Cattell was born in Staffordshire in England in 1905. He came from what Engler (1999) described as a happy and content Childhood. He was 9 years old when World War One broke out, which "had an effect on him in his later years". Cattell did his University studies in London, and majored in Chemistry and Physics. However interested and Scientifically orientated he was towards these, he felt limited by their detachment from society, thus turned towards Psychology, in which he earned his PH.D in 1929. While at the University of London, Cattell worked under renowned Psychologist Charles Spearman, whom is responsible for "Factor Analysis". Factor Analysis later became one of the fundamental tools in Cattell's personality construct.
Because of his history and interests in the more structured Sciences, Cattell's approach to Psychology was more attuned to empirical understanding then the Philosophically based theories such as Freud, Jung etc. During the 1940's, Cattell allied with Edward Thorndike, a behavioural Psychologist whom did numerous studies into the arena of operant conditioning, and operant learning. Like the behaviouralists, Cattell shared an approach that the unconsciously dominated inner world of Freud, dominated by conflicting drives and misplaced sexual urges was not the motivation of individual human behaviour. However, Cattell did not go so far as to state that the only behaviour that was relevant to scientific studies was that which was observable visually. Cattell postulated the idea originated under Gordon Allport that there are complementary elements to a human personality, in which an individual has an inclination, moulded by environmental, social and hereditary forces, to hold dominant traits. These traits were the inner building blocks of personality, but these fundamental traits were not merely visible in the persons outward behaviour, they are masked in numerous surface traits that can all be equally described under one fundamental, or core trait.
