Profile of David McClelland on Famous Like Me

David Clarence McClelland (1917-1998) was a behavioral psychologist, social psychologist, and an advocate of quantitative history. McClelland earned his BA in 1938 at Wesleyan University, his MA in 1939 at the University of Missouri, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Yale University in 1941. McClelland taught at the Connecticut College and Wesleyan University before accepting, in 1956, a position at Harvard University. After his 30- years-tenure at Harvard he moved, in 1987, to Boston University, where he was a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology until his death at the age of 80.

McClelland proposed a content theory of motivation based on the Murray's (1938) theory of personality. In his book (1961) The achieving society, McClelland asserts that human motivation comprises three dominant needs: the need for achievement (N-Ach), the need for power (N-Pow) and the need for affiliation (N-Affil). The subjective importance of each need varies from individual to individual and depends also on an individual's cultural background. He also claimed that this motivational complex is an important factor in the social change and evolution of societies. His legacy includes the scoring system which he co-developed for the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), used for personality assessment and in achievement motivation research, and described in McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell's (1953) book The achievement motive.

McClelland's theory is related to the Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of the key studies, confirming the validity of McClelland's theories, is the study of Bradburn and Berlew (1961) who analyzed achievement motives in British school readers and showed a strong correlation of these themes, a generation later, with the Britain's industrial growth.

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