Carl Hovland

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.