Carl Iver Hovland (June 12, 1912 – April 16, 1961) was a

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

working primarily at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

and for the

US Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

who studied

attitude Attitude may refer to: Philosophy and psychology * Attitude (psychology), an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value * Metaphysics of presence * Propositional attitude, a relational mental state connecting a person to a pro ...

change and

persuasion Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term for Social influence, influence. Persuasion can influence a person's Belief, beliefs, Attitude (psychology), attitudes, Intention, intentions, Motivation, motivations, or Behavior, behaviours. ...

. He first reported the

sleeper effect The sleeper effect is a psychological phenomenon that relates to persuasion. It is a delayed increase in the effect of a message that is accompanied by a discounting cue. A discounting cue being some negative connotation or lack of credibility i ...

after studying the effects of the

Frank Capra Frank Russell Capra (born Francesco Rosario Capra; May 18, 1897 – September 3, 1991) was an Italian-born American film director, producer and writer who became the creative force behind some of the major award-winning films of the 1930s ...

propaganda film A propaganda film is a film that involves some form of propaganda. Propaganda films spread and promote certain ideas that are usually religious, political, or cultural in nature. A propaganda film is made with the intent that the viewer will ad ...

Why We Fight ''Why We Fight'' is a series of seven propaganda films produced by the US Department of War from 1942 to 1945, during World War II. It was originally written for American soldiers to help them understand why the United States was involved in th ...

'' on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with

Irving Janis Irving Lester Janis (May 26, 1918 – November 15, 1990) was an American research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley most famous for his theory of "groupthink" which described the ...

who would later become famous for his theory of

groupthink Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness ...

. Hovland also developed

social judgment theory Social judgment theory (SJT) is a self-persuasion theory proposed by Carolyn Sherif, Muzafer Sherif, and Carl Hovland, defined by Sherif and Sherif as the perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes. According to t ...

change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on your degree of belonging to the group.

Biography

Carl Iver Hovland was born in Chicago on June 12, 1912. As a child, he had a deep interest in music. Up until college, when psychology became a major part of his life, he was looking into a musical career. In 1938 he married Gertrude Raddatz. He was recruited by Samuel Stouffer, a sociologist who was on leave from University of Chicago. Hovland had the responsibility of leading a team of fifteen researchers.Aronson, Elliot, Timothy D. Wilson, and Robin M. Akert. ''Social Psychology''. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Education, 2010. Hovland was involved in a study of the conditions under which people are most likely to change their attitudes in response to persuasive messages. The Yale Group's work was first described in Hovland's book ''Communication and Persuasion'', published in 1953. His major interests in his last few years of life were with concept-formation, which he approached with computer simulation.

Contributions

Psychological research was Hovland's intellectual joy. Especially in his early career, his investigations covered many topics. His papers in psychological journals included a study of test reliability, a major review of the literature on apparent movement, as well as his four classical papers on conditioned generalization from his doctoral dissertation. Hovland began to emphasize micro-level analysis of propaganda and its effects. Hovland's army experiments were the beginnings of that micro-level analysis of an individual. Hovland's "core conceptual variable was attitude". Hovland believed that if he was able to recognize the attitude an individual has towards a trigger, he would be able to predict the behavior and actions of an individual over time. However, there were many studies that argued the contrary and showed that "an attitude toward a person or object does not predict or explain an individual's overt behavior regarding that person or object". This revelation of low correlation did not necessarily render findings useless but instead led to further research on how under certain circumstances it was possible to change a person's behavior via their attitudes. While Hovland focused on an individual rather than a group level, he began to take into consideration interpersonal communication in the form of persuasion. Specifically, Hovland was responsible for carrying out a series of studies that contributed to the "cumulative understanding of persuasion behavior that has never since been matched or even rivaled". To test and apply his theorization Hovland worked proposed the SMCR model. The SMCR model consists of four components—source variables, message variables, channel variables, and receiver variables. By manipulating each of these variables, Hovland was able to advance his "message-learning approach to attitude change". There were problems with his particular approach, however, in that by focusing on a single dimension of the SMCR model, Hovland was unable to do more than isolate a factor rather than study the synergy between the different variables.

Death

Hovland died in on April 16, 1961. When Hovland learned that he had cancer, he continued to work with his Yale doctoral students and conduct persuasion experiments. Finally, when he could work no more, he left his office in the Psychology Department, went to his home in New Haven, drew a bathtub full of water, and drowned himself.Schramm, in Rogers, Everett M. ''History Of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach''. 39:383.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hovland, Carl 1912 births 1961 suicides 20th-century American psychologists Social psychologists Suicides by drowning in the United States Yale Sterling Professors Suicides in Connecticut 1961 deaths United States Army personnel of World War II