Background

Albert Hadley Cantril was born on June 16, 1906 in Hyrum, Utah, United States; the son of Albert Hadley Cantril, a physician, and Edna Mary Meyer. Cantril was raised in Douglas, Wyoming.

Education

Cantril graduated from Dartmouth College in 1928. He attended the universities of Munich and Berlin in 1929 and 1930 before enrolling at Harvard, where he graduated in 1931 with a Ph. D. in psychology.

Career

Cantril worked for a year as an instructor in sociology at Dartmouth. Then he taught psychology at Harvard from 1932 to 1935, the next year moving to Columbia University Teachers College as an assistant professor. In the fall of 1936 Cantril joined the psychology faculty at Princeton. By 1944 he was a full professor, and in 1953 became Stuart Professor and chairman of the psychology department. In 1955 he left the university to head the Institute for International Social Research with his associate Lloyd Free. The institute, sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, gave Cantril the freedom to research the relation between public opinion and governmental policy. His first book, The Psychology of Radio (1935), coauthored with Gordon W. Allport, examined the formation of opinion. While preparing a series of newspaper articles for the New York Times in 1936, Cantril visited George Gallup, who had realized that the Literary Digest poll predicting a landslide victory for presidential candidate Alf Landon would be wrong. Gallup influenced Cantril to move to Princeton, where they continued to collaborate, Cantril adding psychological insight to Gallup's technique. The two perfected the method of selecting a stratified sample. In 1940 Cantril established the Office of Public Opinion Research with Rockefeller Foundation funds. He continued to experiment in methodology but also searched for the reasons that motivated changes in public opinion. In The Invasion from Mars (1940) he examined why some people were frightened by the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds, " while others accepted it as science fiction. He further explored opinion formation in The Psychology of Social Movements (1941). Cantril also studied attitudinal changes on United States involvement in World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt found Cantril's work interesting and depended upon him for an analysis of American opinion throughout the war. While involved in this effort Cantril pursued methodological improvement, publishing his early results in Gauging Public Opinion (1944). In the work, which explored the factors determining opinion formation, Cantril considered the way issues were posed in the form of questions, the influence of interviewers, and sampling problems. Cantril contributed to the genesis of transactional psychology in Understanding Man's Social Behavior: Preliminary Notes (1947), which was published the same year that he collaborated with Muzafer Sherif to write The Psychology of Ego-Involvements: Social Attitudes and Identifications. Cantril wrote that each individual creates a reality shaped by past experiences of success at judging other people's responses. In Cantril's view, while any one respondent has a unique reality world, that person shares many assumptions with those who have had common experiences. Cantril's transactional perspective, which was influenced by George Herbert Mead, was further developed in collaboration with Adelbert Ames, Jr. Ames had studied how people perceive an event, and Cantril asked how this perception affected an individual's transaction with the environment. Their approach was a break with conditioning theory and with the idea that people simply react to a situation. Cantril developed this view into a general theory that is described in The "Why" of Man's Experience (1950); he later expanded the theory with additions from physiological psychology. Even in this period of theory building, Cantril never lost interest in the practical study of public opinion. In 1951 he met W. Averell Harriman, then director of the Mutual Security Agency, who secured government support for experimental research in polling abroad. Cantril sought to determine the state of the national mind of Italy and Holland to discover what kinds of appeals would be most credible. He then measured the effects of these appeals, focusing on the American effort to build support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This work served as a forerunner for Cantril's first project within the Institute for International Social Research, a study of voter attributes in France and Italy. Cantril was puzzled by the strong showing of Communists, and he wanted details on the attitudes of voters who supported them.

His research revealed that citizens of one nation were hostile to other nations not because of unfavorable stereotypes but because they perceived these other nations as interfering with their goals. Details of this research were published in How Nations See Each Other (with William Buchanan, 1953) and in The Politics of Despair (1958). Cantril's concern was not limited to American interests, as was illustrated by a book he edited, Tensions That Cause Wars (1950). In this work he offered his services to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the hope of achieving world peace. The last fifteen years of Cantril's life reflected a growing synthesis of social psychology and public-opinion polling. In his Soviet Leaders and Mastery Over Man (1960) Cantril reported on his visit to Russia, where he talked with psychologists and others to determine their attitudes about socialism and their views of the United States. He concluded that the United States should refrain from attacking Communist ideology while commending Russians whenever they emulated the United States. Cantril synthesized even further in Reflections on the Human Venture (1960), coedited with Charles H. Bumstead. In their analysis of various literary selections, Cantril and Bumstead introduced basic principles of transactional analysis and demonstrated how these theories could be applied to specific situations. Cantril, who sensed the turbulence of the coming decade, believed that technology and science created unique tensions in the contemporary world. He hoped to improve the quality of life by prescriptions spelled out in Human Nature and Political Systems (1961), which urged an end to policy that was formulated only as a defense against Soviet expansion, and a beginning of long-range policy based on the worldwide revolution of rising expectations. The Pattern of Human Concerns (1965) elaborates on theories presented in Human Nature and Political Systems. In 1967 Cantril and Lloyd Free compiled the data from their 1964 campaign polling of Americans into a widely used source, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion. The same year saw publication of The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research, in which Cantril devised projects that exemplified his goals and methods. His approach, which correlated polling results with policy formulation, may be taken for granted today, but Cantril faced major obstacles when he pioneered the field. He was still advancing its cause when he died at Princeton, New Jersey.

Achievements

• Cantril made "major contributions in psychology of propaganda; public opinion research; applications of psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding, and communication; developmental psychology; psychology of social movements; measurement and scaling; humanistic psychology; the psychology of perception; and, basic to all of them, the analysis of human behavior from the transactional point of view. " His influence is felt in education, law, philosophy, politics and psychiatry.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Psychology of Radio (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Psychology of Radio For practical appli...)

  • Human Dimension Experiences in Policy Research

    (Hardback, ex-library, with usual stamps and markings, in ...)

  • The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic

    ( On Halloween night 1938, Orson Welles broadcast a radio...)

  • The "Why" of Man's Experience

    (The "Why" of Man's Experience Hardcover Jan 01, 1950 Cant...)

  • Soviet leaders and mastery over man / Hadley Cantril
  • The pattern of human concerns
  • The Psychology of Social Movements
  • Tensions That Cause Wars; Common Statement and Individual Papers By a Group of Social Scientists Brought Together By Unesco

Connections

He married Mavis K. Lyman on June 18, 1932. They had a daughter and a son, Albert Hadley, who became a public-opinion analyst.

Father:

Albert Hadley Cantril

Physician

Mother:

Edna Mary Meyer

Wife:

Mavis K. Lyman

Son:

Albert Hadley