"[2] Areas of research in which Lasswell worked included the importance of personality, social structure, and culture in the explanation of political phenomena.

[2] In 1918, at the age of 16, Lasswell began his studies at the University of Chicago, where he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics.

[2] Lasswell spent a year teaching at the Washington School of Psychiatry from 1938 to 1939, before joining the U.S. Library of Congress as director of war communications research from 1939 to 1945.

[4] As a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, Lasswell taught a graduate seminar on "Property in a Crisis Society."

He was also involved in the Association for the Advancement of Science, Commission on the Freedom of the Press, Committee for Economic Development, and Rand Corporation.

"[5][8] Lasswell is considered to be a founding father of political psychology and policy sciences[9] and an early proponent of mass communication as a field of scholarly research.

[13] He defined propaganda as "the control of opinion by significant symbols" such as stories, rumors, reports, pictures, and other forms of social communication.

In 1935, Lasswell published World Politics and Personal Insecurity, a study of international relations using quantitative content analysis.

The study included direct observation of the aggressive behavior of welfare clients toward public relief administrators.

Lasswell built a laboratory in his social science office at the University of Chicago to conduct experiments on volunteers and students.

Lasswell also used psychoanalytical interviewing and recording methods that he appropriated from his time of studying with Elton Mayo at Harvard University.

[3] Lasswell introduced the concept of a "garrison state" in a highly influential and often cited 1941 article originally published in the American Journal of Sociology.

It was a "developmental construct" that outlined the possibility of a political-military elite composed of "specialists in violence" in a modern state.

[24] Other scholars object to its lack of a feedback loop,[25][26][23] that it does not take into consideration the effects of noise,[23] and that it does not address the influences of context on communication.

Lasswell was concerned with such questions as how to improve the concepts and procedures of those who study political problems professionally, and how to train policy scientists.

[7] Lasswell’s 1956 book, The Decision Process: Seven Categories of Functional Analysis, outlined seven stages of policy decision-making: intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal.

[29] He also identified eight "goal values" of policy: wealth, power, respect, rectitude, skill, well being, enlightenment, and affection.

[31][6] In his 1956 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Lasswell raised the question of whether or not we should give human rights to robots.