Raymond Cattell

Raymond Cattell
Raymond Bernard Cattell
Born	(1905-03-20)20 March 1905 Hilltop, near Birmingham, England
Died	2 February 1998(1998-02-02) (aged 92) Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
Nationality	British and American
Fields	Psychology
Institutions	University of Illinois
Alma mater	King's College London
Doctoral advisor	Francis Aveling, King's College London
Known for	16 Personality Factors, Fluid and crystallized intelligence, Culture Fair Intelligence Test

Raymond Bernard Cattell, PhD, DSc (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British and American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure and his exploration of many areas within empirical psychology. These multifaceted areas included: the basic dimensions of personality and temperament, the range of cognitive abilities, the dynamic dimensions of motivation and emotion, the clinical dimensions of abnormal personality, patterns of group syntality and social behavior, applications of personality research to psychotherapy and learning theory, predictors of creativity and achievement, and many multivariate research methods including the refinement of factor analytic methods for exploring and measuring these domains. Cattell authored, co-authored, or edited almost 60 scholarly books, more than 500 research articles, and over 30 standardized psychometric tests, questionnaires, and rating scales. According to a widely cited ranking, Cattell was the 16th most eminent, 7th most cited in the scientific journal literature, and among the most productive, but controversial psychologists of the 20th century.

As a research psychologist, Cattell was devoted to the scientific pursuit of knowledge through rigorous research. He was an early proponent of using factor analytic methods instead of what he called "subjective verbal theorizing" to explore empirically the basic dimensions of personality, motivation, and cognitive abilities. One of the results of Cattell's application of factor analysis was his discovery of no fewer than 16 separate primary trait factors within the normal personality sphere alone (based on the trait lexicon). He called these factors "source traits" because he believed they provide the underlying source for the observable "surface" behaviors we think of as personality. This empirically-derived theory of personality factors and the multidimensional self-report instrument used to measure them are known respectively as the 16 personality factor model and the 16PF Questionnaire (16PF).