The American psychologist Carl I. Hovland (1912-1961) was one of the pioneers in research on the effects of social communication on attitudes, beliefs, and concepts.

Carl I. Hovland was born in Chicago, III. He attended Northwestern University and completed his graduate studies at Yale University, receiving his doctorate in 1936. He then joined the faculty at Yale, where he remained throughout his entire career.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s Hovland made major contributions to several areas of human experimental psychology, such as the efficiency of different methods of rote learning. From his close association with Clark L. Hull and other psychologists working at the Yale Institute of Human Relations, Hovland developed a comprehensive view of the behavioral sciences that led him to extend the analytic experimental approach of research on human learning to underdeveloped areas of research in the human sciences.

Hovland's first opportunity to work intensively...