Hadley Cantril

Hadley Cantril (1906–1969) was an American researcher of public opinion.

Born in Utah, he was educated at Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He joined the faculty of Princeton in 1936 and later became chairman of the Princeton University Department of Psychology. He was a member of the Princeton Radio Research Project before it relocated to Columbia University during the early 1940s, and was the main author of The Invasion from Mars, an academic study of Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which caused widespread panic. In 1940 he served as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Cantril's later psychological work included collaboration with Adelbert Ames, Jr. developing a transactional method for studying human perception, as well as other research in humanistic psychology.

Though trained as a psychologist, Cantril's most important work concerned the then-new topic of public opinion research. Influenced initially by the success of George Gallup and Elmo Roper during the 1936 presidential election, Cantril sought to apply their systematic polling technique to academic social psychology. Cantril was a founding editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. In 1940 he founded Princeton University's Office of Public Opinion Research. and from autumn 1940 onwards provided the Roosevelt administration with confidential information about American public opinion, particularly regarding the war in Europe. In 1942 Cantril conducted a small-sample survey of Vichy officials in Morocco, prior to Operation Torch, that revealed the intensity of the anti-British sentiment of the French forces there. This information influenced the disposition of forces during the operation, with American troops landing near Casablanca and mixed forces at Oran and Algiers.

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