| The Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota was established in September 1919, headed by Harvard-educated Richard Elliott, then only 32 years old. It had started out as a different plan entirely. In 1917, the eminent psychologist R.M. Yerkes had agreed to come to Minnesota to start up the department, but World War I intervened, and Professor Yerkes’ appointment was held in abeyance. At the close of the war, Yerkes was asked to head up the new National Research Council so he wrote to Minnesota asking to be relieved of his obligation and offering them instead the young Elliott. He must have spoken persuasively because Minnesota accepted this untried administrator with little teaching experience. Richard Elliott remained as chairman for 32 years, and, during this time, gave the Department a velocity, an impetus, and a definition that characterizes us still. |  |
In 1919, Professor Elliott saw that the “behavioristics area” was where Minnesota could shine almost from the start. The brilliant Karl Spencer Lashley had joined the staff in 1917, where his provocative research on the biological bases of behavior “placed him in the prestige spot” among the faculty. Elliott’s description of his arrangement with Lashley highlights the administrative genius that marked his tenure as chairman. “I constituted myself guardian and protector outside [Lahley’s] laboratory door, fending off official expectations of a usual teaching load and other threats to his research productivity, all the while shoving in to him and his students … whatever supplies and equipment they needed.” The six years that Lashley spent at Minnesota are widely viewed as the most productive of his career.
Elliott’s continued interest in behaviorism and overriding vision for the Department resulted in the appointment of another behaviorist, B. Frederic Skinner, in 1936. Skinner’s appointment was greeted with dismay by other members of the small faculty who doubted the young researcher would pull his weight with the heavy teaching loads. Elliott appealed to then Dean Johnston of the Arts College who responded: “You hire him if you think he’s a comer.” The faculty’s concerns were not without merit. Indeed, Elliot noted that: “… at my urging a special arrangement was made to insure that superior students might come early under the influence of an especially stimulating and unconventional teacher,” and Skinner wrote that he chose two sections of about twenty students each from the 800 students who comprised the introductory psychology enrollment. Under Elliott’s nurturing influence, Skinner’s term at Minnesota was marked by unusual productivity. The Behavior of Organisms was published in 1938, and Skinner went on to produce drafts of Verbal Behavior (subsequently published in 1957) and his utopian conviction, Walden Two, written with great intensity in about seven weeks and published in 1948. And it was during his years at Minnesota that Skinner piqued the national curiosity in things psychological with his research on a pigeon-based missile guidance system, Project Pigeon, and a mechanized baby tender dubbed the Aircrib. Skinner left to become chairman at Indiana University in 1945, but not before training or influencing a number of young Minnesota psychologists including William Estes, Norman Guttman, Howard Hunt, Keller Breland, John Carroll, Kenneth MacCorquodale and Paul Meehl.
It was in another research tradition, however, that the “Minnesota psychologist” was uniquely identified. As Elliott wrote: “It all flowered from the appointment of Donald G. Paterson…. Never was there a closer fit between the interest and abilities of a man and a job that was crying to be done.” Elliott had served as a psychological examiner under “Pat” in the army and had followed his work for the Scott Company , the first U.S. consulting firm in industrial psychology. When Mabel Fernald resigned the faculty position for individual differences in 1921, Elliott resolved to bring Paterson to Minnesota. In the years that followed, Paterson became synonymous with the Minnesota tradition of differential psychology, industrial psychology, and vocational guidance, which for many years dominated the field and generated a disproportionate share of its leaders. Committed to the belief that almost no one was unemployable, Paterson and his colleagues, John Darley, E.G. Williamson, Ralph Berdie, and Beatrice Dvorak, directed the work of the Employment Stabilization Research Institute throughout the Great Depression, culminating in the publication of Men, Women, and Jobs in 1936. Under Paterson’s direction, the Minnesota Mechanical Ability Study resulted in pioneering differential aptitude measures, many of which are still in print today. This groundbreaking effort formed the basis of many large-scale, multi-aptitude test batteries that followed including the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB). In recognition of the Department’s commitment to achieve an optimal use of the nation’s work force, E.K. Strong, developer of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank, willed his huge data bank on vocational interest measurement to the University of Minnesota.
Paterson’s influence in the classroom was equal to that in the research lab. An army of young psychologists enrolled in his highly regarded course, Individual Differences, including Lloyd Lofquist, Rene Dawis Marvin Dunnette, John Holland, Leona Tyler, and Starke Hathaway. Hathaway was immediately attracted to Paterson’s description of the wide-range item content and empirical keying that defined Strong’s extraordinary test. Collaborating with neuropsychiatrist, J. Charnley McKinley, Hathaway set about to measure personality using the same data-based techniques. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory first published in 1941, has become the most widely used and best validated of structured personality inventories. Another Paterson student, Paul Meehl, made lasting contributions to MMPI research by encouraging its actuarial interpretation. In his provocative article “Wanted a Good Cookbook,” Meehl presented a series of cogent arguments for actuarially based profile interpretation. Subsequently, Meehl upended the clinical world by demonstrating, in the 1954 publication Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, that clinical judgment was frequently inferior to statistical prediction. Paul Meehl was equally influential in the realm of philosophical psychology where he published essential explications of construct validity, co-authored with his close friends Kenneth McCorquodale and Lee Cronbach.
In the period following the Second World War, Chairman Elliott sought to expand Minnesota’s involvement in new areas of psychological study. In 1952, he remarked: “Now at Minnesota as elsewhere what I interpret as the Zeitgeist calls for more clinical and social psychology and we are going along with it.” The University of Minnesota program in clinical psychology was accredited in 1948 and has since risen to international prominence. Included among its illustrious alumni are: David Lykken, Harrison Gough, Leonard Rorer and Irving Gottesman. In 1960, clinical psychologist Norman Garmezy initiated the Minnesota risk studies, an influential research program in the etiology of schizophrenia. These investigations evolved into Project Competence, a study of childhood resilience that has continued to the present time.
Social Psychology, too, came of age at Minnesota in the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations, originally an autonomous multidisciplinary unit and later absorbed by the Department of Psychology. Stanley Schacter, Leon Festinger, Harold Kelly, Gardner Lindsey, and Elliot Aronson all were drawn to the fertile research environment created by Director John Darley. In tribute to Darley’s remarkable administrative skills, Schacter describes the Laboratory as: “… a golden era at Minnesota… money was easy to get; subjects were easy to get; … teaching loads were light; space was available; secretaries were literate, and on and on ….” Without exaggeration, the contributions of the social psychologists who were part of this unit literally shaped the course of social psychology for the latter half of the century.
Counseling Psychology, accredited in 1952, sustained and enhanced the seminal contributions of the Employment Stabilization Institute through a 15 year program of research know as the Work Adjustment Project. Carried out under the direction of Lloyd Lofquist, Rene Dawis, and David Weiss, the Work Adjustment Project incorporated a broad theory of vocational adjustment and a comprehensive program of measurement. These studies led to the development of a number of remarkable inventories including the Minnesota Importance Questionnaire and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, among the most researched and widely-used measures of psychological needs and job satisfaction.
In the experimental arena, the post-World War II era has come to be known as the cognitive revolution in psychology. A classic 1948 paper, authored by Kenneth McCorquodale and Paul Meehl, positing “intervening variables” and “hypothetical constructs” paved the way for the study of internal processes of cognition, and James Jenkins inventive experiments on memory suggested a new model of the mind. The University of Minnesota Center for Research in Human Learning, created in 1964, constituted a forum in which new movements in American psychology (Chomskian linguistics, Piagets’s developmental theories, artificial intelligence, and computer modeling) could be explored and debated. Through the ensuing years, the Center has encouraged and supported research in perception, especially vision and audition, language, information processing, learning, memory, and problem-solving.
For many years Minnesota’s Department of Psychology was almost alone in its emphasis on genetic factors in behavior. At a time when most American social scientists were strongly environmentalist, Professor Paterson was emphasizing heritable factors in general intelligence and special mental abilities while William Heron demonstrated that maze-learning abilities in rats could be selectively breed. As early as 1962, Paul Meehl, advanced a genetic theory for the etiology of schizophrenia, and, in 1966, Irving Gottesman established a program of training in behavioral genetics in the Department of Psychology. Noting “that everything is more interesting if you do it with twins,” David Lykken, initiated a program of twin research in 1969, closely followed by his collaboration with Thomas Bouchard and Auke Tellegen on the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart.
Richard Elliott has been succeeded by many able administrators. All have been committed to furthering Elliott’s vision of a department characterized by a parallel commitment to “pure science” and “practical application.” Thus, the history of psychology at Minnesota is one of growth and development in both theoretical and applied psychology from the very beginning. There has been, however, a core unanimity among us, despite these variations in substance and method. The tendency to ask critical questions, to challenge unquestioned assumptions, and, perhaps most characteristically, to press for quantification and measurement is now, as always, the hallmark of the Minnesota psychologist