Remembering Paul E. Meehl: Historical Contributions to Predictive Modeling in Human Behavior

This article briefly examines the life and work of the late clinical psychologist and philosopher of science Paul E. Meehl. His thesis in Clinical versus Statistical Prediction (1954) that the data combination performed by mechanical operations, as compared to clinicians, achieves higher accuracy in predicting human behavior is one of the earliest theoretical works that laid the groundwork for utilizing statistics and computational modeling in research in psychiatry and clinical psychology. For today’s psychiatric researchers and clinicians grappling with the challenges of translating the ever-increasing data of the human mind into practice tools, Meehl’s advocacy for both accurate modeling of the data and their clinically relevant use is timely.