Description: In college Kohut was drawn to the idea that attitudes, opinions, and personality types could be measured.
Transcript:
It’s Andrew Kohut, K-O-H-U-T.
I’m from New Jersey – from Northern New Jersey. I was born in Newark. I was raised in Bergen
County. That’s where I went to college. That’s where I went to graduate school.
(Laughter) I would get a real dose of reality check in Northern New Jersey, so I guess that was
quite helpful. I don’t know. I mean I think that New Jersey and Bergen County in particular in the
1950s and early ‘60s was very much . . . very typical of post-war America when all was stable and . .
. and . . . . and the issues were only about whether the Yankees would win a . . . yet another World
Series. And you know everything seemed very stable and kind of boring. Conformity was the big
issue. Have Americans turned conformist? “The Organization Man” was one of the big books . . .
one of the first big books . . . big . . . big think books, so to speak, that I read. And “The Hidden
Persuaders” and Vance Packard and all of this concern about corporate power, and concern about .
. . about the . . . the fact that young people and society at large wasn’t very rebellious and very
imaginative, perhaps. And 1950s Bergen County was pretty typical of a place that . . . a part of the
world that was booming after the Second World War with veterans starting their families and
raising their families. And I . . . I was raised in a blue collar environment. And I learned about hard
work, and I learned to . . . It was always emphasized that a good education and . . . and trying to
achieve things was the way to lead your life.
I had no idea. I went to college, you know, because I was . . . thought . . . I was told that that was
the right thing to do. I sort of ambled through that. I was not very interested in it. I was not a very
good student. And then I got interested in . . . In about my third or fourth year, I got interested in
sociology. And I started reading . . . It was more social psychology that interested me. I started
reading about the way you could take measurements and capture attitudes about . . . and
personality types and people’s dispositions. And there was a famous psychological battery that
intrigued me. It was called the Adorno Scale. And what it did was it measured people’s
predisposition to fascism, and how authoritarian they were, and how biased and bigoted they
were. It was used . . . developed during the war in some way to calibrate the Nazi way of thinking.
And I read this, and there were all of these questions. And I said, “My god, you can actually
measure stuff like this.” And it intrigued me. And so then I became a little bit interested in . . . in
pursuing . . . pursuing sociology. And I went to graduate school and I met some really great
professors who . . . I was mostly interested in social methodology. The idea of being able to
measure opinions, and attitudes, and quantitatively examine social issues really caught my
attention. And that was what got me going doing what I do.
Recorded On: 9/14/07
