William McDougall (psychologist) - Biography

Biography

McDougall's interests and sympathies were broad. He was interested in eugenics, but departed from neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in maintaining the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as suggested by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; he carried out many experiments designed to demonstrate this process. Opposing behaviourism, he argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology (from Greek ὁρμή hormḗ "impulse").

However, in the theory of motivation, he defended the idea that individuals are motivated by a significant number of inherited instincts, whose action they may not consciously understand, so they might not always understand their own goals. His ideas on instinct strongly influenced Konrad Lorenz, though Lorenz did not always acknowledge this. McDougall underwent psychoanalysis with C. G. Jung, and was also prepared to study parapsychology. In 1920 he served as president of the Society for Psychical Research, and in the subsequent year of its US counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research. A strong advocate of scientific method and academic professionalization in psychical research, McDougall was instrumental in establishing parapsychology as a university discipline in the US in the early 1930s.

Because of his interest in eugenics and his unorthodox stance on evolution, McDougall has been adopted as an iconic figure by proponents of a strong influence of inherited traits on behaviour, some of whom are regarded by most mainstream psychologists as scientific racists. While McDougall was certainly an unorthodox figure and always willing to take a minority view, there is no reason to suppose that in the light of modern psychological knowledge and political developments, he would have supported the position taken by these groups. Though he wrote:

"...; the few distinguished Negroes, so called, of America - such as Douglass, Booker Washington, Du Bois - have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the Negro race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity" (McDougall, William., The Group Mind, p.187, Arno Press, 1973; Copyright, 1920 by G.P. Putnam's Sons).

McDougall married at the age of 29 ("against my considered principles", he reports in his autobiographical essay, "for I held that a man whose chosen business in life was to develop to the utmost his intellectual powers should not marry before forty, if at all"). He had five children.