Carl Hovland

Carl Iver Hovland (1912 to 1961) was an American psychologist who worked mainly at Yale University and, during World War II, for the US Army, studying attitude change and persuasion. Born in Chicago, he first meant to pursue a career in music and turned to psychology in college, taking his doctorate at Yale in 1936 under the supervision of Clark Hull. In the war he led a team of researchers recruited by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer, and his study of the Frank Capra film series Why We Fight led him to report the sleeper effect. He and his Yale group described their work on the conditions under which people change their attitudes in the 1953 book Communication and Persuasion, and he also developed the social judgment theory of attitude change. He collaborated with Irving Janis, who later became famous for the theory of groupthink. Hovland died in 1961, after learning that he had cancer.