The rise and fall of McDougall's instinct doctrine

Krantz, David L.

doi:10.1002/1520-6696(196710)3:4<326::aid-jhbs2300030403>3.0.co;2-6

Cited by 27 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…It came to the fore in psychology with the publication of William James's Principles of Psychology in 1890 (Cravens, 1978), holding sway in psychology and the social sciences during the first two decades of the twentieth century (Bernard, 1924b;Cravens, 1978), most visibly in William McDougall's An Introduction to Social Psychology in 1908 (Bernard, 1932;Cravens, 1978;Degler, 1991;Krantz & Allen, 1967). Hamilton Cravens (1978) described psychologists as paying lip service to instincts in the explanation of behavior and sociologists as trying to work out the ramifications of instincts in social theory.…”

Section: The Rejection Of the Theory Of Instinctsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It began in earnest with the publication of "Are There Any Instincts?" by Knight Dunlap in 1919 (Krantz & Allen, 1967). Social psychologists or those who addressed social psychology played a prominent role; critics from psychology included Dunlap, Jacob R. Kantor, Allport, and John Dewey, while those from sociology included Ellsworth Faris, Luther Bernard, and Robert H. Gault.…”

Section: The Rejection Of the Theory Of Instinctsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Contextualizing Floyd Allports'sSocial Psychology

Parkovnick

2000

J. Hist. Behav. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: The Rejection Of the Theory Of Instinctsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Rejection Of the Theory Of Instinctsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualizing Floyd Allports'sSocial Psychology

Parkovnick

2000

J. Hist. Behav. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The reception of William McDougall (1871–) in America between the World Wars has been a recurring subject for historians, and interpretations emphasize conflict. Native‐born psychologists greeted McDougall with “rhetorical onslaughts,” in the estimate of one team of scholars, and “emotionally laden” words condemned him verbally in the popular press, in another analyst's view (Krantz & Allen, , p. 331; Jones, , p. 936). Beyond these studies of polemical contention are summary judgments about the poor fit of McDougall in the United States.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

Rose¹

2016

J History Behavioral Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The British-born psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938) spent more than half of his academic career in the United States, holding successive positions after 1920 at Harvard and Duke universities. Scholarly studies uniformly characterize McDougall's relationship with his New World colleagues as contentious: in the standard view, McDougall's theory of innate drives clashed with the Americans' experimentation into learned habits. This essay argues instead that rising American curiosity about inborn appetites-an interest rooted in earlier pragmatic philosophy and empirically investigated by interwar scientists-explains McDougall's migration to the United States and his growing success there. A review of McDougall's intellectual and professional ties, evolving outside public controversy, highlights persistent American attention to natural agency and complicates arguments voiced by contemporaries in favor of nurture.

show abstract

“…Was instinct or habit the more powerful behavior catalyst? Without culture, animals served the experimenter's obsession to pinpoint when learning begins (Krantz & Allen, ; Thomas, /2010, Section 3.2; Rose, ). The use of animals other than humans in psychological investigation, to an extent a matter of convenience, exposed contested points in the rising American discipline.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Animal Tales: Observations of the Emotions in American Experimental Psychology, 1890–1940

Rose¹

2012

J History Behavioral Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In nineteenth-century science, the emotions played a crucial role in explaining the social behavior of animals and human beings. Beginning in the 1890s, however, the first American psychologists, resolutely parsimonious in method, dismissed affective experience as intellectually imprecise. Yet in practice, feelings continued to influence at least one research setting: animal experiments. Laboratory reports, although focused on learning, became a repository of informal observations about the animals' temperaments and moods. When American psychologists began to reexamine the emotions between the world wars, they drew on this empirical legacy in animal studies. They also devised a conceptual approach to emotion consistent with their expectation of experimental precision.

show abstract

The rise and fall of McDougall's instinct doctrine

Cited by 27 publications

References 39 publications

Contextualizing Floyd Allports'sSocial Psychology

Contextualizing Floyd Allports'sSocial Psychology

William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

Animal Tales: Observations of the Emotions in American Experimental Psychology, 1890–1940

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About