Carl Hovland: biography and study of persuasive communication

Carl Hovlan firmly believed that if the media could change opinions and attitudes in the audience, it could be considered an effective tool in such serious social issues as prejudice or stereotypes.

The man we are dealing with today, Carl Hovland, is a brilliant experimental psychologist who did not belong to any particular psychological approach, but His research laid the foundations for numerous social, experimental and cognitive psychological models.. Carl Hovland has been one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century.

His professional career was dedicated to research in the field of persuasion, group dynamics, communication and thinking.. His entire academic life was spent at Yale University. He also collaborated in very important research work for the United States Army and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He was the founding father of the famous Yale school or group and carried out the first research on persuasion and persuasive communication. The results of their research are known as the Hovland-Yale model.

It was during World War II that Carl Hovland, while working for the United States Department of Defense, developed his studies on the motivation and attitude change of soldiers.

His life

He was born in Chicago in 1912. It appears that young Hovland was an intelligent, introverted child who had trouble socializing with his classmates. However, his teachers described him as a bright and shy student, who lived in his dream world and had a hard time relating to the group.

He studied Mathematics, Biology, Physics and Experimental Psychology at Northwestern University. Later, she completed her graduate studies at Yale University. There he had the opportunity to be influenced by many important psychologists of the time, such as Clark L. Hull, who was his mentor and with whom he would work for several years.

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During his postgraduate studies, he published six academic articles. After completing his studies, he remained a professor at Yale for the remainder of his professional career. Around his work, the research group known as the Yale group was created.

He married in 1938 and started a family. World War II interrupted her research at Yale and was summoned by the Department of Defense in which he continued his studies on the effectiveness of propaganda and soldier training films.

The objective of this propaganda seemed to be to raise the morale of the soldiers. who were fighting against the Japanese troops, in a campaign that was proving painful and negatively affecting the morale of the troops.

After the war, he returned to Yale, where he was named chairman of the psychology department and, at age 39, was elected president of the American Psychological Association, APA. After a dramatic family episode involving his wife, she fell seriously ill and suffered a fatal accident.Carl Hovland also died prematurely as a result of cancer at the age of 49.

Carl Hovland’s research

During his time working with Clark L. Hull, both researchers designed a series of studies with the purpose of Assess rote learning and integration of psychology language with mathematical equations. Later, and without Hull, Hovland began to be interested in other aspects of the human condition such as communication.

As we have advanced, during World War II, he was recruited by the army to supervise military motivational training programs.. These studies investigated in depth the resistance to changing opinions. and developed methods to overcome it.

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The results were mixed, but it is worth noting that Hovland and his team managed to refute the Nazi propaganda theory about the effectiveness of unilateral presentation of information. This theory held that a successful persuasive communication should present only one aspect of an argument. But Carl Hovland’s research managed to contradict it.

After the war and back at Yale, his research branched into various areas of social communication. In collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, he organized a program of research on attitude change through the way information is presented.

His legacy

Following this project, Hovland extended his studies to the fields of problem solving, communication, opinion change, and social judgments. In this sense, his contributions are considered as the greatest single contribution to the field of social communication that anyone had made up to that time.

Carl Hovland studied all the elements involved in the communication process and his research focused on the influence of all its variables. He identified the different phases in effective communication focused on attitude change: exposure to the message, attention, understanding, acceptance and retention.

He also delved into the different circumstances of the message scenario. such as the credibility of the sender, the nature of the message and the disposition of the receiver. In 1953, he published a volume of work on mass communication, titled Communication and persuasionin which it contemplates its main conclusions and the analyzes about the persuasion processes.

In short, Carl Hovland revolutionized studies related to communication and persuasion. His research continues to be of interest and marked a new direction in subsequent studies.

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