Raymond Cattell

Raymond Bernard Cattell (1905 to 1998) was a British-American psychologist best known for using factor analysis to map the basic dimensions of personality, ability and motivation. Born in West Bromwich, England, he completed his doctorate at the University of London, where he worked with Charles Spearman, and later taught at Columbia, Clark and Harvard before spending 27 years at the University of Illinois. His factor-analytic work produced the 16 personality factor model and its 16PF Questionnaire, still widely used in hiring and counselling, and he proposed the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence and built the Culture Fair Intelligence Test. He argued for his sixteen-factor structure over Eysenck's three-factor model, and his second-order factors anticipated the Big Five. His later writing on Beyondism and eugenics was strongly criticized as racist, and in 1997 he declined a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Foundation after protests. He died in Honolulu in 1998.