Edwin G. Boring

Edwin Garrigues Boring (October 23, 1886-July 1, 1968) was an American experimental psychologist and one of the most influential leaders of the discipline from the 1920s to the 1960s. Boring later became one of the first historians of psychology.

Life

Edwin Garrigues Boring was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1886. He grew up in a matriarchal Quaker household. In childhood, Edwin was fascinated by electricity and decided to study electrical engineering at Cornell University, where he received a master's degree in electical engineering, in 1908. For one of the few electives in the engineering program, he selected Edward B. Titchener's psychology course. Boring found Titchener's lectures "magic" was motivated by Titchener's praise for his examination paper. After a year of factory work at Bethlehem Steel and another year teaching science in Moravian Church school, Edwin Boring returned to Cornell, in 1910 for an A. M. degree to augment his teaching credentials. Boring was soon drawn to psychology by the course of Madison Bentley. Edwin Boring became a devoted student and lifelong admirer of Titchener and a member of Titchener's laboratory group, as was his future wife, Lucy Day. Edwin Boring's dissertation topic, assigned to him by Titchener, was on sensory processes in the alimentary tract, but he also carried out work on schizophrenia and other psychological problems during his graduate student career.

After receiving a doctorate in [[1914], Edwin Boring spent four additional years as an instructor at Cornell. In 1918, Robert M. Yerkes asked Boring to assist with the US Army's testing work, and Boring became chief psychological examiner at Camp Upton, Long Island. Later, Boring worked directly under Yerkes and played a major role in preparing the massive report on the Army testing. Boring remained cautious about the interpretation of intelligence tests for the rest of his career.

In 1919, G. Stanley Hall offered Boring the position of professor of Experimental Psychology at Clark University. Three years later, in the midst of political controversies at Clark, he was invited to Harvard.

from 1919 to 1922. The Edwin Boring began his long career at Harvard University. He taught at Harvard from 1922 until his retirement in 1957 and director of the ppsychological laboratory there from 1924 to 1949. Under his direction the developments of psychology and philosophy were separated in 1934, and in 1945 the divisions experimental and physiological psychology were separated from those of social and clinical psychology.and

From 1924 to 1949 Boring was director of the psychological laboratory at Harvard University, where his goal became to free psychology from its status as a subsection of the Department of Philosophy. Boring was successful and established an independent Department of Psychology in 1934. His emphasized the use of the experimental method to investigate psychological questions rather than the tools of philosophy.

He was the president of the American Psychological Association in 1928.

Books

Boring, E. G. (1942). Sensation and perception in the history of experimental psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

External links

• Short biography
• National Academy of Sciences
• Edwin G. Boring
• The History Channel - Boring
• Revisionist view of Boring

Credits

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