In the 1940s, Lanier was chair of the Department of Psychology at Vassar College, where he showed that the pain threshold depended on specific individuals.
As early as 1929, he gave a lecture to the International Congress of Psychology suggesting whites and black varied "markedly in mental ability".
"[1] A review published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1930 suggested, "the results show enormous and statistically reliable superiority of whites over Negroes.
"[1] [sic] However, in a review for the American Journal of Psychology, Otto Klineberg argued that based on their evidence, he came to a "totally different" interpretation.
[10] In 1934, with Vanderbilt colleague Beverly Douglas, he gave a talk to the society about research they conducted on remaining sensations for victims of accidents who have lost an organ.
[13] He went on to stress the need of a "stable population," thus rejecting immigration, and the family as "the natural biological group, the normal milieu of shared experiences, community of interests, integration of personality.
"[13] For Paul Lauter, a Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, Lanier created a "familiar binary" between "industrial capitalism: the city, the artificial, the mechanical, cosmopolitan, Jewish, liberal, and new," including the "terrifying ghost" of "communism", and "the agrarian: natural, traditional, harmonious, balanced, patriarchal, settled--like the medieval world.
[14] Meanwhile, in a 1936 essay entitled, 'Big Business in the Property State' published in Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence, an anthology co-edited by Allen Tate and Herbert Agar, Lanier argued against the definition of a corporation as an individual.
[2][17] In 1947, Lanier took a leave of absence from Vassar College and served as the executive director of the Committee on Human Resources of the United States Department of Defense.
[18] Lanier was a professor and head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1950 to 1958, and as the Dean of its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1959 to 1960.
[3] As Dean, Lanier, alongside President David Dodds Henry, was held personally responsible for firing Leo Koch, an Assistant Professor of Biology who had written a public letter promoting premarital sex.