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Daniel Ogilvie is a psychology professor at Rutgers University, and a prominent contributor in the field of personality psychology, and more recently the understanding of human beliefs on the soul and afterlife. He received his BA at Harvard University, along with his PH.D in 1967, and began his teaching career at the university before moving to Livingston College at Rutgers in 1970. His major contribution to personality psychology is expressed in the publication of his book "Fantasies of Flight" in 2004, in which he challenged the view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. Ogilvie's research also involved evaluating the self-discrepancy theory, in which he presented his concept of the "undesired self". His interest in the soul and the afterlife influenced him to create a course at Rutgers University called Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences in which he evaluates these beliefs and compares them between various religions.

Early Life

Daniel Ogilvie was born in the "pottery capital of the world" East Liverpool, a small town in Ohio along the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers. The town was located down river from Pittsburgh steel mills, and thus was very polluted. His interests in high school were primarily playing on his school’s football team. Ogilvie applied to Muskingum University in Ohio, a small school that his entire family had attended where he intended to eventually become a forest ranger. However, when a recruiter who was the President of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company and the captain of the 1928 Harvard football team took Daniel and three of his teammates out to dinner, his life took a different course. Two weeks later, he was admitted to Harvard University on a football scholarship. It was here that he discovered that he excelled at writing, and developed an interest in psychology.

Undergraduate and Graduate Education

Ogilvie stood out as an undergraduate because he asked questions that nobody dared to ask, even those who had conducted the actual research he was questioning—He claims this was because there was a lot he didn’t know, but either way, he came off as brilliant to those in his field. At the time, multidisciplinary courses were very common, and his major was called Social Relations—a major that combined psychology, sociology and anthropology, which required him to take classes from each department. He encountered courses from Evon Z. Vogt, a well known anthropologist and Sam Stauffer, a sociologist. Ogilvie’s interest in psychology was sparked by a study he performed on community conflict from the people in his hometown, in which he elaborated on a model developed by a sociologist named Camel.

Ogilvie took a course led by Henry Murray, who would eventually become his mentor. He worked alongside Murray as he developed the Thematic Apperception Test, in which a series of pictures are presented, and the person viewing these pictures must create a story based on the pictures. When writing a story to an ambiguous stimulus, the subject thinks they’re just writing a story, but Murray theorized that the subject is actually taking a lot from their own experiences—they are revealing more about themselves than they know. Ogilvie wrote his undergraduate honors thesis under the direction of Phil Slater, an assistant professor at Harvard. At the time, he was very interested in Sigmund Freud’s work, and designed an experiment testing Freud’s prediction of “identification with the aggressor”. Freud predicted that people who are hostile towards someone else will take on their characteristics. Ogilvie and Slater tested this by observing the interaction between subjects and an obnoxious man. They observed behind a one-way mirror as people had a discussion with a man who was overtly obnoxious and rude. The man had a distinct action of leaning back in his chair and playing with his pencil as he spoke. People who had expressed anger to him took on the man’s characteristic. Their experiment became published, and Ogilvie graduated with high honors.

After graduating from Harvard, Ogilivie began to search for a job, but was told by many companies they believed he was guaranteed to go to graduate school, given his undergraduate success. He was hired as a research assistant at Harvard where he collaborated with others on developing the first computer system for analyzing content. After a year of working, he was accepted into Harvard Graduate School, where he studied social psychology under the advising of Henry Murray—He was his last graduate student. Ogilivie developed his dissertation called Fantasies of Flight, published in 2003.

In graduate school, Ogilvie worked with faculty members such as David McClellan, who became famous for studying the need for achievement and power in personality psychology. Under the direction of Robert Freid Bales, a sociologist, he conducted research on small group dynamics. After graduate school, he interviewed with University of California in Santa Cruz, University of Chicago, University of Buffalo, and eventually got an offer to stay at Harvard on the faculty in the Arts, Sciences and Education department.

Career

At Harvard, Ogilvie was in charge of putting people together in infancy research studying cognitive development, language development, and math development. He was invited to conferences put together by Joan Kooney from the Forne Foundation, who was interested in early childhood development and was in the process of putting together the Children’s Television Network. These conferences led to the creation of Sesame Street. Dan Ogilvie’s contribution came after his research with children playing in a room with the television on. His observations led him to conclude that when children played, they did not pay attention to the television until a commercial came on. Ogilvie suggested that the children’s show have a segment that resembles an educational commercial, such as “This segment was brought to you by the letter ‘__’!” Thus, the segment was created.

Just after the Children’s Television Network was getting started, Ogilvie came to Livingston College at Rutgers, where he became chairman of the psychology department. Livingston College at the time was separate from Rutgers, and was a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural university. Ogilvie has remained at Rutgers for the past 43 years, where he teaches introductory psychology courses, personality psychology, collaboration courses on mythology with the English department, and Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences.

Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences

At the turn of the 20th century, Ogilvie, along with many others such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris became concerned with the possibility of human beings destroying life on this planet based on commitment to religion. Ogilvie noticed that with all of the fighting between scientific atheists versus the priests and clergy of different religions, no one was talking about the idea of the soul, which is the foundation of it all. In 2008, Ogilvie decided to give an honors seminar just to explore the idea, and was met with a lot of interest from students.

At this point, Rutgers was developing a series of Signature Courses to be offered to freshmen, so in the Fall of 2009 he sent in his idea for a course that addressed beliefs on the soul and afterlife. The course was approved in Spring of 2010, and he began collaborating with neuroscientist Leonard Hamilton in the production of the course, which was first offered in the Fall 2010 semester. The course was a success: students were very engaged in the idea of talking openly about a topic that seemed almost taboo. Student feedback showed that people were really thinking in depth about the idea of the soul. Fall 2012 was the last time that the course was offered in person, however each class was videotaped, allowing the ideas generated in the course to continue by offering it as an online course. Currently (2012?) the online class holds 150 students, with 50 students in each recitation section. Ogilvie plans to observe how the ideas evolve overtime as new publications emerge in the field.

A recent development in technology and education based in Stanford University called the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) was released around February 2014. MOOC offers free courses to students from any college for credit. Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences was offered as one of these courses: 25,000 people signed up for it. This class that he developed is the only course of its kind in the world.

Research

The "Undesired Self"

Ogilvie’s research career took him in many directions. In the 1970s, there was much research on the discrepancy between the real and ideal self, introduced by Carl Rogers. The ideal self is the image you have of yourself in the future, while the real self is the self you are at in the present moment. The measure between these two selves became an important variable in psychological research. The real-ideal 'self discrepancy states that if you’re far from your ideal self, it causes stress and anxiety because you are aware of how much more there is to make up for, but if you are too close to your ideal self, than your life is at a standstill and you are less motivated to improve yourself—it is a motivational variable. While giving a lecture in a Personality course, Ogilive became frustrated with the real-ideal self-discrepancy idea he was discussing and felt as though something was missing. He proposed that there must be something else in our lives between now and our future self—it was with these questions that he came up with the idea of the “undesired self”. The Undesired Self is the self when we are at our worst; we have already been at our worst at some point in our lives, so we measure the distance between our current self, and the self that we do not want to be. He proposed that the undesired self is a better peg to compare to because it is a real entity, instead of a phantom self as he claimed the “ideal self” was.

Ogilvie’s theory faced a challenge with E. Tory Higgins from NYU who had already established the basis of the self-discrepancy theory, which made it difficult for Ogilvie to get his research published because his idea did not fit his theory..

The God Problem

In 2008 Ogilvie delivered an acceptance speech at the American Psychological Association Convention after winning the 2007 Henry Murray Award. It was here that Ogilvie opened up on his thoughts about what he called, The God Problem. The God problem is an ongoing issue that Ogilvie will study for the rest of his career. The basis of the God problem lies with the idea that religious disputes are what leads to most wars. Ogilvie argues that while there is an abundance of research that shows the belief in God is beneficial to believers, the other side of research shows how religions are a main reason for our self-destruction. Ogilvie poses the question, if there is an abundance of scientific support for Darwin’s theory of evolution, why do people still continue to believe that God created humans and our actions will lead us to an eternal soul. The topic of the God problem, which he now calls Soul Searching, is a work in progress that Ogilvie hopes to elaborate upon as he becomes educated in different disciplines..

Working Models of Self-With-Others

Daniel Ogilvie conducted studies on the representations of the self. John Bowlby in 1950 proposes the idea that humans seek other people and objects. These relationships are stored in our minds and we use them to guide us when forming new relationships. Before Bowlby, William James stated that humans have just as many selves as they have people who recognize them. From these theories, Ogilvie teamed up with Richard Ashmore in the early 1990s to develop their theory of SWOR. SWOR, which stands for self-with-other representations argues that we have as many SWORs as we have relationships. SWORs can be organized into families and an object can cause a pattern of feelings. These feelings can be characteristics of one or more groups of self-with-other experiences. When conducting research on SWOR, Ogilvie and Ashmore began by having research participants create a list of important people in their lives, which were called targets. Along with this list, they created a list of features, which were personal traits and characteristics. After entering this information on the computer, the participants viewed names of a target on the screen, while constructing a mental image of an interaction they had with the target person. They then had to apply a feature to the self from that interaction by rating either 1 for yes and 2 for no. An example would be the word "mom" coming up on the screen. The participant would create an image of me-with-mom and then rates themselves in that situation with their mom. For instance, they would choose “yes” if they were happy and “no” if they were annoyed. In the end, the results are compiled to show how targets are grouped in conjunction with features, showing how the structure of the social self are revealed. Ogilvie believes this study to still be in progress and is awaiting advancements in order to continue research..

Four Motives

More recently, Daniel Ogilvie along with Kristin Rose created the PACK taxonomy which derived 4 motivational variables from the contingencies of learning through operant conditioning. PACK stands for, Prevent from positive punishment, Acquire from positive reinforcement, Cure from negative reinforcement, and Keep from negative punishment. The PACK taxonomy and Ogilvie’s findings can be further described in his Journal of Personality article..

Publications

TED Talk

In 2013, Dan Ogilvie was invited by TED to give a talk about the soul based on his Soul Searching Project that he has been working on at Rutgers University since 2009. TED is a nonprofit organization with the mission of spreading ideas, also known as Ideas Worth Spreading. Beginning in 1984, the first conference was a way to bring people together through, technology, entertainment and design. TED has now expanded to two annual conferences, along with multiple TED Talks. Dan Ogilvie gave his talk on how he tries to understand human’s belief on the soul. Ogilvie wants to define the soul, beginning with whether or not one believes in the soul and what cognitive systems come together to create those beliefs. In his talk, Ogilvie begins by explaining a conversation that occurred between, himself, his wife, and his daughter. When his daughter was 4 years old she awoke in the middle of the night, crying with fear, stating “I don’t want to be a thing that dies”. His wife brushed it off by telling her to worry since she had a long life ahead of her. Ogilvie realized that for many families this would be the time to talk about heaven, God, the afterlife and the soul. He states, that as children we are taught by “these are the facts”, instead of “this is what we believe”. The ideas that we are taught are internalized and become permanent structures that we do not like to question. For most humans world wide, Ogilvie says we believe we have a soul and that it is going to go somewhere. Ogilvie poses the question, “How does it come about that people believe they have souls and theres an afterlife?" Based on his daughters questions about the afterlife Ogilvie says we know at age four there are brain structures that are able to support the whole notion that you can be at one place and another at the same time. This brings up Ogilvie’s notion of the traveling self, which states we are able to be in one physical place and imagine ourselves in another place at the same time. As humans we can not imagine not existing. Ogilvie ends the talk by discussing the course he teaches about the soul at Rutgers University; Causes and Consequences of Soul Beliefs. He asks the audience to do the same thing he asks his students, “Talk about what you were told to believe. Have that conversation with other people.” 


Fantasies of Flight

Ogilvie conducted a cross-cultural personality psychology study of the imagery of flight in folklore, fairytales, and art for his dissertation. He studied different societies in which flying imagery was common as opposed to those who had none, and developed in depth studies of famous artists whose paintings contained things up in the air. In his book, he challenges the view that individuals should be studied as carriers of traits by resurrecting the approach of intensive case studies, and integrating the fields of developmental psychology and neuroscience to address the satisfaction of latent needs in personality..

Current Research

Currently, Professor Ogilvie is teaching Personality Psychology courses at Rutgers University, and continuing his analysis of soul beliefs. He hopes to develop a book describing the process of the course, and the feedback he received. Ogilvie is currently constructing a paper on the anatomy of internalized beliefs, and the partial history of soul beliefs. Ogilvie has given many talks on Psychology and Social Responsibility, along with a sermon for the Academy of Life, in which he will lead a discussion about his ideas on the soul, the afterlife, and beliefs.