Hadley Cantril

Hadley Cantril (1906–1969) was an American researcher of public opinion.

Born in Utah, he was educated at Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He joined the faculty of Princeton in 1936 and later became chairman of the Princeton University Department of Psychology. He was a member of the Princeton Radio Research Project before it relocated to Columbia University during the early 1940s, and was the main author of The Invasion from Mars, an academic study of Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which caused widespread panic. In 1940 he served as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Cantril's later psychological work included collaboration with Adelbert Ames, Jr. developing a transactional method for studying human perception, as well as other research in humanistic psychology.

Though trained as a psychologist, Cantril's most important work concerned the then-new topic of public opinion research. Influenced initially by the success of George Gallup and Elmo Roper during the 1936 presidential election, Cantril sought to apply their systematic polling technique to academic social psychology. Cantril was a founding editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. In 1940 he founded Princeton University's Office of Public Opinion Research. and from autumn 1940 onwards provided the Roosevelt administration with confidential information about American public opinion, particularly regarding the war in Europe. In 1942 Cantril conducted a small-sample survey of Vichy officials in Morocco, prior to Operation Torch, that revealed the intensity of the anti-British sentiment of the French forces there. This information influenced the disposition of forces during the operation, with American troops landing near Casablanca and mixed forces at Oran and Algiers.

In 1955 he founded the Institute for International Social Research (IISR) with Lloyd A. Free. Cantril had previously provided data on public opinion in America and abroad to Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower, and the IISR was often asked by United States government agencies to conduct small-sample public opinion polls in foreign countries. Notably, Cantril and Free conducted a poll of Cuba during 1960 demonstrating great support for Fidel Castro, which was overlooked during the presidential transition between Eisenhower and Kennedy and read only after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco. Cantril's most-cited work is The Pattern of Human Concerns, notable for the development of the self-anchoring scale (also known as "Cantril's Ladder"). Cantril and Free also first discovered the paradox that American voters tend to oppose "big government" in general while supporting many specific liberal social programs.

During the late 1950s, Cantril served on the International Objectives and Strategies panel of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Special Studies Project.

• Social Psychology of Everyday Life, 1934
• The Psychology of Radio (with Gordon Allport), 1935
• Industrial Conflict: a Psychological Interpretation, 1939
• The Invasion from Mars, a Study in the Psychology of Panic, 1940
• America Faces the War, a Study in Public Opinion, 1940
• Psychology of Social Movements, 1941
• Gauging Public Opinion, 1944
• Psychology of ego-involvements : social attitudes & identifications, 1947 (co-authored with Muzafer Sherif)
• The "Why" of Man's Experience, 1950
• Tensions that cause wars (a report for UNESCO), 1950
• Public Opinion, 1935–1946, 1951
• How Nations See Each Other, a study in public opinion, 1953 (co-authored with William Buchanan)
• Perception: a Transactional Approach, 1954 (co-authored with William H. Ittelson)
• On Understanding the French Left, 1956
• Faith, Hope, and Heresy: the Psychology of the Protest Voter, 1958
• Politics of Despair, 1958
• Reflections on the Human Venture, 1960
• Soviet Leaders and Mastery over Man, 1960
• Human Nature and Political Systems, 1961
• Pattern of Human Concerns, 1965
• Political beliefs of Americans; a study of public opinion, 1967
• The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research, 1967
• Psychology, Humanism, and Scientific Inquiry: the Selected Essays of Hadley Cantril, 1988 (posthumously)