Discover the Best Books Written by Paul E. Meehl

Paul Everett Meehl was an American clinical psychologist, Hathaway and Regents' Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, and past president of the American Psychological Association. 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 empirical studies and theoretical accounts of construct validity, schizophrenia etiology, psychological assessment, behavioral prediction, and philosophy of science. 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.

Meehl started as an undergraduate 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, which he held throughout his career. In addition, he had appointments in psychology, law, psychiatry, neurology, philosophy, and served as a fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, founded by Herbert Feigl, Meehl, and Wilfrid Sellars.

Meehl rose quickly to academic positions of prominence. He was chairman of the University of Minnesota Psychology Department at age 31, president of the Midwestern Psychological Association at age 34, recipient of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology at age 38, and president of that association at age 42. 

He was promoted to Regents' professor, 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 during the 1950s collaborated with a group of Lutheran theologians and psychologists to write What, Then, Is Man?. 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, Meehl was a signatory of a collective statement titled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal. He died on February 14, 2003, at his home in Minneapolis of chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. In 2005, Donald R. Peterson, a student of Meehl's, published a volume of their correspondence.