Graziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)
James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) was an American psychologist. Although his early training was with Wundt in the structuralists’ tradition, Cattell became an important force in stimulating the American functionalism movement.
Cattell’s work focused on the study of individual differences, an area that had been stimulated by Darwin’s evolutionary concepts and by Francis Galton’s statistical methods. Cattell stimulated American psychology to study groups of people instead of single individuals and to use statistical procedures, although Cattell was apparently not adept at statistics or mathematics (Schultz & Schultz, 2008). Cattell's major contributions were in the field of mental testing.