卡尔·霍夫兰德

卡尔·霍夫兰德 （英语：Carl Iver Hovland，1912年6月12日—1961年4月16日）， 美国心理学家。

生平

霍夫兰出生于美国芝加哥的一个移民家庭，因患癌症逝于美国康涅狄格州哈姆登。1936年，他在耶鲁大学获得博士学位后，曾担任耶鲁大学中心理学系讲师、助理教授、教授，是一位著名的实验心理学家，也是在宣传与传播学研究中的代表人物之一；在世界第二次大战期间，霍夫兰和一群心理学家进行了一个对于态度与说服进行的研究，对此提出了众多影响颇大的理论—耶鲁学派。

耶鲁研究

耶鲁研究又称为“说服研究 (persuasive research) ”，耶鲁研究起源于二次世界大战期间，美国陆军部新闻署以及教育署征召一些社会学家，其中以卡尔·霍夫兰和史多佛（Samuel Stouffer）为主要负责人，他们将耶鲁大学作为研究的中心，并对美国的军人进行一连串的实验，他们将军人分为两批，并且以不同的方式在他们的面前播放战争宣导影片；这个实验的目的是想要从实验中试图寻找出传播媒介的讯息是否会直接的影响着人们，进而导致人们的行为和态度产生改变。

Carl Iver Hovland (June 12, 1912 – April 16, 1961) was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude 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

Hovland was born in Chicago on June 12, 1912. He originally intended to pursue a career in music until college, when he discovered psychology. Before this discovery, during his high school years at Luther Institute in Chicago, he would meet a fellow piano student, Gertrude Raddatz. He would later come to marry her in 1938.

During Hovland’s initial pursuit of music, he would come to neglect his other classes that did not interest him as much, such as sports. Instead, an interest was toward music and science bloomed as Hovland became an excellent pianist. His love for the two merged with his promotion of his interests through a small shop he developed.

Hovland entered Northwestern University at the age of 16 and obtained his A.B. in 1932 and A.M. in the following year, working with Graydon L. Freeman. Hovland moved to Yale University where he received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1936 under the supervision of Clark L. Hull.

In 1942, Hovland was recruited by Samuel Stouffer, a sociologist on leave from the University of Chicago, to contribute to their collaborative research efforts. Hovland had the responsibility of leading a team of fifteen researchers.

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.

With his life’s end approaching due to his cancer, his major interests in his last few years of life shifted from his verbal concept research to concept-formation. He would approach this idea with computer simulations [SG3] of human thought process

In his lifetime, Hovland was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

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.