Jack W. Dunlap
1952-54 Division 19 President 

By Kim Johnson

Jack Wilbur Dunlap was the fifth president of Division 19, serving as president from 1953-1954. Jack was born on an Osage Indian Reservation in White Eagle, OK on August 11, 1902. During high school, he worked for the railroad that employed his father while at the same time completing a bookkeeping course on his own. After completing high school Dunlap enrolled as an agricultural economics and mathematical statistics major at Kansas State Agricultural College, which is now Kansas State University. He supported himself through college by playing piano in a dance band. After receiving his B.S. in 1924, Dunlap taught mathematics at a local high school while pursuing his master’s at Kansas State. After earning his M.S. in 1926, he began working toward his PhD at Stanford but left after a year to teach at the Territorial Normal and Training School in Honolulu, Hawaii.  During this time Dunlap engaged his interest and talent for statistics, deriving many formulas regarding standard errors of various statistics.

Dunlap returned to school in 1930 to study under Edward Thorndike and received his PhD from Columbia University in 1931. He then taught at Fordham University, followed by the University of Rochester. He developed the Academic Preferences Blank in 1940 while at the University of Rochester.

Dunlap had a strong interest in psychometric methods and in the measurement of attitudes and mental abilities. From the time he returned to graduate school in 1930 to the time he entered the Navy in 1942, Dunlap published 42 papers, books, tests, and computational charts, served as editor of several professional journals, helped found the Psychometric Society, and served as its president in 1942.

World War II began in Europe in 1939, and in 1940 Dunlap was appointed Director of Research of the Committee on Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots, a position he held in tandem with his teaching job at Rochester and that John Jenkins had held before him. He worked with John Jenkins on projects concerning the selection and training of pilots.

In 1942 Dunlap joined the Navy as a Lieutenant Commander. His first tour was in the Aviation Psychology Branch at the Navy Bureau of Medicine (BuMed) in Washington, D.C. where he worked with John Jenkins among others. After his BuMed tour, he was appointed to the Naval AIT Station near Key West, Florida as Officer-in-Charge at the Free Gunnery Training and Research Unit. He was also stationed at other Naval Stations in the course of his service, including in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. Interestingly, his last Navy assignment was with the Office of Naval Intelligence where he served as a member of the U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe, on the highly classified and controversial intelligence mission called Project Paperclip. The mission of Paperclip was to search for Nazi scientists who developed weapons during the war, interrogate them, and bring some of the most important scientists, such as Wernher Von Braun, to the United States to continue their work on the programs they had worked on for Germany during the war. They also searched for weapons facilities, equipment, and documents from the Third Reich that might prove useful to the United States. Jack’s assignment with Paperclip was to find the engineering staff and technical drawings for the Messerschmitt ME 262, the world’s first jet fighter developed by the Nazis. He managed to successfully complete this assignment in a matter of a few weeks bringing key staff members and their families from Leipzig in east Germany to Paris.

Dunlap retired from the Navy as a captain in 1946 and went to work for The Psychological Corporation. Under George Bennett’s (the tenth president of Division 19) leadership, Dunlap helped establish a new division of bio-mechanics, focusing on human factors. This division worked closely with government agencies in a series of studies of human factors in high-speed flight.

In 1947, Dunlap and colleague Phillip Morris left The Psychological Corporation to start a company of their own--Dunlap, Morris and Associates. Morris left the company to return to his family’s brewing business (Pabst) in 1948 and Dunlap moved the company to Stamford, Connecticut and changed its name to Dunlap and Associates. Dunlap’s company continued to work closely with the Air Force, the Army, and the Office of Naval Research. Over the years, they worked on projects such as emergency medical care, highway safety, agricultural economics, flight simulators, and many others. Dunlap and Associates was tremendously successful. Dunlap served as President of the company until 1966 and Chairman until 1970, and he remained a director into his retirement.

Dunlap was an editor of the Journal of Experimental Education, the Journal of Educational Psychology, and Psychometrika. He was active in 17 professional societies. He was a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Human Factors Society. He was a Diplomate in Industrial Psychology of the American Board of Examiners on Professional Psychology. He helped found the Psychometric Society and served as its president in 1942. He was a founder of the Human Factors Society and served as its president in 1961. He was President of the New York State Association of Psychology. In addition to serving as president of the Society for Military Psychology (Division 19), he also served as president of two other divisions of the American Psychological Association: Consulting Psychology in 1947, and Division 14 (now the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology – SIOP) in 1950.

References

Benjamin, L.T., Jr. (October 1997). The Early Presidents of Division 14: 1945-1954. The Industrial Psychologist. Retrieved from: http://www.siop.org/tip/backissues/tipoct97/BENJAM~1.aspx.
 
Johnson, K. (May 2016). A biography of Jack W. Dunlap. Retrieved from http://www.siop.org/Presidents/Dunlap.aspx.   
 
Kurtz, A.K. (1979). Obituary: Jack W. Dunlap. American Psychologist, 34(6), 538. 

Orlansky, J. Division 21 Members Who Made Distinguished Contributions to Engineering Psychology. In Henry L. Taylor (ed.) Retrieved from https://www.apadivisions.org/division-21/about/distinguished-contributions.pdf.

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