Carl Hovland facts for kids

Carl Iver Hovland (born June 12, 1912 – died April 16, 1961) was an important psychologist. He mainly worked at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II. Carl Hovland studied how people's attitudes change and how persuasion works. He was the first to describe something called the sleeper effect. This happened after he looked at how the Frank Capra propaganda film Why We Fight affected soldiers. He also helped create the social judgment theory of attitude change. This theory suggests that how much you belong to a group can affect how easily you are persuaded by them.

Biography of Carl Hovland

Carl Hovland was born in Chicago on June 12, 1912. When he was a child, he loved music very much. He even thought about having a career in music. But when he went to college, psychology became a big part of his life. In 1938, he married Gertrude Raddatz.

During World War II, Carl Hovland was asked to join a special team. He led about fifteen researchers. Their job was to study how people's attitudes could be changed by messages. This work was very important for the US Army.

Hovland and his team at Yale studied how people change their minds. They looked at what makes someone more likely to be persuaded. Their findings were shared in a book called Communication and Persuasion. It was published in 1953. Later in his life, Hovland became interested in how people form ideas. He even used computer simulations to study this.

Carl Hovland was a respected scientist. He was a member of important groups. These included the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences.

Carl Hovland's Contributions to Psychology

Carl Hovland loved doing research in psychology. Early in his career, he explored many different topics. He wrote papers about how reliable tests were. He also reviewed studies on how things seem to move. His early work included four important papers on how learned responses spread to similar situations.

Hovland started to focus on how propaganda affects individuals. His experiments with the army were key to this. He believed that if he knew a person's attitude, he could guess their future actions. But some studies showed that attitudes don't always predict behavior perfectly. This led to more research on how attitudes can still be changed.

Hovland also looked at how people persuade each other. He led many studies that greatly improved our understanding of persuasion. His work in this area has been very influential.

The SMCR Model of Communication

To test his ideas, Hovland helped develop the SMCR model. This model has four main parts:

• Source variables: Who is sending the message?
• Message variables: What is the message itself?
• Channel variables: How is the message sent (like TV or radio)?
• Receiver variables: Who is getting the message?

By changing each of these parts, Hovland learned more about how attitudes change. This "message-learning approach" helped explain how persuasion works. However, it was sometimes hard to study how all these parts worked together.