Hagen, John William

John William Hagen was born May 11, 1940, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Wayne S. Hagen, M.D., and Elfie M. Erickson Hagen. Hagen's father left his home state of South Dakota to pursue medical training at the University of Minnesota, where he met his wife, a nurse at the hospital where he interned. Hagen's early childhood was spent near Army medical facilities in Rockford, Illinois; Brooklyn, New York; and San Francisco, where his father was stationed as a surgeon during and immediately after World War II.

The family returned to Minneapolis in 1948, where Hagen was educated in the public schools and entered the University of Minnesota in 1958, intending to major in architecture. By the end of his sophomore year, however, he was attracted to the behavioral and social sciences, inspired in part by an unforgettable course in introductory psychology taught by David LaBerge (who played the piano in class) and James Jenkins (who fired a blank gun in class to illustrate false memory phenomena). LaBerge invited Hagen to become involved in his research on perceptual scaling; this work led to a presentation at the Midwestern Psychological Association, and Hagen had been hooked by psychology. This decision was reinforced by positive experiences at Minnesota as an undergraduate teaching assistant for courses in introductory psychology and applied psychology.

Following LaBerge's advice, Hagen applied to Stanford for graduate studies in psychology and began there in 1962. Initially, Hagen was not certain how to focus his graduate work. However, an introductory course in developmental psychology taught by Robert Sears and Eleanor Maccoby was a highlight and turning point, convincing Hagen that developmental psychology would be the focus of his graduate training. However, his interests were not so much in social and personality development, which concerned Sears and Maccoby; rather, Hagen wanted to pursue learning and cognitive processes, an interest fostered by early contacts at Stanford with Richard Atkinson, Gordon Bower, Thomas Landauer, and Karl Pribram. Maccoby, who had agreed to serve as Hagen's adviser, encouraged him to forge a new line of research, one that would draw on the emerging field of cognitive psychology and apply it to questions of cognitive development.

Hagen's emerging commitment to cognitivedevelopmental psychology was strengthened by his participation in 1964 in a summerlong institute on cognitive development at the University of Minnesota. The faculty represented the leaders of the emerging field, including Harold W. Stevenson, Jerome Kagan, Roger Brown, and William Kessen, and their enthusiastic but often differing perspectives on the nature of that field made for a provocative summer, one that reassured Hagen he had found his niche. It was also a time of forging bonds with a cohort of fellow students who would help shape the field, including Leslie B. Cohen, Arnold Sameroff, Tom Achenbach, and Rita deVries.

Completing his doctoral studies in 1965, Hagen joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. This was a period when many major universities were beginning to add graduate programs in developmental psychology. At that time, Michigan had a nucleus of developmental psychologists: Lorraine Nadelman, [Page 526]Klaus Riegel, David Birch, and Ronald Tikofsky. A program was created in 1965 with the hiring of Hagen, David McNeil, who came from Harvard, and Martin Hoffman, who was hired from the Merrill-Palmer Institute to direct the new program. Hagen has remained at Michigan throughout his career, having been promoted to associate professor in 1969 and to full professor in 1973.

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