William McDougall | |
|---|---|
 William McDougall | |
| Born | 22 June 1871 (1871-06-22) Chadderton, Lancashire, England,United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland |
| Died | 28 November 1938(1938-11-28) (aged 67) Durham, North Carolina, United States |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Doctoral advisor | W. H. R. Rivers |
William McDougallFRS[1] (/məkˈduːɡəl/mək-DOO-gəl; 22 June 1871 – 28 November 1938) was an early 20th centurypsychologist who was a professor atUniversity College London,University of Oxford, Harvard University and Duke University.[2] He wrote a number of influential textbooks, and was important in the development of the theory ofinstinct and ofsocial psychology in the English-speaking world.
McDougall was an opponent ofbehaviourism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the 20th century; but his work was known and respected among lay people.
He was born atTonge, Middleton in the Manchester area on 22 June 1871, the second son of Isaac Shimwell McDougall and his wife Rebekah Smalley.[3] His father was one of the McDougall brothers who developedself-raising flour, but concentrated on his own business as a chemical manufacturer.[4]
McDougall was educated at a number of schools, and was a student atOwens College, Manchester andSt John's College, Cambridge.[5] He studied medicine and physiology in London andGöttingen. After teaching atUniversity College London andOxford, he was recruited to occupy theWilliam James chair of psychology atHarvard University in 1920, where he served as a professor of psychology from 1920 to 1927. He then moved toDuke University, where he established the Parapsychology Laboratory underJ. B. Rhine, and where he remained until his death. He was a Fellow of theRoyal Society. Among his students wereCyril Burt,May Smith,William Brown andJohn Flügel.[6]
McDougall's interests and sympathies were broad. He was interested ineugenics, but departed fromneo-Darwinian orthodoxy in maintaining the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as suggested byJean-Baptiste Lamarck; he carried out many experiments designed to demonstrate this process.[7]
Opposing behaviourism, McDougall argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he calledhormic psychology. The term "hormic" comesfromhormḗ (ὁρμή), theGreek word for "impulse" and according to Hilgard (1987) was drawn from the work of T. P. Nunn, a British colleague (Larson, 2014).He first outlined hormic psychology inAn Introduction to Social Psychology (1908). Hormic psychology serves as one of the foundational frameworks for understanding the wide range of human motivational forces. He listed the following innate principal instincts and primary emotions that are "probably common to the men of every race and of every age":[8]
However, in the theory ofmotivation, 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 influencedKonrad Lorenz[citation needed], though Lorenz did not always acknowledge this[citation needed]. McDougall underwentpsychoanalysis withC. G. Jung, and was also prepared to studyparapsychology.
Because of his interest ineugenics and his unorthodox stance onevolution, McDougall has been adopted as an iconic figure by proponents of a strong influence of inherited traits on behavior, some of whom are regarded by most mainstream psychologists asscientific racists. 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.[9]
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.
McDougall's bookThe Group Mind received "very hostile reviews" from psychologists but sold well to the public. TheAmerican Press was critical of McDougall as his lectures on national eugenics were seen as racist.[7]
McDougall was a strong advocate of thescientific method and academic professionalisation in psychical research. He was instrumental in establishingparapsychology as a university discipline in the US in the early 1930s.
The traditional historiography of psychical research, dominated by the 'winners' of the race for 'the science of the soul', reveals fascinating epistemological incommensurabilities and a complex set of interplays between scientific and metaphysical presuppositions in the making and keeping alive of the scientific status of psychology. Thus, revised histories of psychical research and its relationship to psychology with a critical thrust not limited to that which has been viewed with suspicion anyway, offer both a challenge and a promise to historians, the discussion of which the present article hopes to stimulate.[10]
In 1920, McDougall served as president of theSociety for Psychical Research, and in the subsequent year of its US counterpart, theAmerican Society for Psychical Research.[11]
McDougall worked to enlist a number of scientific, religious, ethical, political and philosophical issues and causes into a wide "actor-network" which finally pushed through the institutionalization and professionalization of parapsychology.[12] He was also a member of theScientific American committee that investigated the mediumMina Crandon.[7] He attended séances with the medium and was sceptical about her "ectoplasmic hand". He suspected that it was part of an animal, artificially manipulated to resemble a hand. McDougall's suspicion was confirmed by independent experts who had examined photographs of the hand.[7]
McDougall was critical ofspiritualism. He believed that some of its proponents such asArthur Conan Doyle misunderstood psychical research and "devote themselves to propaganda".[7] In 1926, McDougall concluded "I have taken part in a considerable number of investigations of alleged supernormal phenomena; but hitherto have failed to find convincing evidence in any case, but have found rather much evidence of fraud and trickery."[13]
McDougall, however, continued to encourage scientific research on psychic phenomena and in 1937 was a founding co-editor (with Joseph Banks Rhine) of the peer-reviewedJournal of Parapsychology, which continues to be published. Because he was the first to formulate a theory of human instinctual behavior, he influenced the development of the new field of social psychology.
In 1911, McDougall authoredBody and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism. In the work he rejected bothmaterialism andDarwinism and supported a form ofLamarckism where mind guidesevolution. McDougall defended a form ofanimism where all matter has a mental aspect; his views were very similar topanpsychism as he believed that there was an animating principle in matter and had claimed in his work that there were bothpsychological andbiological evidence for this position.[14] McDougall had defended the theory thatmind and the brain are distinct but interact with each other though he was not a dualist or a monist as he believed his theory of animism would replace both the philosophical views ofdualism andmonism.[15][16] As a parapsychologist he also claimedtelepathy had been scientifically proven. He used evidence from psychic research as well as from biology and psychology to defend his theory of animism.[17]
McDougall produced another work attacking materialism titledMaterialism and Emergent Evolution (1929). Materialism and Emergent Evolution (1929) was the only distinctive psychological approach to the field other than Floyd Allpott's book titled Social Psychology, written in 1924. In the book he had also criticised the theory ofemergent evolution as he claimed it had ignored the evidence ofLamarckism and had ignored the evidence of mind guiding evolution. McDougall's last work on the subject titledThe Riddle of Life (1938) criticisedorganicism as according to McDougall even though the theory of organicism had rejected materialism it had not gone far enough in advocating an active role for a nonphysical principle.[18]
By William McDougall:
By Margaret Boden:
Works by or aboutWilliam McDougall atWikisource