Charles Osgood

Charles E. Osgood (1916-1991) was an American psychologist who developed the semantic differential, a scale used to measure the cognitive meaning of concepts, events or objects. Custom research papers from Paper Masters report that Osgood was born in Massachusetts. Reports on his early education show that Osgood received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1945 and was a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana from 1949 to 1984. He was also president of the American Psychological Association (APA) from 1962 to 1963. When writing a research paper on Charles Osgood, be sure to include a brief background on him before delving into the psychological influences he had. Paper Masters can compose a custom written research paper on Charles Osgood that follows your guidelines.

Osgood's Teachings

Osgood's semantic differential emerged out of the conflict between nominalists and realists.

• Nominalists maintain that only real things exist and that abstractions (universals) are simply words.
• Realists believe that universals have independent existence.

Osgood was attempting to measure the semantics (meaning) of words and their concepts, particularly studying adjectives. Adjectives, of which there are thousands in the English language, reveal subtleties in language and behavior.

Osgood's In The Measurement of Meaning

In The Measurement of Meaning (1957), Osgood and his coauthors stated that a person's behavior in a given situation is highly dependent upon what that situation means or signifies to the individual. He also stated that "meaning" had numerous meanings.

During the Cold War of the 1960s, Osgood developed a new approach for US/USSR relations that he called "Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-reduction" or GRIT. In his 1962 book An Alternative to War or Surrender, Osgood outlined a plan that sough to reduce nuclear arms and establish trust between the superpowers.