Orval Hobart Mowrer - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Mowrer spent his early years on the family farm near Unionville, Missouri. His father retired from farming and moved the family to town when Hobart reached school age. The death of the elder Mowrer when Hobart was 13 changed his life radically. A year later he suffered the first in a series of major depressions which would recur throughout his life. Nevertheless, he did well in high school and entered the University of Missouri in 1925. Having decided on psychology as a career, he became laboratory assistant to the university's first and only psychology professor, Max Friedrich Meyer. Meyer had earned a PhD in physics before emigrating from Germany in the 1890s and was a rigorous behaviorist. Although Mowrer's initial hope was that psychology would help him to understand himself and his own problems, he readily adapted to Meyer's behavioral approach. Mowrer began his college years as a conservative Christian, but lost his faith as he adopted progressive and scientific views prevalent in academia.

In his senior year, as a project for a sociology course, Mowrer composed a questionnaire to investigate sexual attitudes among students. It was distributed anonymously and the responses were to be returned anonymously. The questionnaire was accompanied by a letter from a non-existent "Bureau of Personnel Research" which began:

Dear University Student:
During the last several decades it has become increasingly apparent that there is something seriously wrong with the traditional system of marriage in this country. But, unfortunately, the whole matter has been so inextricably bound up with religious dogmas, moral sentiments, and all manner of prudish conventionalities as to make it exceedingly difficult to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the precise reasons for this situation.

There were slight differences in wording between the questionnaires sent to women and those sent to men, but each contained 11 groups of questions requesting the student's opinions about illicit sexual relations, whether the student would marry a person who had engaged in sexual relations, how s/he would react to unfaithfulness in marriage, whether s/he had engaged in sex play as a child or sexual relations as an adult, and whether s/he would favor the legal establishment of "trial marriage" or "companionate marriage."

Some of the students sent the questionnaires on to their parents, who complained to the administration. Two faculty members were aware of the questionnaire and allowed it to be distributed, sociology professor Harmon O. DeGraff and psychology professor Max Friedrich Meyer, although neither had read the cover letter. Ultimately both men lost their jobs, and Meyer never held an academic position again. The American Association of University Professors censured the University for violation of academic freedom, in the first such action taken by the AAUP.

The scandal had little impact on Mowrer's career. He left the university without a degree in 1929 (the degree was granted a few years later), entering Johns Hopkins University, where he worked under Knight Dunlap. Mowrer's PhD research involved spatial orientation as mediated by vision and the vestibular receptors of the inner ear, using pigeons as subjects. During his time at Johns Hopkins he also underwent psychoanalysis for the first time, in an attempt to resolve another episode of depression. After completing his doctorate in 1932 he continued his work on spatial orientation as a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University and then Princeton University.