William McDougall | |
---|---|
File:McDougall.jpg | |
Born | 22 June 1871 Chadderton, Lancashire, England |
Died | 28 November 1938 Durham, N.C., U.S. |
Nationality | English |
Scientific career | |
Fields | psychologist |
William McDougall FRS[1](22 June 1871 in Chadderton, Lancashire, England - 28 November 1938 Durham, NC, U.S.) was an early twentieth century psychologist who spent the first part of his career in the United Kingdom and the latter part in the United States. He wrote a number of highly influential textbooks, and was particularly important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world. He was an opponent of behaviorism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the twentieth century; but his work was very well known and respected among lay people.
McDougall was educated at Owens College, Manchester and St John's College, Cambridge.[2] He also studied medicine and physiology in London and Göttingen. After teaching at University College London and Oxford, he was recruited by William James to Harvard University, where he served as a professor of psychology from 1920 to 1927. He then moved to Duke University, where he established the Parapsychology Laboratory under J. B. Rhine, and where he remained until his death. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Among his students was Cyril Burt.
Research
McDougall's interests and sympathies were broad. He was interested in eugenics, but departed from neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in maintaining the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as suggested by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; he carried out many experiments designed to demonstrate this process. Opposing behaviourism, he argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology (from Greek ὁρμή hormḗ "impulse").
However, in the theory of motivation, he defended the idea that individuals are motivated by a significant number of inherited instincts, whose action they may not consciously understand, so they might not always understand their own goals. His ideas on instinct strongly influenced Konrad Lorenz, though Lorenz did not always acknowledge this. McDougall underwent psychoanalysis with C. G. Jung, and was also prepared to study parapsychology. In 1920 he served as president of the Society for Psychical Research, and in the subsequent year of its US counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research.[3] A strong advocate of scientific method and academic professionalization in psychical research, McDougall was instrumental in establishing parapsychology as a university discipline in the US in the early 1930s.[4]
Because of his interest in eugenics and his unorthodox stance on evolution, McDougall has been adopted as an iconic figure by proponents of a strong influence of inherited traits on behaviour, some of whom are regarded by most mainstream psychologists as scientific racists. While McDougall was certainly an unorthodox figure and always willing to take a minority view, there is no reason to suppose that in the light of modern psychological knowledge and political developments, he would have supported the position taken by these groups. Though he wrote:
"...; the few distinguished Negroes, so called, of America - such as Douglass, Booker Washington, Du Bois - have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the Negro race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity" (McDougall, William., The Group Mind, p.187, Arno Press, 1973; Copyright, 1920 by G.P. Putnam's Sons).
McDougall married at the age of 29 ("against my considered principles", he reports in his autobiographical essay, "for I held that a man whose chosen business in life was to develop to the utmost his intellectual powers should not marry before forty, if at all"). He had five children.
Selected bibliography
By William McDougall:
- McDougall, William (1909. First published 1908), An Introduction to Social Psychology (2nd ed.), London: Methuen & Co, pp. 1–2 (n13–14 in electronic fields)
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(help) (Note: This and other versions of this title available at Internet Archive)
- This book has been reprinted several times. For example, in 1960, University Paperbacks, an imprint of Methuen & Co and Barnes & Noble, published a reprint of the 23rd edition.[5]
- The Group Mind (1920, reprinted 1973)
- Physiological Psychology (1920).
- Outline of Psychology (1923)
- Character and the Conduct of Life (1927)
- Body and Mind
- Outline of Abnormal Psychology
- Energies of Men (1932)
By Margaret Boden:
- Purposive Explanation in Psychology (1972)
See also
References
- ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1098/rsbm.1940.0005, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with
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instead. - ^ "McDougall, William (MDGL890W)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ Krantz, D L; Hall, R; Allen, D (1969), "William McDougall and the problem of purpose.", Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 5, no. 1 (published 1969 Jan), pp. 25–38, doi:10.1002/1520-6696(196901)5:1<25::AID-JHBS2300050104>3.0.CO;2-S, PMID 11610086
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(help) - ^ Asprem, E. (2010), "A Nice Arrangement of Heterodoxies: William McDougall and the Professionalization of Psychical Research", Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 46 (2):123-143.
- ^ McDougall, William (1960. First published 1908), An Introduction to Social Psychology (23rd ed.), University Paperbacks. Imprint of Methuen & Co (London) and Barnes & Noble (New York)., pp. xxi–xxii
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(help) (Note: Preface to 23rd edition commences p.xxi, with date of this preface [October 1936] on p.xxii.)
Further reading
- Rose, Anne C. (2009). Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press). ISBN 978-0-8078-3281-3. (18 December 2010).
- Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009), Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Univ. of Vermont Press, ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6
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ignored (help) - Tucker, William H. (2007), The funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 978-0-252-07463-9
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External links
- Works by or about William McDougall at Wikisource
- Works by William McDougall at Project Gutenberg
- Autobiographical essay written in 1930.In Carl Murchison (ed.) A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Vol. 1. New York: Russell and Russell (1930): 191- 223. Accessed 2008-05-26.
- Chris Brand (1997). William McDougall (1871-1938): heterodox and angry with psychologists by nature, nurture and circumstance. An essay presenting McDougall's intellectual concerns, positions and achievements. Accessed 2008-05-26.