As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, Hovland
acquired a strong background in mathematics, physics, and
biology, as well as in experimental psychology, receiving
his A.B. with highest distinction in 1932 (just before turn-
ing twenty). On a Catharine White fellowship he also ob-
tained his A.M. there in 1933 and completed research that
appeared in his earliest published papers (the first, coau-
thored with a stimulating new Northwestern faculty mem-
ber G. L. Freeman on "diurnal variations in performance
and related physiological processes").
Concerning a letter recommending Hovland for gradu-
ate study, Yale's Walter R. Miles recalled that, "The letter's
language of so high approval and praise was such as to
make [the] Yale professors smile and shake their heads. As
events evolved they were using similar language in . . .
recommending the same Carl Hovland . . . a very few years
later" (Miles, 1961, p. 122). Hovland prepared six papers
for publication during his first year and in just two more
years he received his 1936 Ph.D. with honors under the
prominent Yale learning theorist Clark L. Hull.
Hovland's dissertation provided the first evidence for a
law of generalization, in which the tendency to make a
response learned to one stimulus falls off exponentially
with the distance separating a test stimulus from the origi-
nal training stimulus along a sensory continuum, such as
the continuum of auditory pitch (Hovland, 1937). Begin-
ning with my own dissertation twenty years later, I devel-
oped a new approach that provided more definitive evi-
dence for such a law (Shepard, 1958, Figure 2) and, thirty
years still later, a theoretical justification for the law's pos-
sible "universal" character (Shepard, 1987, Figures 1 and
3). Such a law of generalization was also central to the
interpretation of the results of our joint study of classifica-
tion learning (Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins, 1961, pp.
25-30). I still regard generalization as the most fundamen-
tal problem of human, animal, and machine learning－if
not, indeed, of education and cognitive science generally.
On completing his dissertation, Hovland was immedi-
ately invited to join the Yale faculty, of which he remained
a member for the rest of his life. Two 1940 publications
illustrate the extraordinary range of his early work at Yale.
As part of an interdisciplinary group investigating the con-
nection between frustration and aggression, Hovland and
Robert Sears (1940) discovered a substantial (negative)
correlation, over a century of U.S. history, between economic
indicators (such as the price of cotton) and number of
lynchings. At the same time, according to one of his later
coworkers, M. Brewster Smith, Hovland served as the "heavy
hitter" on the team of Hull, Hovland, et al. that produced
the 1940 monograph "Mathematico-Deductive Theory of
Rote Learning" (Smith, personal communication of 1997).
This book, though too technically demanding to have been
read by many psychologists, has been deemed "as elegant
a volume as ever published in psychology" by a later Hovland
student who decided to pursue a career in psychology af-
ter "stumbling upon that volume in [his] undergraduate
browsing days" (McGuire, 1996, p. 46).
From 1942 to 1945, during America's involvement in
World War II, Hovland was on leave from Yale. Recruited
by the noted sociologist Samuel Stouffer (himself on leave
from the University of Chicago), Hovland headed the Ex-
perimental Section of Stouffer's Research Branch under
Major General Frederick Osborn's Information and Edu-
cation Division of the War Department. The primary mis-
sion of Hovland's section was to evaluate the training pro-
grams and films being prepared by the Information and
Education Division for American troops in the United States
and Europe. Hovland was responsible for guiding and syn-
thesizing the work of some fifteen researchers.
1
Despite his wartime leave, Hovland rose meteorically at
Yale through the ranks of instructor (1936), assistant pro-
fessor (1937), director of graduate studies (1941, at age
twenty-nine), associate professor (1943, in absentia), full
professor, chairman of the psychology department and di-
rector of the Laboratory of Psychology (1945, at age thirty-
three), to Sterling professor (1947, at age thirty-six). In-
deed, Hovland and his twenty-eight-year-senior mentor Clark
Hull were both named to Sterling professorships in 1947. I
was told that this made psychology the only department at
that time with two Sterling professors and that this came
about because Hovland, in his characteristic generosity and
sense of fairness, would not accept the honor in advance
of his mentor.
Beginning with his research during the war, Hovland
brought the methodological talents he had honed in his
experimental work on learning and generalization to bear
on problems of communication and social psychology. He
and a number of those who had worked with him in the
Research Branch prepared a series of volumes titled "Stud-
ies in Social Psychology in World War II." Hovland was the
senior author of volume 3, the highly influential 1949 Ex-
periments on Mass Communication.
After returning to Yale, Hovland established the "Yale
Communication and Attitude Change Program." With the
help of the Rockefeller Foundation, this program supported
for over fifteen years (until Hovland's death) research by
Hovland and over thirty coworkers and students.
2
This work
established how verbally presented information changes (or
renders resistant to change) a recipient's opinions and be-
liefs as a function of experimentally manipulated variables,
such as the recipient's prior position on an issue, the
recipient's self-esteem, the credibility of the source, the
extremity of the position advocated, the order of presenta-
tion of arguments, whether one or both sides of the issue
are presented, whether the conclusions of an argument are
explicitly stated or are left to the recipient's inference,
whether the recipient actively attempts to reproduce the
arguments for someone else, whether the recipient is in-
duced to think of counter arguments, whether the pre-
sented information is designed to elicit the recipient's emo-
tions (especially fear), the time that has elapsed since the
information was presented, and the conditions imposed at
the delayed time of assessment of attitude change (for ex-
ample, whether knowledge of the forgotten high or low
credibility source is reinstated).
Following Hovland's death, his attitude change program
was characterized as "the largest single contribution [to
the field of social communication] any man has made
(Schramm, 1963, p. 5). Over thirty years later, it was still
deemed "the biggest single force within psychology's com-
munication-relevant attitude-change movement" (McGuire,
1996, p. 43), and as "the gold standard for research in
social psychology" (Timothy Brock, personal communica-
tion of May 20, 1997). Zimbardo has suggested that the
secret of the success of this program lay in Hovland's unique
conceptual ability to decompose the complex relations be-
tween persuasive communications and attitude change in
a way that rendered them susceptible to controlled labora-
tory experiments. Moreover, by "establishing a structural-
sequential mode of the input-mediating-output variables and
processes involved, Hovland anticipated the later informa-
tion processing approach that proved so valuable in cogni-
tive psychology (Zimbardo, personal communication of June
9, 1997).
Hovland also played a crucial role in the formation of
what became the Bell Telephone Laboratories' Behavioral
Research Center, of which I was a member from 1958 to
1966. It was, I believe, the longest lived of any group whose
members were given the freedom to pursue basic psycho-
logical research within an industrial setting. According to
William A. Baker, former president of Bell Labs, the estab-
lishment of this group came about when Robert Greenleaf
of the personnel department at AT&T and Baker (then
vice-president for research at the labs) decided that in view
of the vast number of employees that the Bell System trains
every year and the even vaster number of customers that
daily interact with the telephone system, a small self-sustaining
group of behavioral scientists might be justified within
a large laboratory traditionally oriented toward the physical
sciences. They turned to Hovland, whose earlier work in
industrial psychology had impressed them with its "ingenu-
ity" and "versatility." Baker said, "Carl achieved an extraor-
dinary rapport with our industrial endeavor" (personal com-
munication of May 11, 1995).
Hovland recruited two former students of the brilliant
MIT social psychologist Kurt Lewin to establish strengths
in both basic and applied social psychology－Morton Deutsch
and Alex Bavelas. But Bavelas (who had been selected to
lead the applied effort) did not stay long, whereupon a
struggle ensued between Bell Labs and the personnel de-
partment of AT&T about whether the new group should
be oriented toward basic or applied research. Hovland
"played the pivotal role . . . in the decision to support its
basic research orientation," said Deutsch, who warmly re-
called "Carl's intellectual openness, personal support, and
his skills as a mediator of conflict" (personal communica-
tion of March 24, 1997).
During the ensuing years, the Bell Labs' Behavioral Re-
search Center attracted a number of creative young psy-
chological researchers. Some time after Hovland's death,
when changing circumstances led Bell Labs (and many other
companies) to curtail support for basic research, virtually
all of these scientists were able to move to professorships
at major universities. Indeed, despite its relatively small
size, this center has had as many as five of its members
elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
3
The area to which Hovland turned his attention toward
the end of his life concerned the cognitive processes of
concept acquisition, problem solving, and thinking. Dur-
ing the few years left to him, he advised or collaborated
with at least ten researchers in this increasingly active area.
4
The letters Mary Jenni received in response to her 1974
inquiries to Hovland's former colleagues are remarkably
consistent in their expressed admiration of Hovland's in-
tellectual powers, his administrative efficiency, the moral
quality of his judgments and actions, and the affection
everyone felt for him.
Leonard W. Doob, who was a young member of Yale's
faculty when Hovland arrived there in 1934, wrote, "Clearly
he was the outstanding student of the year, coming here
with a tremendous recommendation from Northwestern."
Even when he had joined the faculty, Doob said, Hovland
was "shy and self-contained; you never quite knew what he
was thinking. His IQ was incredibly high. He was a very
efficient administrator; the details, externally at least, never
seemed to bother him because he dealt with them so quickly
and apparently painlessly" (letter of November 4, 1974).
Robert R. Sears, who had been on the Yale faculty with
Hovland between 1936 and 1941 (though David Star Jor-
dan professor of social science at Stanford when he re-
sponded to Jenni's 1974 request), wrote, "Carl was a big
man in every respect. He was very gentle and . . . very
musical. He was a cheerful, smiling person who came into
the office every morning and put his head in my door and
said Ôwhat's new?' We both had classes over on the main
quadrangle . . . at 11:00 . . . He walked so fast that . . . I
got to class . . . puffing and panting while Carl went up to
a second floor lecture room, bounding two or three steps
at a time . . . He was a wonderful guy . . . At our house he
would sit and play with my son David, who was then about
a year old." Sears's letter concluded, "He was a remarkable
man, brilliant in every sense of the word, and a delightful
friend and warm companion" (letter of October 28, 1974).
Incidentally, Sears's son David later went on for graduate
study with Hovland and became a professor at UCLA. About
Hovland (who died during David's last year at Yale), David
told me, "He took me into his home for several days after I
was released from the hospital following an appendectomy
. . . I treasure the memories of the times I [spent] with him,
in class and out." An incident that David recalled well illus-
trates Hovland's mixture of warmth, shyness, and propriety:
"One year a group of students went to the Hovland house
to sing Christmas carols, as a gesture of appreciation; we
saw Carl hasten to run upstairs to put on a coat and tie
before coming to the door to greet us" (personal communi-
cation of May 19, 1997).
Leland DeVinney, one of Hovland's associates in Wash-
ington during the war, later became director of social sci-
ence at the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided much
of the support for Hovland's attitude change program at
Yale. He wrote, "In the field of communication and atti-
tude formation . . . [Hovland] is recognized as the leading
pioneer." Concerning Carl and Gertrude, he said, "My wife
and I . . . have never known lovelier or finer people," and
added, "I also have known many of Carl's associates and
students and know that Carl was an extraordinary teacher
and research guide. He was highly respected and also loved
by all of them" (letter of November 9, 1974).
Donald R. Young, another of Hovland's associates during
the war, who later became director of the Russell Sage Foun-
dation on whose Board of Directors Hovland served until
his death, wrote that he had found it "a joy to work with a
man of Carl's qualities. He was among the very best re-
search psychologists, highly skilled, imaginative, and reli-
able. He always delivered a top product." Recalling his last
visit with Hovland, Young said, "He was then so ill that he
had to go to bed immediately when the meal was ended,
yet he still was the perfect host giving little evidence of
either the physical or mental suffering he must have been
enduring." Young concluded, "In my seventy-six years I have
known few men his equal and none his superior" (letter of
November 19, 1974).
Claude Buxton, who succeeded Hovland as chairman of
the psychology department at Yale, wrote, "Carl . . . be-
came my dearest friend, . . . a very gentle [and] very moral
person, and his code included never taking advantage of
anyone or anything . . . He is one of the two or three
people I have ever known who made a moral assessment
of his own proposals or ideas . . . He was enormously
efficient and organized－one of our colleagues used to say
that everything Carl did he did on ball bearings, because
it went so smoothly; he was tremendously stimulating to
graduate students, . . . [who told] me they did more work
for [Carl's evening special-interest] no-credit meetings than
they ever did in their regular courses" (letter of November
8, 1974).
Irving L. Janis, who worked with Hovland both in his
Experimental Section in Washington and then (as a younger
faculty colleague) in his attitude change program at Yale,
similarly concluded his letter to Mary Jenni by saying, "You
can feel justifiably proud of your cousin. He was a truly
great psychologist and a great person" (letter of October
30, 1974).
Much the same picture emerged from my own more
recent inquiries. Jane Olejarczyk, who is now assistant busi-
ness manager for academic affairs/registrar for Yale's psy-
chology department, but who began working as Hovland's
secretary when she was only nineteen, said, "Knowing how
inexperienced I was with academia he constantly assigned
me to projects about which I had no clue and gently in-
sisted that I could do [them]. He didn't lavish praise but I
knew I did well when the next task was more difficult than
the one before." Olejarczyk spoke of Hovland's "warmth"
and said, "There was the feeling when he was about that
you were part of a family and that you mattered." She added
that "Gertrude Hovland was the epitome of grace" (per-
sonal communication of May 29, 1997).
Eleanor E. Maccoby (Browning professor emerita of de-
velopmental psychology at Stanford), who remembers
Hovland well and whose late husband Nathan Maccoby
worked in Hovland's group during the war, observed that
Hovland was exceptional both in his quick and wide-rang-
ing intelligence and, also, in his "complete absence of guile"
(personal communication of 1996).
Harold H. Kelley (professor emeritus of social psychol-
ogy at UCLA), who worked with Hovland in his Yale atti-
tude change program in the 1950s, wrote, "Of course, the
most important thing about Carl was his enormous intel-
lect, his quick understanding of [nearly] everything that
was going on, and the ways he let his thought and work
roam far and wide . . . In organizing the personnel of his
program, he was deliberately and sympathetically eclectic,
grabbing here and there so as to include all possible lines
of thought that might bear on the communication/persua-
sion process" (letter of June 24, 1995).
William J. McGuire noted that "it never bothered Hovland
that members of the group . . . were driven by antagonistic
theories that made opposite predictions" and remarked
that what prevented these decentralized, individualistic
projects from "becoming undesirably anarchical was
Hovland's particular intellectual excellence as a synthesizer.
He could attend a symposium of papers that seemed to
have little in common and, if called on to summarize them,
seemed able on the spot to abstract out their unifying
themes and show that the papers converged in interesting
and complex ways to produce a coherent picture" (McGuire,
1996, pp. 48-49).
About Hovland's own research style, Kelley observed that
Hovland would "analyze the shortcomings or special condi-
tions of . . . prior work, identify intuitively the as-yet-un-
studied factors that would reverse, undo, or clarify the prob-
lem." Kelley added, "It always seemed to me that that was
his investigative forte－identifying the special conditions
surrounding prior work and then expanding the design to
pin down the phenomenon more clearly."
Following Hovland's death, the New England Psychologi-
cal Association (of which Hovland was president in 1950)
had a memorial session in which Herbert Kelman charac-
terized Hovland as "the world's most non-authoritarian
leader." Similarly, Abraham Luchins wrote me, "He was the
most efficient and the least officious of people" (personal
communication of May 29, 1997). And Hovland's wartime
coworker M. Brewster Smith said, "My most vivid memory
of Carl . . . was his unique ability to guide the development
of appropriate research design by asking just the right ques-
tions－always in a tentative way that opened new perspec-
tives or possibilities . . . I have never since experienced that
degree of consultative skill . . . ." (letter of May 15, 1997). It
was in this way that Hovland was, in the words of Timothy
Brock, a "visionary founder of subdisciplines" (personal com-
munication of May 20, 1997). Speaking further of Hovland's
low-key and indirect style of leadership, Kelley wrote, "I
know that left some people (including myself) with a bit of
anxiety. But still, he was so warm, interested in your per-
sonal life, etc., that one couldn't help feeling great affec-
tion for him." Continuing, Kelley said, "As you can see, I
was very fond of Carl, and also had the utmost respect for
him. I regard him as one of the handful of real geniuses in
psychology. . . ." (letter of June 24, 1995).
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