William McDougall doesn't belong in this chapter, really. But his dislike for Watson's brand of behaviorism and his efforts against it warrant his inclusion. He was born June 22, 1871 in Lancashire, England. He entered the University of Manchester at 15, and received his medical degree from St. Thomas's Hospital in London, in 1897. He usually referred to himself as an anthropologist, especially after a one-year Cambridge University expedition to visit the tribes of central Borneo.

From 1898, McDougall held lectureships in Cambridge and Oxford. His reputation developed in England with the publication of several texts, including Introduction to Social Psychology in 1908 and Body and Mind in 1911. In 1912, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

During WWI, he served in the medical corps, treating soldiers suffering from "shell shock," what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. After the war, he himself received therapy from Carl Jung!

He was offered a position as Professor of Psychology at Harvard in 1920. He considered himself a follower of William James, so he took this as a great honor.  In that same year, he published The Group Mind, followed in 1923 by the  Outline of Psychology.

In 1924, he participated in The Battle of Behaviorism (published in 1929).  This was a debate with John Watson at the Psychology Club meeting in Washington DC that year.  The audience narrowly voted McDougall the winner, but it would be Watson who would win the favor of American psychology for years to come!

McDougall resigned from his position as chair of Psychology at Harvard in 1926, and began teaching at Duke University in 1927.  It should be noted that he had a particular strong relationship with his wife, and in 1927 dedicated his book Character and the Conduct of Life to her with these words: "To my wife, to whose intuitive insight I owe whatever understanding of human nature I have acquired." He died in 1938.

McDougall was an hereditarian to the end, promoting a psychology based on instincts.  He himself referred to his position as evolutionary psychology. Further, he was the leading critic of the behaviorism of his day.  He particularly hated Watson's simplistic materialism.

McDougall was not well like by his students or by his colleagues.  The American press (notably the New York Times) was particularly antagonistic towards him.  The reasons were clear:  McDougall took his hereditarian position at a time when the environmental position ruled American psychology and popular opinion.  He called himself a "democratic elitist" and considered a nation's intellectual aristocracy a treasure which should be protected.  Further, he believed in the hereditary nature of group differences, both national and racial, and proposed the institution of eugenic programs.  In his defense, however, he had no sympathy with Nazism and its version of eugenics!

McDougall has been largely forgotten -- until recently, with genetics and evolutionary psychology on the rise.

McDougall saw Instincts as having three components:

• perception -- we pay attention to stimuli relevant to our instinctual purposes
• behavior -- we perform actions that satisfy our instinctual purposes
• emotion -- instincts have associated negative and positive emotions

Notice that instincts are purposive, i.e. goal-directed!  This is not stimulus-response behaviorism!

Here is a list of instincts and accompanying emotions:

• escape -- fear
• combat -- anger
• repulsion -- disgust
• parental (protective) -- love, tenderness
• appeal for help -- distress
• mating -- lust
• curiosity -- feeling of mystery
• submission -- inferiority
• assertion -- superiority
• gregariousness -- loneliness
• food-seeking -- appetite
• hoarding -- greed
• construction -- productivity
• laughter -- amusement