Ernest Hilgard - Textbooks

Textbooks

Hilgard was also the author of three hugely influential textbooks on topics other than hypnosis. The first, “Conditioning and Learning”, jointly authored with Donald Marquis, was very widely cited up until the 1960s. When Gregory Kimble updated a second edition in 1961, Hilgard and Marquis’s names were made part of the title, a distinction, as Hilgard himself noted, usually reserved for deceased authors. A second text, “Theories of Learning” (1948), was also widely cited, and lasted for five editions (through 1981); the last three editions involved Hilgard's Stanford colleague Gordon H. Bower. The third textbook was the well written and wide-ranging “Introduction to Psychology” (1953), which was, according to his biography on the website of the American Psychological Association, “for a long period, the most widely used introductory psychology text in the world.” Several editions were co-authored by Rita L. Atkinson or Richard C. Atkinson, another colleague at Stanford and later chancellor of the University of California at San Diego and then president and regent of the University of California. The 15th edition, published in 2009, is called “Atkinson and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology”.