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Hugo Munsterberg - A Prolific Propagandizer for Applied Psychology

Born in Danzig, Germany, Munsterberg left his birthplace at the age of 19 to study medicine at the university in Leipzig. However, his academic interests changed once he took a psychology course with Wundt. He earned a Ph.D. from Wundt in 1885 and an M.D. from the University of Heidelberg two years later. He then accepted a teaching position at the University of Freiburg and set up a laboratory in his own home at his own expense. Munsterberg veered from this career path in 1982 when he was offered a chance to become the director of Harvard's psychology laboratory by William James. Hence, Munsterberg made the transition from pure experimental psychology to applied psychology. After a decade at Harvard, Munsterberg wrote his first book in English. American Traits (1902) was a psychological, social, and cultural analysis of American society.

Munsterberg seemed to be attracted to controversy during his time in the U.S. In 1908, Munsterberg became involved with Prohibition, the movement to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages. He argued against the Prohibition with the argument that alcoholic beverages in moderation could be beneficial. His beliefs about women were also controversial. In general, he believed graduate work to be too demanding for women. He declared that women should not be trained for careers because that took them away from the home. Newspapers reported that Munsterberg was a secret agent, a spy, or a high-ranking German military officer. Colleagues snubbed him, and he received death threats in the mail. The ostracism and virulent public attacks broke his spirit. In December of 1916, Munsterberg died of a massive stroke.

Forensic psychology and eyewitness testimony - Forensic psychology deals with psychology and the law. Munsterberg was particularly interested in the fallibility of human perception in viewing a criminal event and subsequently describing it. He wrote articles on crime prevention and conducted research on simulated crimes. In 1908, he published On the Witness Stand, which described the psychological factors that can affect a trial's income: false confessions, the power of suggestion in the cross-examination of weakness, and the use of physiological measurements to detect heightened emotional states in suspects and defendants.

Psychotherapy - Munsterberg believed mental illness was really a behavioral maladjustment problem, not something attributable to underlying unconscious conflicts. Munsterberg's 1909 book, Psychotherapy, focused on the field of clinical psychology.

Industrial psychology - Munsterberg was a promoter of industrial psychology. his article "Psychology and the Market" in 1909 covered several areas to which psychology could contribute: vocational guidance, advertising, personnel management, mental testing, employee motivation, and the effects of fatigue and monotony on job performance. Munsterberg published his findings of working as a consultant for several companies in Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913). Munsterberg's observations showed that his selection techniques could improve job performance and that talking while working decreased efficiency. His solution was to redesign the workplace to make it difficult for workers to talk to one another.

John Dewey - The Founding of Functionalism

After obtaining his undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont, Dewey spent a few years after graduation teaching high school and studying philosophy on his own. He enrolled in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he received in Ph.D. in 1884. He went on to teach at the universities of Michigan and Minnesota. In 1886, Dewey published the first American textbook in the new psychology. Dewey established a laboratory school at the University of Chicago, where he spent the next ten years. This radical innovation in education became the cornerstone for the progressive education movement. In 1904, Dewey went to Columbia University in New York to continue his work applying psychology to educational and philosophical problems.

Dewey published "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" in the Psychological Review (1896). In this important work, Dewey contributed directly to the founding of the functionalist school of thought. Dewey attacked the psychological molecularism, elementism, and reductionism of the reflex arc wit its distinction between between stimulus and response. In doing so, Dewey was arguing that neither behavior nor conscious experience could be reduced to elements. The reflex arc argued that any unit of behavior ends with the response to a stimulus - behavior involved in a reflex response cannot be meaningfully reduced to basic sensorimotor elements any more than consciousness can be meaningfully analyzed into elementary component parts. Dewey concluded that the proper subject matter for psychology had to be the study of the total organism as it functions in the environment.

Mary Whiton Calkins - The Functional Inequality of Women

Mary Whiton Calkins was the student of William James. Calkins was a woman who has able to overcome barriers of prejudice and discrimination. Calkins lived during a time when a general belief was held in the so-called natural intellectual superiority of men. It was argued that even if women were granted educational opportunities similar to those available to men, women possessed innate intellectual deficiencies that would impede their ability to fully utilize their education. As such, Harvard declined to grant a doctoral degree to Calkins, even though her examination was described as the one of the most brilliant examinations for the Ph.D. at Harvard yet. Harvard was discriminating against her only because she was a woman. Seven years later, Harvard offered her a degree from Radcliffe College, which Calkins refused. Calkins went on to develop the paired-associated technique used in the study of memory, made significant and lasting contributions to the study of psychology, and became the first woman president of the APA.

G. Stanley Hall - An Outstanding Records of Firsts

G. Stanley Hall accompanied William James during the time of tremendous growth of psychology in the United States between 1875 and 1900. Born on a farm in Massachusetts, Hall was an intensely ambitious boy. In 1863, Hall entered Williams College where he developed an enthusiasm for evolutionary theory. After graduation, he enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Hall found that he had no strong commitment to the ministry and it quickly became clear that he would not be noted for his religious orthodoxy. Instead, he went to the University of Bonn, Germany, to study philosophy and theology. In Berlin, he added studies in physiology and physics. Hall recalls his time in Europe a time of liberation. However, Hall returned home to the United States in 1871 because his parents would no longer support him. At this time, Hall was 27 years old with no degree and heavily in debt. Hall secured a teaching job at Antioch College in Ohio, but took a leave of absence in 1874 in order to begin graduate studies and conduct research at the medical school in at Harvard where he worked with William James. In 1878, Hall was awarded the first doctoral degree in psychology in the United States.

Immediately after receiving his degree, Hall left for Europe again to study psychology at Berlin and then to become Wundt's student at Leipzig. Upon returning to the United States two years later, Hall began his focus on the application of psychology to education. Hall's repeated message was that the psychological study of children be a major component of the teaching profession. Hall lectured around the United States and was subsequently offered a professorship at Hopkins where he formally established what is usually considered to be the first American psychology lab in 1883.

In 1887, Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology - the first psychology journal in the United States that is considered an important publication even today. The following year hall became the first president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Hall aspired to make Clark a graduate university that emphasized research rather than teaching. Psychology at Clark prospered under Hall. During his time at Clark University, Hall established the journal Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Applied Psychology. In addition, Hall made Clark University more receptive to women and minority students than most schools in the United States at that time. After Hall's retirement from Clark in 1920, he continued to write. He died four years later, a few month after he was elected to a second term as APA's president.

Evolution and the Recapitulation Theory of Development - Halls intellectual interests had a single theme: evolutionary theory. His work was governed by the conviction that the normal growth of the mind involved a series of evolutionary stages. Hall is often called a genetic psychologist because of his concern with human and animal development and the related problems of adaptation. Hall's genetic interests led him to the psychological study of childhood. In conducting his research on children, Hall made extensive use of questionnaires and his studies led to the formalization of the child study movement. Hall is well-known for his recapitulation theory of psychological essence which is the idea that the psychological development of children repeats the history of the human race. This idea was written about in his work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Eduction (1904). As Hall grew older, he naturally became curious about the later stages of human development. At the age of 78 he published Senescence (1922), the first large-scale survey of the psychological issues of old age.

James Rowland Angell - The Province of Functional Psychology

Born into an academic family in Vermont, Angell went on to complete his undergraduate work at Michigan, where he studied under Dewey. Angell received his master's degree in 1892 after working with James for a year at Harvard. Angell went to Europe to continue his graduate studies at the universities in Halle and in Berlin, Germany. Because Angell was unable to complete the work for his doctoral degree, he decided to accept an appointment at the University of Minnesota. Although Angell himself never earned a Ph.D., he was instrumental in granting many doctorates and in the course of his career he received 23 honorary degrees.

James Angell molded the functionalist movement into a working school of thought. His textbook, Psychology (1904), embodies the functionalist approach. In it Angell noted that the function of consciousness is to improve the organism's adaptive abilities. He posed that the goal of psychology is to study how the mind assists the organism in adjusting to its environment. Angell described three major themes of the functionalist movement:

1. Functional psychology is the psychology of mental operations, in contrast to structuralism, which is the psychology of mental elements.

2. Functional psychology is the psychology is the psychology of the fundamental utilities of consciousness.

3. Functional psychology is the psychology of psychophysical relations (mind-body relations) and is concerned with the total relationship of the organism to its environment.