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Biographical Memoirs Volume 73 (1998) / Chapter Skim
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CARL IVER HOVLAND
Pages 230-261

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From page 230...
... to cod?
From page 231...
... cognitive psychology (focusing respectively on human learning, attitude change, en c! concept acquisition)
From page 232...
... be catching a train to New Yorkperhaps to consult with AT&T, Bell Laboratories, or the Rockefeller or Russell Sage Foundations. On those occasions when I clic!
From page 233...
... with papers in no visible orcler. When another of my fellow graduate students inquirer!
From page 234...
... at it by his own swifter, purely mental calculation. ~ Former Yale student Philip Zimbardo (now a professor of social psychology at StanforcI)
From page 235...
... HovIanc! in a Summer Institute on the new computer simulation approach to mocleling human cognitive processes organizer!
From page 236...
... It was shortly after joining the Bell Labs that I began my one direct research collaboration with HovIand. Herbert Jenkins en c!
From page 237...
... I (often together with the Bell Labs learning researcher Ernst Rothkopf)
From page 238...
... He was cared for by his son David, then an undergraduate at Yale, and by his daughter Kathie, who, having just entered Wellesley College, traveled down from Massachusetts to be with her father during the weekends.
From page 239...
... me) have all gone on to make their own influential contributions at three major universities (Bregman in auditory perception at McGill, Hunt in human cognition at the University of Washington, en c!
From page 240...
... Walter now live in McLean, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where she is senior legal editor for Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP. Davic!
From page 241...
... , and enjoyed playing piano and organ duets. Gertrude went on to stucly piano at the American Conservatory in Chicago en c!
From page 242...
... Until the untimely deaths of both parents, the HovIand home in addition to being filled with music seems to have been a consistently warm and supportive one. Kathie wrote to me of her "strongest feelings" about her father "awe and pride in his brilliance and his accomplishments, joy in the tender memories of our togetherness (including playing piano duets, my 'helping' with his experiments discussing everything from my academic goals and achievements to my boyfriends, listening to operas from the Met on the radio on Saturday afternoons, and my driving him to New York to Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer treatments)
From page 243...
... the first evidence for a law of generalization, in which the tendency to make a response learner! to one stimulus falls off exponentially with the distance separating a test stimulus from the original training stimulus along a sensory continuum, such as the continuum of auditory pitch (HoviancI, 1937~.
From page 244...
... sociologist Samuel Stouffer (himself on leave from the University of Chicago) , HovIand headed the Experimental Section of Stouffer's Research Branch uncler Major General Frederick Osborn's Information en c!
From page 245...
... the "Yale Communication en c! Attitude Change Program." With the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, this program supporter!
From page 246...
... ~ rim · ~ - - -- - - - - - - a live psycno~ogy March, personal communication of June 9, 1997~. HovIand 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.
From page 247...
... two former students of the brilliant MIT social psychologist Kurt Lewin to establish strengths in both basic en c! applier!
From page 248...
... Incidentally, Sears's son David later went on for graduate study with HovIand and became a professor at UCLA. About Hoviand (who died during David's last year at YaTe)
From page 249...
... much of the support for HovIancl's attitude change program at Yale. He wrote, "In the field!
From page 250...
... Much the same picture emerged from my own more recent inquiries. Jane Olejarczyk, who is now assistant business manager for academic affairs/registrar for Yale's psychology department, but who began working as HovIancl's secretary when she was only nineteen, said, "Knowing how inexperienced I was with academia he constantly assignee!
From page 251...
... in his Yale attitucle change program in the 1950s, wrote, "Of course, the most important thing about Car! was his enormous intellect, his quick unclerstancling of knearly]
From page 252...
... to me that that was his investigative forte identifying the special conditions surrounding prior work en c! then expanding the design to pin down the phenomenon more clearly." Following HovIand's death, the New England Psychological Association (of which HovIanc!
From page 253...
... at least twenty-two Yale doctoral clissertations.5 His scientific achievements were recognizec! by his early election to the American Philosophical Society (1950)
From page 254...
... THANK FORMER YALE students and Hovland associates for the many thoughtful and heart-warming reminiscences they shared with me, including those I have quoted in this memoir (the most extensive supplied by Hovland's former coworkers Harold Kelley and Herbert Kelman) and those, though not quoted here, that contributed helpful information, suggestions, or corrections (from Robert Abelson, Irvin Child, Earl Hunt, Kenneth Kurtz, Mark Lepper, Edith Luchins, George Mandler, George Miller, Lloyd Morrisett, John Pierce, and Burton Rosner)
From page 255...
... 4. Hovland's students and associates who worked on these cognitive processes included Daniel Berlyne, Albert Bregman, Hugh Cahill, Earl Hunt, Herbert Tenkins, Kenneth Kurtz, Lloyd Morrisette, Dean Pruitt, Roger Shepard, and Walter Weiss.
From page 256...
... 1974. An inventory and evaluation of source materials on Carl Iver Hovland.
From page 257...
... In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol.
From page 258...
... 1951 Human learning and retention. In Handbook of Experimental Psychology, ed.
From page 259...
... In Handbook of Social Psychology, vol.
From page 260...
... Hunt. Computer simulation of concept attainment.


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