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From: "Peter_McCrae" <>
Subject: HUDSON; LIAM-2005-UK
Date: Sun, 22 May 2005 01:19:35 +0100

Professor Liam Hudson
(Filed: 21/03/2005)
The Daily Telegraph & telegraph.co.uk

Professor Liam Hudson, who has died aged 71, began his career as an
experimental psychologist specialising in the relationship between
intelligence and creativity, but later reacted against the "scientific"
approach of the Oxbridge psychology schools in which he had been trained and
rejected as facile the attempt to distinguish innate personality types and
measure aptitude.



The relationship between creativity and intelligence has fascinated
psychologists ever since the early days of the discipline. At first it was
hoped that IQ tests would be the key to identifying creative people, but
studies of eminent men and women found that a high IQ score was not a good
predictor of creativity.

As an alternative to the IQ test, psychologists developed more open-ended
"free association" tests designed to distinguish between the creative and
non-creative. When Hudson tried these out among school children, he found
that they distinguished, more accurately, between students of the humanities
and those specialising in the physical sciences. In his influential Contrary
Imaginations (1966) he suggested that, within the English education system,
there were two distinct personality types: "convergers" with high IQs but
little taste for tests of free association, and "divergers", with the
reverse aptitudes.

But Hudson's observations began to suggest that the supposedly creative
"divergers" did not in fact show more originality or achievement than their
"converger" counterparts. In his second book, Frames of Mind, (1968) he
examined the effect of other kinds of broadly cultural affiliations in young
people's lives, including attitudes to authority, gender idenitification and
their choices of roles.

Hudson set up an experiment in which 16-year-old schoolboys were invited to
role play (in writing) a fictional "mad artist", John McMice, an
uninhibited, bohemian figure who often said things for effect, and who liked
to shock people with gruesome jokes. To Hudson's surprise he found that
young men who had presented themselves as somewhat nerdish "convergers"
produced scripts containing extraordinarily imaginitive, even obscene
material, suggesting that their psychological typecasting had been a matter
of cultural choice rather than innate tendency.

Hudson's third book The Cult of Fact (1972) challenged the assumptions and
pseudo-scientific methodology of much academic psychology, which tended to
overlook unquantifiable yet vital factors such as the role of myth and
cultural stereotype, expectations and attitudes to authority, role-play and
self-image in the formation of individual identity.

The son of a salesman and manager, Liam Hudson was born in London on July 20
1933. From Whitgift School, he went on to do his National Service in the
Royal Artillery, which for Hudson involved taking part in the Coronation
procession through the streets of London in 1953. He vividly recalled
marching in the pouring rain a few paces behind the Mounties, "caked halfway
up the chest in their horses' droppings".

In an wry account of his early academic career in The Cult of Fact, Hudson
described how he himself was a classic case of someone whose progress belied
their actual intellectual potential as measured by testing. At school, he
had been bottom of his class, yet he won a scholarship to Exeter College,
Oxford, to read Modern History - "a moral outrage to everyone who knew me".
He survived the preliminary examinations by the narrowest margin at the
second attempt, and switched to Philosophy and Psychology.

The Psychology school at Oxford at that time was strictly scientific in
tone. In order to illuminate the workings of the human brain, "we sorted
cards, watched flashing lights, pressed bars, and once or twice watched
white rats wander disconsolately through poorly-constructed mazes".
Graduating with a good Second, he won a research grant and moved to the
Psychology school at Cambridge to do a doctorate under Oliver Zangwill.

His career at Cambridge started unpromisingly when, as a research student at
Emmanuel College, he was placed next to the college Master, an historian, at
dinner. On hearing that Hudson was interested in intelligence tests, the
Master said: "Huh! Devices invented by the Jews for the advancement of
Jews."

"Offered, I now realise, as a provocation," Hudson wrote later, "the remark
blighted my relation with Emmanuel College; and it was some years before I
could bring myself - despite its strategic position at the top of Downing
Street - even to use its lavatory."

Appointed director of the Research Unit of Intellectual Development in 1964,
Hudson found a more congenial billet in the "stagey ambiance" of King's
College, Cambridge. It was, perhaps, the undergraduate posturing which he
saw all around him ("the air of charade was all-pervasive: the sons of
suburbia parodied the lettered gentry; and the lettered gentry parodied the
sons of suburbia parodying themselves"), that led him to question the
mechanistic approach of experimental psychologists and to appreciate the
importance of role play, myth and cultural stereotyping. He became
disillusioned with a profession in which the psychologist of high status
worked in laboratories with rats, and the psychologist of low status worked
with human beings in their natural habitat.

In 1968, Hudson travelled north to take up the Chair of Educational Sciences
at Edinburgh and in 1977 was appointed Professor of Psychology at Brunel
University. His other works include Human Beings (1975); Bodies of Knowledge
(1982) and a novel, The Nympholepts (1978). From 1987 to 1996, he was a
visiting professor at the Tavistock and Portman clinics.

A man of diverse interests, very much a diverger by his own youthful
definition, Hudson was wonderfully imaginative and creative, including
making things with his hands, painting and writing fiction. He was always
happiest working in his own home and in 1987, following his retirement from
Brunel, he and his wife Bernadine established the Balas Co-partnership, a
"cottage industry" which formalised their collaboration in a diversity of
fields, including painting, jewellery, photography and writing.

In works such as The Way Men Think (1991) and Intimate Relations (1995),
co-written with his wife, Hudson addressed psychological issues in a
humanist, heterodox manner that owed as much to artistic, biographical and
literary themes as to experimental psychology. For that reason, many of his
fellow psychologists found them confusing and full of loose ends, to which
Hudson would probably have replied "but that's precisely the point".

Liam Hudson is survived by his second wife, Bernadine Jacot, and by their
daughter and three sons.










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