Jacob "Jack" Block (April 28, 1924 – January 13, 2010) was a

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

professor at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

. His main areas of research were personality theory, personality development, research methodology, personality assessment, longitudinal research, and cognition. He often collaborated with his wife

Jeanne Block Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block (July 17, 1923 - December 4, 1981) was an American psychologist and expert on child development. She conducted research into sex-role socialization and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centered personali ...

. His most renowned body of work, undertaken primarily with his wife, was a longitudinal study on a cohort of more than 100

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

toddlers. He studied them regularly for nearly 30 years. Unlike most longitudinal studies, the Blocks' focused on the psychological makeup and history of the subjects, rather than quantitative measures such as IQ. The study tracked how the subjects' background influenced their later choices and the outcomes of their lives. Block was born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, New York, and received a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College. He earned his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from Stanford University in 1950. He received many awards over the years and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of Block's studies drew particular notice in the news media. Published in ''The Journal of Research in Personality'' in 2006, it found that subjects who at 3 years old had seemed thin-skinned, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable tended at 23 to be political conservatives. On the other hand, 3-year-olds characterized as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient were inclined to become liberals.

Book publications

*"The Q-Sort Method in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research", 1961 *"The Challenge of Response Sets", 1965 *''Lives Through Time'', 1971 *''Personality as an Affect-Processing System'', 2002 *''The Q-Sort in Character Appraisal'', 2008

References

External links

UC Berkeley obituary
20th-century American psychologists 1924 births 2010 deaths Stanford University alumni Brooklyn College alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Quantitative psychologists Personality psychologists {{US-psychologist-stub