The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/HumRRO.md

category	tags	summary	location	created	updated
Private Organization	Organization MilitaryPsychology ThinkTank ColdWar USArmy	A nonprofit research organization founded in 1951 as the US Army's primary contractor for behavioral science research, with classified studies on training, leadership, counterinsurgency and psychological vulnerability; independent of George Washington University from 1969.	Alexandria, Virginia	2026-06-04	2026-10-15

The Human Resources Research Office (HumRRO) was a nonprofit behavioral science organization founded in 1951 under contract to the U.S. Army that became one of the primary institutional centers for military psychology research in the United States during the Cold War. It was headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and at its height employed approximately 275 people, including 90 to 100 psychologists holding advanced degrees.¹

Founding and Organizational Structure

HumRRO was established in 1951 and for most of its early existence maintained an affiliation with George Washington University in Washington, D.C., which provided academic cover and access to research networks. That relationship ended in October 1969 when student demonstrations over the university's connections to military research prompted the administration to sever ties with the organization. HumRRO reorganized as a fully independent nonprofit and continued its research function from its Alexandria headquarters. Its research program was distributed across seven divisions located throughout the continental United States, in Kentucky, California, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, in addition to the Alexandria headquarters.¹

The office's own 1966 bibliography describes it as a nongovernmental agency of The George Washington University, operating under Army contract DA 44-188-ARO-2, and gives its mission as studies and research in the fields of training, motivation and leadership.²

A 1973 study of the office by CONSAD Research Corporation for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare records the sequence in other terms. An Army staff study, "An Integrated Program in Human Resources Research," was approved by the Under Secretary of the Army on June 21, 1951 and is credited to Harry Harlow. The contract between the Army and the university was executed on July 27, 1951, and responsibility for psychological warfare passed after 1955 to the SORO at American University. The office moved to Alexandria in 1963. The study states that in 1969 the office severed its ties with the university, and quotes a participant: "The most visible effect was that the color of the checks changed." The office's president, Meredith P. Crawford, wrote that the office left the university "again with the full concurrence of the Army," and the study dates the new independent corporation from September 1, 1969.³

The organization published approximately 35 technical reports per year. Its annual budget was roughly $6 million. Between 60 and 65 percent of its research was sponsored by the military. Only about 3 percent of its output was classified, which allowed HumRRO to maintain a public academic face while conducting sensitive work within that small classified fraction.¹

Research Areas

HumRRO organized its research program around six areas: man as an individual performer; man as a member of an organization; man as a leader; man as a member of a culture in a different setting; the technology of instruction; and the management of human systems. This framework covered both conventional personnel topics (selection, training, doctrine) and the more operationally sensitive territory of psychological vulnerability assessment and counterinsurgency support.¹

A distinct specialization within HumRRO's portfolio was the development of training technology: simulators, scale models, mock-ups, job performance tests, self-instructional taped courses, and scrambled books. The organization claimed its training devices produced an average 10 to 15 percent reduction in training time and a 20 percent reduction in attrition among trainees who completed device-supported instruction.¹

A 1966 HumRRO technical report under Contract DA 44-188 ARO-2, by Thomas Myers, Donald B. Murphy, Seward Smith and S. James Goffard, reports four days of dark, quiet isolation for 176 cubicle subjects drawn from 551 enlisted men across studies from 1956 to 1961, with a stated concern for the ability to "maintain independence of judgment in the face of propaganda and group pressure." Among the effects the report lists for the four days (96 hours) of sensory deprivation and social isolation is "increased susceptibility to influence"; the control subjects were held at the Presidio of Monterey.⁴

The organization contributed personnel and research products to the broader ecology of Cold War military social science. Theodore Vallance and Charles Windle both moved from HumRRO to SORO (the Special Operations Research Office) at American University, which became the primary Army contractor for counterinsurgency social science research in the early 1960s. HumRRO also contributed work on defection and disaffection research during the Korean War, conducted through the Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University.¹

Classified Work

HumRRO's classified output included a 1962 document by Hilton Bialek et al. on interrogation, a 1955 document on leadership under combat conditions, and a 1958 document on group effectiveness in counterinsurgency settings.¹

The 1963 report on screening procedures for tactical interrogation, prepared by the Leadership Human Research Unit with HumRRO technical supervision, identifies Bialek as task leader in the planning phase and John E. Taylor as acting task leader during execution. Its preface states that the task began July 1, 1961 at the request of the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence and that its initial exploratory work was reported in a May 1962 Task QUIZ research memorandum.⁵

Overlap with SORO and CRESS

HumRRO's research focus overlapped substantially with that of SORO and its successor CRESS (Center for Research in Social Systems). Where HumRRO emphasized individual and unit performance, SORO and CRESS focused on population-level psychological and political analysis for counterinsurgency purposes. The movement of researchers between the two organizations reflected a shared sponsor base: all three drew primarily on Army funding and shared access to the classified psywar literature of this period. The Army Research Institute (also known as USARIBSS) served as the institutional successor to several overlapping earlier bodies and eventually consolidated much of this research function under a single Army command.¹

Footnotes

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1. Peter Watson, War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology. Basic Books, 1978. pp. 462-468 (App. II). ↩︎

2. Human Resources Research Office, Bibliography of Publications as of 30 June 1966 (Alexandria, Va.: HumRRO, September 1966), introductory statement. DTIC AD0643761. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0643761 ↩︎

3. Human Resources Research Office history, in Institutional Funding for Applied Research: The Case of HumRRO and the U.S. Army, CONSAD Research Corporation for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, May 24, 1973, ERIC ED097560, chapters I and II (quoting William A. McClelland, Professional Paper 30-68; Meredith P. Crawford, A Perspective on the Development of HumRRO, 1967). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED097560.pdf ↩︎

4. Thomas Myers, Donald B. Murphy, Seward Smith and S. James Goffard, Experimental Studies of Sensory Deprivation and Social Isolation, HumRRO Technical Report 66-8, June 1966. DTIC AD0636478. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0636478 ↩︎

5. U.S. Army Leadership Human Research Unit, report on screening procedures for tactical interrogation, May 1963, preface and composition of the research team. DTIC AD0487576. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0487576 ↩︎