Jack Block

Jacob "Jack" Block (April 28, 1924 January 13, 2010)[1] was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. His main areas of research were personality theory, personality development, research methodology, personality assessment, longitudinal research, and cognition. He often collaborated with his wife Jeanne Block.

His most renowned body of work, undertaken primarily with his wife, was a longitudinal study on a cohort of more than 100 San Francisco Bay Area toddlers. He studied them regularly for nearly 30 years. Unlike most longitudinal studies, the Blocks' focused on the psychological makeup and history of the subjects, rather than quantitative measures such as IQ. The study tracked how the subjects' background influenced their later choices and the outcomes of their lives.

Block was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1950. He received many awards over the years and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

One of Block's studies drew particular notice in the news media. Published in The Journal of Research in Personality in 2006, it found that subjects who at 3 years old had seemed thin-skinned, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable tended at 23 to be political conservatives. On the other hand, 3-year-olds characterized as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient were inclined to become liberals.

Book publications

  • "The Q-Sort Method in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research", 1961
  • "The Challenge of Response Sets", 1965
  • Lives Through Time, 1971
  • Personality as an Affect-Processing System, 2002
  • The Q-Sort in Character Appraisal, 2008
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gollark: Essentially, none are safe.
gollark: You do *not* have the GTech™ generalized food production systems, which are capable of producing chocolate.
gollark: > The SinthTech™️ Inc. Memetic Research & Neutralisation Agency (mRNA) has so far discovered everything there is to know about memeticsThis is highly implausible.
gollark: I can't not neither unconfirm nor antideny the non-use of no memetics which might or might not be more powerful or less powerful or equally powerful compared to the lesser memetics which are potentially in use by some entities who may or may not exist.

References

  1. Fox, Margalit (February 6, 2010). "Jack Block, Who Studied Young Children Into Adulthood, Dies at 85". The New York Times. Retrieved February 7, 2010.


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