1998 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award

Paul Meehl

University of Minnesota

Learning theory, the nature of schizophrenia, construct validity, personality measurement, actuarial and clinical prediction, the base rate problem, configural scoring, psychotherapy, significance testing, psychology and law, philosophy of science, extrasensory perception, taxometric theory and methods – to each of these diverse areas, Paul Meehl has made fundamental contributions. His bibliography sparkles with papers that have become classics because they are innovative, scholarly, and models of trenchant but lucid analysis. Like James McKeen Cattell himself, Meehl’s focus of interest has been on the nature and sources of individual differences. Beginning in the 1950s, this Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences has already been recognized by most of the honors and awards available to psychologists. Generous in the context of discovery, rigorous in the context of verifications, a brilliant teacher, Meehl has been a role model for generations of Minnesota psychologists and for their students, in turn, all around the country.