James Mckeen Cattell Contributions to Psychology
James McKeen Cattell
James McKeen Cattell was born on May 25, 1860, in Easton, Pennsylvania, where his father was soon to be president of Lafayette College from 1863 to 1883. He received his bachelor's degree from Lafayette in 1880, spent two years traveling and studying in Germany, and returned to the United States in 1882 as a graduate fellow in philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University. Returning to Leipzig in the fall of 1883, he earned his doctoral degree in experimental psychology under Wilhelm Wundt in 1886, with a dissertation that examined reaction times for various simple mental processes (Sokal, 1981). After completing his doctorate, Cattell spent two years at Cambridge University, where he founded England's first laboratory in experimental psychology. While at Cambridge, Cattell married Josephine Owen, who became a lifelong partner in his research and later in his editing and publishing duties. Also during his Cambridge years, Cattell's father helped him to secure a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for two and a half years. It was during this time that Cattell coined the term "mental testing" to characterize his research (Sokal, 1987). Cattell then moved to Columbia University as head of its psychology department and taught there until his dismissal in 1917, a dismissal nominally caused by an anticonscription piece that he published during the first world war, but almost certainly fueled by long-standing antagonism between Cattell and Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler (Sokal, 1995). Cattell's eminence in his day is clear; in 1901 Cattell was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, although historian Michael M. Sokal suggests that this may have been due more to his resurrection of the journal Science than to his scientific research (Sokal, 1980). Cattell is known to psychologists familiar with the history of psychology in the United States not only for his experimental work on reaction
James McKeen Cattell was born on May 25, 1860, in Easton, Pennsylvania, where his father was soon to be president of Lafayette College from 1863 to 1883. He received his bachelor's degree from Lafayette in 1880, spent two years traveling and studying in Germany, and returned to the United States in 1882 as a graduate fellow in philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University. Returning to Leipzig in the fall of 1883, he earned his doctoral degree in experimental psychology under Wilhelm Wundt in 1886, with a dissertation that examined reaction times for various simple mental processes (Sokal, 1981). After completing his doctorate, Cattell spent two years at Cambridge University, where he founded England's first laboratory in experimental psychology. While at Cambridge, Cattell married Josephine Owen, who became a lifelong partner in his research and later in his editing and publishing duties. Also during his Cambridge years, Cattell's father helped him to secure a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for two and a half years. It was during this time that Cattell coined the term "mental testing" to characterize his research (Sokal, 1987). Cattell then moved to Columbia University as head of its psychology department and taught there until his dismissal in 1917, a dismissal nominally caused by an anticonscription piece that he published during the first world war, but almost certainly fueled by long-standing antagonism between Cattell and Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler (Sokal, 1995). Cattell's eminence in his day is clear; in 1901 Cattell was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, although historian Michael M. Sokal suggests that this may have been due more to his resurrection of the journal Science than to his scientific research (Sokal, 1980). Cattell is known to psychologists familiar with the history of psychology in the United States not only for his experimental work on reaction