he called "subjective verbal theorizing" to explore empirically the basic dimensions of personality, motivation, and cognitive abilities.

Raymond Cattell undertook a series of empirical studies into the basic dimensions of other psychological domains: intelligence, motivation, career assessment and vocational interests.

Raymond Cattell theorized the existence of fluid and crystallized intelligence to explain human cognitive ability, investigated changes in Gf and Gc over the lifespan, and constructed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test to minimize the bias of written language and cultural background in intelligence testing.

Raymond Cattell's research was mainly in personality, abilities, motivations, and innovative multivariate research methods and statistical analysis.

Raymond Cattell was the first to propose a hierarchical, multi-level model of personality with the many basic primary factors at the first level and the fewer, broader, "second-order" factors at a higher stratum of personality organization.

Raymond Cattell conducted empirical studies into developmental changes in personality trait constructs across the lifespan.

Raymond Cattell contributed to cognitive epidemiology with his theory that crystallized knowledge, while more applied, could be maintained or even increase after fluid ability begins to decline with age, a concept used in the National Adult Reading Test.

Raymond Cattell constructed a number of ability tests, including the Comprehensive Ability Battery that provides measures of 20 primary abilities, and the Culture Fair Intelligence Test which was designed to provide a completely non-verbal measure of intelligence like that now seen in the Raven's.

In regard to statistical methodology, in 1960 Raymond Cattell founded the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, and its journal Multivariate Behavioral Research, in order to bring together, encourage, and support scientists interested in multi-variate research.

Raymond Cattell was an early and frequent user of factor analysis.

Raymond Cattell developed new factor analytic techniques, for example, by inventing the scree test, which uses the curve of latent roots to judge the optimal number of factors to extract.

Raymond Cattell was born on 20 March 1905 in Hill Top, West Bromwich, a small town in England near Birmingham where his father's family was involved in inventing new parts for engines, automobiles and other machines.

When Raymond Cattell was about five years old, his family moved to Torquay, Devon, in the south-west of England, where he grew up with strong interests in science and spent a lot of time sailing around the coastline.

Raymond Cattell was the first of his family to attend university: in 1921, he was awarded a scholarship to study chemistry at King's College, London, where he obtained a BSc degree with 1st-class honors at age 19 years.

Raymond Cattell stated that in the cultural upheaval after WWI, he felt that his laboratory table had begun to seem too small and the world's problems so vast.

Raymond Cattell ultimately found this disappointing because there was limited opportunity to conduct research.

Cattell did his graduate work with Charles Spearman, the English psychologist and statistician who is famous for his pioneering work on assessing intelligence, including the development of the idea of a general factor of intelligence termed g During his three years at Exeter, Cattell courted and married Monica Rogers, whom he had known since his boyhood in Devon and they had a son together.

In 1937, Raymond Cattell left England and moved to the United States when he was invited by Edward Thorndike to come to Columbia University.

Raymond Cattell returned to teaching at Harvard and married Alberta Karen Schuettler, a PhD student in mathematics at Radcliffe College.

Raymond Cattell founded the Laboratory of Personality Assessment and Group Behavior.

Raymond Cattell remained in the Illinois research professorship until he reached the university's mandatory retirement age in 1973.

In 1977, Raymond Cattell moved to Hawaii, largely because of his love of the ocean and sailing.

Raymond Cattell continued his career as a part-time professor and adviser at the University of Hawaii.

Raymond Cattell served as adjunct faculty of the Hawaii School of Professional Psychology.

Raymond Cattell died at home in Honolulu on 2 February 1998, at age 92 years.

Raymond Cattell is buried in the Valley of the Temples on a hillside overlooking the sea.

Raymond Cattell's will provided for his remaining funds to build a school for underprivileged children in Cambodia.

Raymond Cattell found that constructs used by early psychological theorists tended to be somewhat subjective and poorly defined.

Raymond Cattell wanted psychology to become more like other sciences, whereby a theory could be tested in an objective way that could be understood and replicated by others.

In 1994, Raymond Cattell was one of 52 signatories of "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal.

Rather than pursue a "univariate" research approach to psychology, studying the effect that a single variable might have on another variable, Raymond Cattell pioneered the use of multivariate experimental psychology.

Raymond Cattell believed that behavioral dimensions were too complex and interactive to fully understand variables in isolation.

Raymond Cattell drew a comparison between these fundamental, underlying traits and the basic dimensions of the physical world that were discovered and presented, for example, in the periodic table of chemical elements.

In 1960, Raymond Cattell organized and convened an international symposium to increase communication and cooperation among researchers who were using multivariate statistics to study human behavior.

Raymond Cattell brought many researchers from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America to work in his lab at the University of Illinois.

Raymond Cattell noted that in the hard sciences such as chemistry, physics, astronomy, as well as in medical science, unsubstantiated theories were historically widespread until new instruments were developed to improve scientific observation and measurement.

In particular, Raymond Cattell was interested in exploring the basic taxonomic dimensions and structure of human personality.

Raymond Cattell believed that if exploratory factor analysis were applied to a wide range of measures of interpersonal functioning, the basic dimensions within the domain of social behavior could be identified.

Raymond Cattell specified three kinds of data for comprehensive sampling, to capture the full range of personality dimensions:.

In order for a personality dimension to be called "fundamental and unitary," Raymond Cattell believed that it needed to be found in factor analyses of data from all three of these measurement domains.

Raymond Cattell then conducted a programmatic series of factor analyses on the data derived from each of the three measurement media in order to elucidate the dimensionality of human personality structure.

Raymond Cattell constructed the Objective Analytic Battery that provided measures of the 10 largest personality trait factors extracted factor analytically, as well as objective measures of dynamic trait constructs such as the Motivation Analysis Test, the School Motivation Analysis Test, and the Children's Motivation Analysis Test.

Also within the broadly conceptualized personality domain, Raymond Cattell constructed measures of mood states and transitory emotional states, including the Eight State Questionnaire In addition, Raymond Cattell was at the forefront in constructing the Central Trait-State Kit.

Raymond Cattell was a controversial figure due in part to his friendships with, and intellectual respect for, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

William H Tucker and Barry Mehler have criticized Cattell based on his writings about evolution and political systems.

Tucker notes that Cattell thanked the prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologues Roger Pearson, Wilmot Robertson, and Revilo P Oliver in the preface to his Beyondism, and that a Beyondist newsletter with which Cattell was involved favorably reviewed Robertson's book The Ethnostate.

Raymond Cattell claimed that a diversity of cultural groups was necessary to allow that evolution.