1940

For Irving Bender, professor of psychology emeritus who died last spring 82 years young, the Class of '40 held a special place.

Unknown to many of the Class, 1940 served as a guinea pig for a study by Professor Bender of the psychology of change. Indeed, through him, the class has become something of a foot-note in psychology, a statistical reference for future studies of man as an evolving social animal.

It all started our senior year when Professor Bender interviewed and tested 112 members of the Class selected as a representative sample for measuring and correlating personality, background, values, ambitions, and achievement and trouble. His intent was to sketch a profile of a middle-class college generation of that time. He made followup studies in 1955, 1965, and 1969 with 60 of the original group still participating in the final questionnaire analyzed by the class's hidden watchdog.

A report on these studies appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology two years ago but has only now come to our attention. Reduced to formal academic language, the Class scarcely seems the collection of vibrant, striving, happy or troubled individuals we see ourselves to be. But for Professor Bender, both the individuals he studied and the Class itself remained a central concern. Ebullient, interested, and perhaps a little more elfish, he came to our last reunion to see once again the faces behind the statistics. And he expressed in his recent memoires a desire to accomplish "what is important to me," and first on the list was his "1940 study."

Although he may have wished to explore other avenues with the data, or perhaps to take one more sampling of changes of attitude and value among us, the journal article stands as a noteworthy summing-up. And some of what he found underlines that it is not always comfortable to be a guinea pig.

The Class, he found, confounded some earlier theories of the value changes experienced by middle-class men. He reported, for instance, that on the basis of his studies of the Class of '40 and similar data from the Dartmouth classes of '56 and '68, "One can not say that the values of college graduates do not change noticeably during the adult years." The theoretical values of the Class of '40 strengthened noticeably over the years after graduation, and the aesthetic and religious values shifted sharply, diminishing in the first 15 years and re-asserting themselves in our middle years. Only the economic, social, and political values, he wrote, went essentially unchanged.

Curiously, however, in terms of a society in which change has come to be regarded as the only constant, Professor Bender seemed to find what may be inferred as a negative correlation with a tendency toward value change.

"Self-perceived value change in adult life is predictable," he wrote, "from personality ratings as a student. Change tends to be reported by men who as students had low grades, low practical intelligence, weak self-concepts and poor relations with other people. Later, they tended to be rated low on value energy. In short, persons reporting most value change over the years tended to be less intellectually alert and to lack ego strength."

Later, commenting on political attitudes, Professor Bender noted, "Using this measure, the men who became less liberal from 1940 to 1969 tended to be businessmen (as opposed to professional men) without graduate degrees; they tended to say that they would not choose the same college major if they were to do it over. In 1940, they were rated low on creativity, influence, inquiring mind, power of analysis, work habits, practical intelligence and likeability. The men who became more politically conservative were generally the same as those who reported changes in (other) items. These data agree with (others) in portraying an association between political conservatism and personal frustration."

Professor Bender also found that during periods of change in society both older alumni and contemporary students tended to show shifts in values, but that shifts among students and younger alumni were sharper. In that context, from his information he exonerated "changing patterns of student recruitment" as the cause of the wide generation gap of the "troubled" late '60s. He concluded, after appropriate adjustments in his findings, that "a large generation gap would have occurred in 1968 even if the recruitment of Dartmouth students had remained constant since 1940. The gap was a reflection of broader value changes within middle class society."

Although Professor Bender observed in his latter-day correspondence with men from the Class of '40 "increasing expressions of anxiety and unrest appearing to be related to problems of life adjustment at about the age of 50," he also found a consoling return to value stability as the Class moved into its full maturity.

But he left any more substantive interpretations of his data to younger generations of researchers. Of himself and his work, meanwhile, he left among his papers a series of observations, some in verse, which imply an acknowledged uncertainty about his conclusions. An example:

Now who designs the labyrinth of life?

Who knows the ins and outs of alteredways?

The psychologist who plagues rats andcats,Fooled by a sleepy kitten in a maze.

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