Some of the men had other kinds of difficulties. One Study member, whom his adult friends knew as “a very happy guy,” talked about growing up with an alcoholic mother. “I had a terrible time in my second, fourth and sixth grades. I got trial promotions probably because the teacher wanted to get rid of me. Throughout this period, also, there was hardly any income in the family. My folks had lost the variety store and gas station and during the winter, warmth at night consisted of getting under a pile of blankets. The winter days of my early years were spent curled up on a bench behind a big potbelly stove in a variety store listening to men talk. I would stay there because it was warmer than it was in the house.”
Whatever a man’s origins, his Harvard degree was a ticket of entry to the upper middle class. When the men returned from their service in World War II, they also benefited from high employment, a strong dollar, and the G.I. Bill, which virtually guaranteed an affordable graduate school education. They were just young enough to participate in the physical fitness and anti-smoking trends of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Most of the 1940 generation of Harvard men were upwardly mobile, and most ended up more successful than their fathers. (There were a few exceptions, like the man whose Wall Street father made two million 1935 dollars a year in the midst of the Depression. No, this father was not Joseph P. Kennedy.)
HOW THE MEN WERE STUDIED: 1939–1946
Three investigators interviewed each sophomore accepted into the Study: Clark Heath, a staff psychiatrist, and Lewise Gregory. The meeting with Dr. Heath included a comprehensive two-hour physical and a history of the young man’s dietary habits, medical history, and physical responses to stress. Each man was also studied by Carl Seltzer, the physical anthropologist, who recorded his racial type (Nordic, Mediterranean, etc.) and his somatotype (mesomorph, endomorph, ectomorph), determined whether his body build was predominately “masculine” or “feminine,” and made exhaustive anthropometric measurements.13 The Study investigators noted his every physical detail, from the functioning of his major organs to his brow ridges and moles to the hanging length of his scrotum. They took a careful dietary history, too, including the number of teaspoons of sugar in his daily coffee or tea (the range was 0 to 7!).
As I’ve noted, the emphasis on somatotyping was an ill-fated effort to advance the then-fashionable science of physical anthropology. Carl Seltzer’s mentor was the Harvard anthropologist William H. Sheldon, who had been influenced by Kretschmer’s work and believed that human personality was significantly correlated with body build. The ectomorphic build, that is, was thought to be correlated with a schizoid temperament, the mesomorphic build with a sanguine temperament, and the endomorphic build with a manic-depressive temperament.14 This is a cat that I let out of the bag in the last chapter; a third of a century later, Grant Study follow-up revealed that none of the ten outcomes in the Decathlon of Flourishing (or the men’s officer potential) correlated significantly with body type.
Eight to ten one-hour psychiatric interviews focused on the man’s family, his values, his religious experience, and his career plans. The psychiatrists were trying to get to know the men as people, not as patients. No attempt was made to look for pathology or to interpret the men’s lives psychodynamically. The interviews included a history of early sexual development, but unfortunately the psychiatrists did not inquire into the men’s close relationships.
Lewise Gregory integrated individual interviews with the men with the careful social histories that she gathered in her home visits with the men’s parents; I’ve described these above. In keeping with the research methodology of the 1930s, those histories were sometimes more anecdotal than systematic. Her chief informants were usually the men’s mothers, although fathers and siblings at times contributed information as well.
Frederic Wells, the Study psychologist, gave each man tests designed to reflect native intelligence (the Army Alpha Verbal and Alpha Numerical). In many cases he also administered two projective tests: a word association test and a shortened version of the Rorschach. The intention here was to test imagination, not to explore the unconscious (for which purpose the Rorschach is usually employed). Also included was the Harvard Block Assembly Test, an assessment of manipulative dexterity and comprehension of spatial relationships.15
Physiologist Lucien Brouha studied each man in the Fatigue Lab. Brouha measured each man’s respiratory functions and the physiologic effects of running on an 8.6 percent incline treadmill at seven miles per hour for five minutes or until exhausted, whichever came first. Examiners took measures of pulse rate, blood lactate levels, exercise tolerance, and so on as a way of sorting the students by physical fitness. Surprisingly, I noted in 2000—more than fifty years later—that treadmill endurance correlated better with successful relationships than with physical health. (As it turned out, endurance and stoicism turned out to be better predictors of love than health in other areas, too.)
In 1940, the Study received a one-time grant of $2,400 ($35,000 in 2009 dollars) from the Macy Foundation, a philanthropic organization sympathetic to psychosomatic medicine. This windfall enabled the recording of primitive single-channel electroencephalograms, which had just begun to come into use. The neophyte encephalographer’s interpretations of these EEGs sometimes sound more like Tarot card readings than physiological analysis; in some cases the tracings were thought to reveal “latent homosexuality.” The Study also hired an experienced forensic graphologist to interpret the men’s handwriting. It soon became clear that neither handwriting nor EEGs were useful predictors of personality. But however naive or even comical some of these efforts sound now, they reflect a serious and important truth—that the Grant Study was collecting information even before there was science available to capitalize on its investment, in hopes that it would prove meaningful later. And in many cases it did. Prewar psychological and medical science were very different from today’s counterparts. It wasn’t only attachment theory that had to wait until the nineteen-fifties; so did double-blind placebo-controlled drug trials. Good science is always reaching a little ahead of itself.
Table 3.2 The Sequence of Contacts
1938–1945
8–10 psychiatric interviews
Complete physical exam by Dr. Heath
Interviews by Dr. Heath and Miss Gregory; she also made home visits
Anthropological and physiological testing
EEG, Rorschach, and handwriting analysis (on many of the men)
Complete psychometric testing and some projective testing by Dr. Wells
The 26 personality traits assigned by Dr. Woods (Appendix E)
Brief childhood assessment (1–3) by Miss Gregory
At age 21 the ABC College adjustment (soundness) ratings assigned
1946–1950
Debriefing of combat experience by Dr. Monks
Annual questionnaires begun
Interviews with wives by social anthropologist Dr. Lantis
Thematic Apperception Test by Dr. McArthur
Full staff conferences on each man at age 29; ABCDE ratings of personality soundness for future adjustment made
1950–1967
Mostly biennial questionnaires; little other contact
1967–1985
All men re-interviewed, mostly by Eva Milofsky or Dr. Vaillant (Appendix A) Beginning age 45, complete physical exams every five years until the present
Objective health scored 1–5 (Well, minor illness, chronic illness, disabling illness, dead)
Childhood environment assessed, blind to events after age 19
Wives twice sent questionnaires
Adjustment at work, love, and play assessed from age 30–47 on all men (Appendix D)
Adaptive coping style (narcissistic, neurotic, empathic) assessed
NEO (Costa and McCrae) administered by mail
Lazare Personality Inventory administered by mail
1985–2002
All men re-interviewed (Appendix A)
Adjustment at work, love
, and play assessed from age 49–65 and from age 65–80 (Appendix D)
Wives and children sent questionnaires
Physical exams every five years and biennial questionnaires continued
Gallup Organization’s Wellsprings of a Positive Life administered by mail
Aging at 80 computed (subjective and objective mental and physical health)
2002–2010
Physical exams every five years and biennial questionnaires continued
Joint marital interviews and “daily diaries”
Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS) at ages 80, 85, and 90
Re-interviewed at retirement, 1985–2005
2010
Decathlon scores compiled
Case in point: the scientific pendulum has swung once more, and in the early twenty-first century genetic research once more dominates studies of environment. Instead of handwriting samples, the Study is collecting DNA. We don’t yet know how it will be used. What will that look like to readers seventy-five years from now?
EARLY DATA ANALYSIS
By 1941, the Study had examined 211 sophomores. A debate arose as to whether this was enough. Frederic Wells, perhaps the most established researcher employed by the Study, sent a letter to Clark Heath imploring that he stop accepting new students so that the staff could begin evaluating the huge amount of data that they already accumulated. But others worried that 211 cases was only a small number, after all, when the goal was to find conclusive correlations between the psychological and anthropological. Eventually a compromise was reached, and the researchers agreed to take on one last group of students from the class of 1944. They were studied as sophomores in 1942 and completed the total Study cohort of 268. Between 1938 and 1943 the Grant Foundation had contributed $450,000 ($7 million in 2009 dollars) to the research.
But now the Study had to decide how to harvest this vast planting, and that was not proving easy. As I’ve said, a longitudinal study has to stay a bit ahead of itself, both in its data collecting and in its theoretical hunches. After all, it can’t know in advance what will prove relevant (if it did, there would be no need for the study), and has to rely on best guesses. This can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. But the Grant Study was a very early longitudinal study, so it didn’t have the benefit of others’ experience, and it began in something of a theoretical vacuum, when very little was known about adult growth and development. It had been very ambitious in collecting data, but not always very thoughtful about what it would do with the results. Many of the investigators were feeling overwhelmed, and by 1944 William Grant was beginning to express serious doubts about the administration of the Study and about whether he should continue to fund it. The trustees of the Grant Foundation put increasing pressure on the researchers to produce a summary of the Study’s early results. For the next two years, the Study archives are filled with desperate efforts to discover publishable material.
Only three papers appeared before 1945 (see Appendix F), and in 1945, two monographs were hastily published to meet Grant’s demand for results and a popular book that would dramatize the Study’s findings.
Earnest Hooton was a Harvard professor, a brilliant physical anthropologist, and a fluent writer. He had been Study anthropologist Carl Seltzer’s mentor (also my archaeologist father’s). And he was firmly committed to the world of constitutional medicine. “If we wish to study the whole man, we must begin with his physique,” he maintained, and he imagined that research out of the Grant Study might one day lead to “effective control of individual quality through genetics, or breeding.”16 It was he who had encouraged early researchers to expect that “[O]n the whole . . . ‘normality’ goes closely with a ‘strong masculine component.’”17 Hooton’s summary of the Grant Study was published in 1945 as Young Man, You Are Normal.18 That was a far cry from Grant’s own proposed title, The Grant Study of Social Adjustment, which did not help to bridge the growing rift between the Study administration and its funder. Still, for the next thirty years, Hooton’s was the leading book on the study.
In it he wrote, “When physique, studied from different standpoints, turns out to be so intimately related to various personality traits, it is clear that body build must also furnish clues to the social capacities of the individual.”19 Instead of adducing any experimental evidence in support of these claims, however, he simply dismissed his opposition as “crass environmentalists.”20 This is a striking term. It conveys not just simple cluelessness about the environmental considerations that are so crucial now, but real antagonism to an entire way of thinking. Yet Arlie Bock had already been wondering about the nature/nurture issue in his first visions of the Study seven years before; it’s possible to see in the difference between his attitude and Hooton’s a scientific paradigm nearing its tipping point.
The second monograph was What People Are, by Study director Clark Heath. Heath’s book relied heavily on anthropometric measurements too, and also on an untested personality profiling scheme devised by William Woods, a staff psychiatrist without research training.21
Woods’s schema (see Appendix E) scored Study members on twenty-six personality traits, many of them dichotomies such as Vital (warm, expressive) Affect vs. Bland (colorless) Affect, Well-Integrated Personality vs. Unintegrated Personality, Verbal vs. Inarticulate, Sociable vs. Asocial etc. An attempt was then made to correlate the resulting profiles with body build but the results were unconvincing.
Neither of these two hastily published books attracted much attention, and certainly they did nothing to halt the shift toward environmentalism in the social sciences. In the years since, somatotype categories have not proven particularly useful when matched against other independent ratings, and neither have (most of) Woods’s personality traits. Even at the time, what evidence there was, was not persuasive. Worse, the early investigators were not blind to each other’s ratings, so there’s no way to know how much apparent early correlations between body build and personality were a function of halo effect or observer bias. In 1970 I tried to replicate the correlations reported in some of the early papers and could not.
Before we contemptuously (and prematurely) dismiss the early investigators’ work as a wash, however, we have to consider the realities of statistical methodology in those days. There were no computers to absorb infinitudes of entries and magically align them along dozens of axes at the click of a key. Study members had to be listed down the left-hand side of huge ledger sheets. Scores and measurements were plotted along the top, individually, in exquisite handwriting. And that was only the beginning. To be useful, the data had to be pulled out of the ledgers, again by hand, and subjected to individual calculations, some of them quite complex. The tests that the original investigators used are out of fashion today, but analysis was laborious in a way that is unimaginable now. The Study in the 1940s did not even own a Monroe calculator (as the early electric adding machines were called). Ironically, in 1944, one of the world’s first reliable computers, the Mark I, was being installed only 300 yards away. But the techniques and technologies of complex data analysis that could (and in time did) reveal unexpected correlations in the early data were not yet available to the Grant Study researchers. When the rich crop they had sown finally did come to fruition after the explosion of computer technology in the late twentieth century, it was the early investigators who had done much of the heavy lifting.
EARLY CONCLUSIONS AND SOME CORRECTIONS
The specter of World War II engaged early the Study’s interest in possible military applications for its research, particularly the identification of potential officers and appropriate placements for them. John Monks was a patrician internist who joined the staff in 1946 to study the men’s response to the war, and produced a well-researched if little-appreciated monograph, College Men at War.22 Monks treated Woods’s personality traits as if their scientific validity had been proven, with the suggestion that they be used to identify desirable traits in officer candidates. His monograph was fa
scinating in the stories and backgrounds it gave of the College men. It was disappointing, however, because Monks, like the original investigators, had not yet grasped the power of longitudinal study to actually test a hypothesis.
And the fresh empirical follow-up of 2010 (which came out of the questions I was trying to answer for this book as well as the Decathlon challenge) found that such promising variables as Masculine Body Build, Well Integrated, Vital Affect, or such foreboding ones as Lack of Purpose and Values and Shy, bore no relation at all to attained military rank. The only college trait that did predict high rank was Political, while low rank was predicted only by . . . Cultural and Creative and Intuitive! The scriptwriters of M*A*S*H might have anticipated that result, but Bock’s original investigators certainly did not.
Woods’s predictive schema has had more general problems than its failure to identify good officer material. Most of his traits failed to correlate significantly with any of the events in the 2010 Decathlon of Flourishing, and only one correlated significantly with more than three. That one, however, was a notable exception. Well Integrated (defined as “steady, dependable, thorough, sincere, and trustworthy”) correlated with eight Decathlon events, and for the last twenty-five years has been a staple variable in our data analyses. It signals a bundle of traits that enable a young man “to surmount common problems which confront him such as career choice, competitive environment, and moral and religious attitudes.”23 It was assigned to 60 percent of the men, while 15 percent were called Incompletely Integrated. These latter men were deemed to lack perseverance, and were seen as “erratic, unreliable, sporadic, undependable, ill directed and little organized.” (The remaining 25 percent of the men were unclassified for this dichotomized variable.) Half a century later, proportionately four times as many of the Well Integrated enjoyed good marriages than the Incompletely Integrated. Another finding of great interest was that as of 2012, the Well Integrated have lived on average seven years longer. In contrast, the two variables that the original investigators thought would be most predictive of positive outcome, Vital Affect and Sociable, were unimportant after the first ten years.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 8
