Overview
James McKeen Cattell holds the honorable distinction of being the first psychology professor in the United States. He earned his PhD in Germany under Willhem Wundt, who was the first to distinguish psychology from biology and philosophy while calling himself a psychologist.
Metrics and Eugenics
Together, Wundt and Cattell explored the study of intelligence through psychometrics, though their general worldviews were often radically different. Wundt strictly opposed the biological determinism behind eugenics and the biological reductionism behind treating complex mental processes as simple physical processes to examine in a vacuum without reference to one’s identity within broader society. Cattell had somewhat of an obsession with ranking people against each other in the fashion of American management philosophy, which was undergoing the revolution of Scientific Management driven by those like Frederick Winslow Taylor and American Pragmatism championed by psychologists William James and John Dewey - both of whom were Presidents of the American Psychological Assocation as well. While Wundt and other psychologists saw their work as aimed towards discovering truths scientifically, pragmatists argued that the value of ideas were tied to their immediately measurable applications, usually in industrialized corporate environments.
Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology as a field emerged out of the work of Cattell and his contemporaries, who thought the pragmatic application of psychology and psychometrics was to identify the inherent characteristics of a worker that would determine their worth in an environment. Rather than focusing on changing the workplace or seeing workers as people who could grow with time and resources, the focus became on weeding out those who scored lower on psychometric assessments as the individual culprits behind unoptimal productivity. Labor unions and traditionalist psychologists alike condemned this practice as reducing humans to interchangeable components that punished individuality and independence through conformity disguised as scientific standards. Many pragmatists, including Cattel, responded that the purpose of education in democracy was not actually to improve people’s conditions but to match individuals to the role best suited for their natural limitations.
A Hippie Side
Ever the experimentalist, Cattell continued a brave and amusing tradition of researching drugs through self-administration, though he didn’t publish a manuscript about it like many predecessors did. He experimented with cannabis, opium (legally obtainable as hashish at the time), caffeine, morphine, chocolate, etc., and he often went over the limits he prescribed for himself in the course of experimentation.
In 1917, Cattell was fired from Columbia University for opposing the draft into World War I. He sued the university and used his settlement winnings to create the Psychological Corporation. For the rest of his career, he pursued his interests in publications with applied psychology.
Eugenics
Cattell was unfortunately not immune from the anxieties of social changes that led many otherwise brilliant researchers to pursue pseudoscientific paradigms that justified their success as inherent to their being.