HumRRO

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 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

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

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