Walter Dill Scott

Walter Dill Scott (May 1, 1869 – September 24, 1955) was an American psychologist and academic administrator who was one of the first applied psychologists and the 10th president of Northwestern University. He applied psychology to various business practices such as personnel selection and advertising.

Scott was born in Cooksville, Illinois near the town of Normal, Illinois. He lived on a farm until the age of 19 when he entered Illinois State Normal University. He remained at the university for two and a half years while teaching at country schools. With the aid of a scholarship, he was able to attend Northwestern University in 1891 where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1895. He desired to become a university president in China, so he enrolled at McCormick Theological Seminary; however, upon his graduation in 1898, he could not find a position. Instead, he decided to go to Germany with his wife and study psychology with Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. While there, he received his Doctorate of Philosophy in psychology and education in 1900.

He returned to the United States in 1900 and was appointed instructor of psychology and education and director of the psychological laboratory at Northwestern University. In 1907, Scott was made professor of psychology and head of the new Department of Psychology. In 1909, he was appointed professor of advertising in its School of Commerce and in 1912, professor of applied psychology in the School of Commerce.

While teaching at Northwestern University, he was approached by an advertising executive looking for ideas to make advertising more effective. He turned his attention to this area and composed the book The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice in 1903. In 1908, he published another book about that topic titled The Psychology of Advertising. Scott was granted extended leave of absence from Northwestern from 1916-1918 which enabled him to serve as Director of the new Bureau of Salesmanship at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Scott's main area of interest at the Bureau was the application of scientific knowledge to business problems. Some of his personnel selection methods included tests to measure certain desirable characteristics and rating scales to rate applicants on necessary skills and attributes (appearance, demeanor, neatness, judgment, accuracy). In 1919, Scott and his associates founded the Scott Company Engineers and Consultants in Industrial Personnel, which provided services to over 40 industrial concerns in its first year.

He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1919, and in 1920, elected president of Northwestern University where he served until 1939. In 1933, he was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French Government for his contributions to education and the Goethe Plaque by the German Government "in recognition of Northwestern University's impressive celebration of Goethe's anniversary". At Northwestern, Scott Hall is named for Walter and his wife Anna Miller Scott. In his nineteen years of presidency, Scott was able to raise around $70,000,000 for the university. Scott will be recalled as the president who transformed Northwestern into a financially stable, administratively consolidated, and academically respectable university.

He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Alpha Phi Omega.

Along with Alfred Binet and Walter Van Dyke Bingham, Scott applied the military's need for "quick thinking" recruits when developing "intelligence." Scott devoted all of his psychological career to researching methods of social control and human motivation. His interest in this subject was attributed to Wilhelm Wundt's influence while at Leipzig. This interest ultimately led to his great contribution to Applied psychology. Scott adopted an optimistic approach to personal management with the goal that humans could overcome limitations. He believed that a pleasant working environment would show increased productivity among workers. Unlike Hugo Münsterberg and Harry L. Hollingworth, Scott disregarded features in the workplace like fatigue and stimulants on the worker. Sir Francis Galton was a primary influence on Scott’s writings. Both men had elitist views about the use of science to organize society, but Scott believed that habit dictated social order. Scott was not motivated to discover whether innate influences outweighed environmental factors. Rather, he was motivated by practical social needs, allowing him to rephrase Galton's human variation analysis as "personal" differences. Before World War I, Scott developed tests for any variety of mental functions that business clients specified as most desirable among prospective employees. Using his "personalized" approach, Scott praised the individual and autonomy—escaping the influences of environment and heredity.

Scott, Galton, and Binet all sought to facilitate the institutional placement of persons by objectifying evaluations and assuming that mental ability was innate.