Robert S. Woodworth - Early Life

Early Life

Woodworth was born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on October 17, 1869. His father was a Congregationalist minister, and his mother was a college-educated teacher. Since Woodworth’s mother was his father’s third wife, he grew up in a large family with children from each of his father’s marriages. His father’s approach to parenting was authoritative and strict. He attended high school in Newton, Massachusetts with the plan of becoming a minister. He received his A.B. degree from Amherst College in 1891, focusing on religion, the classics, mathematics, science, and history. During his senior year, Woodworth took a class in psychology, which caused him to change his future plans. Rather than becoming a minister, he taught mathematics at a high school for two years and at a college for two years in Topeka, Kansas.

Following his stint as a teacher, Woodworth attended a lecture by G. Stanley Hall, and he was enthralled by Hall’s emphasis on “the importance of discovery through investigation” (p. 374). The lecture had such a profound effect on Woodworth that he hung a sign labeled “investigation” over his desk at home. He then read James’s Principles of Psychology, and he had a similar captivating experience to many other students interested in psychology of the time. He decided then to finally follow a career path in psychology.

In 1895, he returned to college as an undergraduate student at Harvard University, studying philosophy with Josiah Royce, psychology with William James, and history with George Santayana. Here at Harvard, he met Edward Lee Thorndike and Walter B. Cannon, and the three became longtime friends. While working with James, he encouraged Woodworth to keep a dream diary. The two were not able to find a significant correlation between the content of one’s dreams and the day’s events. However, Woodworth noted that he often dreamed about incomplete or interrupted topics and events, later emphasized by Bluma Zeigarnik with the Zeigarnik effect. In 1896, Woodworth earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, followed by being an assistant at the Harvard Medical School in the psychology department from 1897-1898. Here, he observed Cannon’s experiments on hunger and emotions. James McKeen Cattell offered Woodworth a graduate fellowship at Columbia University, one of the two primary functionalist schools in psychology. In 1899, Woodworth earned his PhD under Cattell. His dissertation was entitled "Accuracy of voluntary movement."