Citizenship American Name Paul Meehl | Role Psychologist | |
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Born Paul Everett Meehl
3 January 1920
Minneapolis, Minnesota ( 1920-01-03 ) Institutions University of Minnesota Alma mater University of Minnesota Known for Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Construct Validity Notable awards National Academy of Sciences (1987)
APA Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1996)
James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award (1998) Died February 14, 2003, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States Fields Psychology, Philosophy of science Books Clinical Versus Statistical, Multivariate Taxometric Procedur, Psychodiagnosis; Selected Papers, Psychodiagnosis: Selected Papers, An Atlas for the Clinical Use of th | ||
Education University of Minnesota | ||
Paul Everett Meehl (3 January 1920 – 14 February 2003) was a clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Meehl as the 74th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Eleanor J. Gibson. Throughout his nearly 60-year career, Meehl made seminal contributions to psychology, including contributions on construct validity, schizophrenia etiology, behavioral assessment and prediction, and philosophy of science.
Contents
- Childhood
- Education and career
- Philosophy of science
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
- Clinical versus statistical prediction
- Schizophrenia
- Applied clinical views and work
- Selected works
- References
Childhood
Paul Meehl was born January 3, 1920 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Otto and Blanche Swedal. His family name "Meehl" was his stepfather's. When he was age 16, his mother died as the result of poor medical care which, according to Meehl, greatly affected his faith in the expertise of medical practitioners and diagnostic accuracy of clinicians. After his mother's death, Meehl lived briefly with his stepfather, then with a neighborhood family for one year so he could finish high school. He then lived with his maternal grandparents, who lived near the University of Minnesota.
Education and career
Meehl started at the University of Minnesota in March 1938. He earned his Bachelor's degree in 1941 with Donald G. Paterson as his advisor, and took his PhD in psychology at Minnesota under Starke R. Hathaway in 1945. Meehl's graduate student cohort at the time included Marian Breland Bailey, William K. Estes, Norman Guttman, William Schofield, and Kenneth MacCorquodale. Upon taking his doctorate, Meehl immediately accepted a faculty position at the University that he held throughout his career, with appointments in psychology, law, psychiatry, neurology, philosophy, and as a fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, founded by Herbert Feigl, Meehl, and Wilfrid Sellars. Meehl was chairman of the University of Minnesota Psychology Department at age 31, president of the Midwestern Psychological Association at 34, recipient of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology at 38, and president of that association at age 42. He was promoted to the highest academic position at the University of Minnesota in 1968. He received the Bruno Klopfer Distinguished Contributor Award in personality assessment in 1979, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987.
Meehl was not particularly religious during his upbringing, but in adulthood collaborated with a group of Lutheran theologians and psychologists to write What, Then, Is Man? (1958). This project was commissioned by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod through Concordia Seminary. The project explored both orthodox theology, psychological science, and how Christians (Lutherans, in particular) could responsibly function as both Christians and psychologists without betraying orthodoxy or sound science and practice.
In 1995, he was a signatory of a collective statement titled Mainstream Science on Intelligence, written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal.
Meehl practiced as a clinical psychologist throughout his career. In 1958, Meehl performed psychoanalysis on Saul Bellow as a patient, while Bellow was an instructor at the University of Minnesota.
In 2005, Donald R. Peterson, a student of Meehl's, published a volume of their correspondence.
Meehl died on February 14, 2003 at his home in Minneapolis of chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.
Philosophy of science
Meehl was a leading philosopher of science. Early in his career he was a proponent of Sir Karl Popper's Falsificationism, and later amended his views as neo-Popperian. Meehl was a strident critic of using statistical null hypothesis testing for the evaluation of scientific theory. He believed that null hypothesis testing was partly responsible for the lack of progress in many of the "scientifically soft" areas of psychology (e.g. clinical, counseling, social, personality, and community).
Meehl with his colleague Lee J. Cronbach introduced the notion of construct validity in psychology, as well as the application of nomological networks to understand psychological test properties and scientific theorizing and practice.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
Meehl conducted research on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), including development of the K scale. While Meehl did not directly develop the MMPI (he was a high school junior when Hathaway and McKinley created the item pool, for example), in the years after obtaining his PhD he contributed widely to the literature on interpreting the MMPI. In particular, Meehl argued that the MMPI could be used to understand personality profiles systematically associated with clinical outcomes, something he termed a statistical (versus a "clinical") approach to predicting behavior.
Clinical versus statistical prediction
His 1954 book Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence, analyzed the claim that "mechanical" (formal, algorithmic) methods of data combination outperformed "clinical" (e.g., subjective, informal, "in the head") methods when such combinations are used to arrive at a prediction of behavior. The analysis favored mechanical modes of combination and caused a considerable stir amongst clinicians. Meehl (1954) argued that mechanical methods of prediction would, used correctly, make more efficient decisions about patients' prognosis and treatment. As recently as 2009, however, clinicians make such decisions based on their professional judgment, that is, they combine all kinds of information "in their head" and arrive at a conclusion/prediction about a patient. Meehl (1954) theorized that clinicians would make more mistakes than a mechanical prediction tool created for a similar decision purpose. Mechanical prediction methods are simply a mode of combination of data to arrive at a decision/prediction concerning the emission of behavior. Mechanical prediction does not exclude any type of data from being combined. Mechanical prediction approaches can incorporate clinical judgments, properly coded, in their predictions. The defining characteristic is that, once the data to be combined is given, the mechanical approach will make a prediction that is 100% reliable. That is, it will make exactly the same prediction for exactly the same data every time. Clinical prediction, on the other hand, does not guarantee this.
Meta-analyses comparing clinical and mechanical prediction efficiency have supported Meehl's (1954) conclusion that mechanical data combination and prediction outperforms clinical combination and prediction.
Schizophrenia
Meehl was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1962. That year, he theorized that schizophrenia had a genetic link, contrary to the prevailing notion at the time that schizophrenia was caused by the rearing environment including parenting.
Applied clinical views and work
In 1973, Paul Meehl published Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences. He stated that his main reason for not attending case conferences in a psychological or psychiatric clinic is that he feels that they are intellectually unstimulating and boring, sometimes to the point of being offensive. Meehl directly identified problems and fallacies that he noticed in the psychology or psychiatry case conference setting. In contrast, he stated he found case conferences for internal medicine or neurology illuminating, in part because they often contain a pathologist's report containing the true disease and/or pathophysiology. In other words, the medical case conference often benefits from having a gold standard to which the clinical symptoms and signs could be compared and contrasted. Meehl argues that creating a psychiatric analogue to the pathologist's report is a promising area of research, and he proposes a format for case conferences that includes data provided for discussion, and a subset of data revealed at the end to show whether conference attendees' clinical inferences about the patient's diagnosis were in fact correct. Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences also addresses the issue of clinical versus statistical judgment, and the fact that clinical decision making, in case conferences and other environments, is often not very accurate. More generally, Meehl's paper encourages clinicians to be humble when it comes to skills used in decision making, and pushes for a higher scientific standard for clinical case conferences.