Edwin Boring

In 1920, Boring was offered a position at Harvard and was also offered a position to continue working with Yerkes in Minnesota. He chose Harvard because he believed that they had a greater need for him there; he had a mission to "rescue Harvard psychology from the philosophers" (p. 36) and transform psychology into a respectable science.[2] Boring felt that the previous psychology professor, Hugo Münsterberg, had "vulgarized" (p. 46)[3] the field by placing it in the philosophical realm; it was Boring's goal to bring the program to a more objective perspective. However, the summer before he was to start at Harvard, G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University, offered him a job as professor of experimental psychology for three years with the promise that if his work was satisfactory, his position would be made permanent. The appeal of stability led Boring to accept the position at Clark.[2] Here, he enjoyed his work, but there were concerns regarding the status of psychology when the new president and geographer Wallace Walter Atwood was appointed, who wanted to replace newly popular psychology with geography.[2] Controversy was also stirred during the Red Scare, when Atwood accused Boring of being a Bolshevik encouraging underground radicalism at Clark.[4] Such allegations had no evidence of support, and while Boring waited for his reappointment to Clark, he received another offer from Harvard as an associate professor and an offer from Stanford University for a full professorship with a higher salary.[2] The decision was made for Boring when Stanford withdrew the offer because of Boring's hesitation to accept it, leaving him to start a new career at Harvard.[2]

His tenure at Harvard almost ended before it began, when he was injured in an automobile accident. Boring fractured his skull and had to stay in the hospital for six weeks.[3] Also, the accident resulted in temporary retroactive and progressive amnesia.[3] The experience caused Boring to question what it means to be conscious.[3] If a person could not recall what the person had said moments afterward, could he really be considered conscious? Such questions become a lifelong endeavor for Boring to try to answer.

He was rewarded for his dedication to Harvard by being promoted to laboratory director in 1924; he held that position until 1949, when he resigned.[2] In 1928, he received a full-time professorship; during that same year he was president of the American Psychological Association.[2]

Boring was very interested in building a close relationship between the staff and students. At his suggestion, in 1924 the Harvard philosophy and psychology department began the first colloquium to build a sense of community.[2]

In 1933, James B. Conant became president of Harvard. Conant's interest in psychology was considerably greater than the former president's, and in 1934, he accepted Boring's motion to separate the psychology and philosophy departments.[2] By removing the philosophy go-between, the official break between the disciplines freed the psychological science faculty to focus on the research and experimental psychology questions that they wanted to answer.[2] Boring emphasized the use of the experimental method, rather than the tools of philosophy, to investigate psychological questions.[5] Boring's mission was finally complete. Boring was made the first chair of the Department of Psychology, but 2 years later, he resigned the position to Gordon W. Allport.[2]

So-called "Boring figure"[11]

Later in his career Boring became interested in the perceptual ambiguity of figure-ground phenomena. He discussed cartoonist W. E. Hill's "My Wife and My Mother-in-Law" in a 1930 journal article, explaining that this illustration was an accurate representation of the phenomena because the two different images are interpenetrating one another with no formal dividing line.[12] He contrasted this image to Edgar Rubin's Rubin vase figure, where he felt that there is an obvious dividing line between the human profiles and goblets.[12] This description made Hill's young-woman/old-woman puzzle famous and earned it the title of the "Boring figure".[13]

One graduate student with whom Boring developed a student-professor relationship similar to the one Boring had had with Titchener was Stanley Smith Stevens.[2] In 1936 the two published their research on tonal brightness.[3] At the time it was known that tonal brightness varied with pitch; and, based on previous research, it was believed that high tones are bright and low tones are dull.[14] The question that Stevens and Boring researched was concerning the bright and dull tones that could be produced with a siren when the holes were appropriately spaced, hypothesizing that brightness varies with both the intensity and the frequency of the pitch.[14] Boring suggested that they embrace the new technology and conduct the experiment with a cathode-ray oscilloscope and a wave-analyzer.[3] They concluded through this study that tonal brightness is essentially the same as tonal density.[14]

One of Boring's best-known projects is his 1940 study of the Moon illusion.[15] Boring and fellow researcher A. H. Holway hypothesized that the Moon appears larger on the horizon because the eyes view it directly at a leveled position, while the Moon overhead appears smaller because the eyes must look up.[2] They tested this experimentally, and found that for an observer whose eyes were kept in a fixed position while a circle representing the Moon moved up (through the use of a pulley system), the Moon appeared to increase in size.[3] This illusion did not occur when participants were lying down while viewing the Moon, and they also found some evidence of it not occurring when viewing the Moon with only one eye.[3] These results led the researchers to conclude that the illusion of Moon shrinkage depends on the movement of the eyes in the head, not the movement of the actual head, and that it depends on binocular vision, that is, the use of both eyes together.[2] This study exemplifies Boring's interest in misperceptions of sensory experience.

Although Boring did make some research contributions, he had a larger impact through his writing. His first connection to psychological literature came about in 1926 when Boring became a joint editor of The American Journal of Psychology, which was originally started by G. Stanley Hall and later bought by K. M. Dallenbach for Cornell University and put under Titchener's control.[2] When Titchener withdrew from the journal Dallenbach asked I. Madison Bentley, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Boring to pick up editorship of the journal.[2] Boring accepted and remained an editor for 23 years.[2]

While studying at Cornell, the 200-lecture course Titchener had Boring and the rest of his graduate students design left an interest in Boring on the historical perspective of psychology.[2] This later inspired him to publish his first book titled A History of Experimental Psychology in 1929 in hopes of making psychologists more "history-conscious" (p. 42).[2] The book did well within the first year, selling 1,316 copies;[2] many in the field enjoyed the text and the manner in which he described the history of the discipline.[3] The text continued to prosper through the years, selling 16,765 copies in 1950.[2] Most people still consider this to be Boring's most important work; the publication made him one of the first historians of psychology.[3]

His next work, The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness, appeared in 1933. Here, he attempts to accommodate behaviorism by viewing sensations through their physical mechanisms.[15] In this, Boring expresses his monist physicalism perspective, similar to operationalism's emphasis on measurement in order to understand the meaning of concepts.[3] Boring himself was surprised by his view being in direct opposition to his deeply respected mentor Titchener.[2] However, Titchener was dead by this time. Having found Titchener's mentalist and dualist perspective untenable, Boring now focused on the physical brain rather than the abstract mind.[2] One of the book's objectives is to clarify such complex terms as consciousness and sensation, questions that had been plaguing him since his automobile accident.[3] Boring sought to establish what these phenomena represent in physical terms.

Boring was approached by Harry P. Weld to collaborate with him and Herbert Langfeld on a psychology textbook, referred to as the BLW textbooks.[2] The first edition was titled Psychology: a Factual Textbook and was published in 1935.[2] This textbook focused mainly on the hard facts and each section was written by a specialist in the field of focus for that chapter.[2] In 1939 the text was much revised and a second edition was published.[2] The third edition published in 1948 was renamed Foundations of Psychology and it was greatly expanded to include new authors, chapters, and format.[2]

He considered his most important work to be his second volume of history, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, which was published in 1942.[2] Boring dated the preface December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, because, he argued, this was the last day "pure scholarship could be undertaken with a clear conscience" (p. 47).[2] As a historian of psychology, Boring was well aware of the importance of place and time during which theories were proposed. In the last chapter of his book, Boring introduced  Goethe and Johann Herder's idea of Zeitgeist.[15] Both G. Stanley Hall and William James had occasionally used the term but it was Boring who popularized it.[4] In several of his works and articles he refers to the Zeitgeist, recognizing how it affected the acceptance of his own ideas. For instance Boring describes forces of the time working to separate the disciplines of philosophy and psychology at Harvard, commenting that the change would have been made even without him there to propose it.[2] Also in this book, Boring claimed that different areas of the tongue are sensitive to sweet, salty, sour and bitter tastes. This was based on misinterpreted data from a 1901 paper written by German scientist D. P. Hänig. This in turn led to the now discredited tongue map, which purports to show where tastes are detected.[16][17] Boring later resigned from Harvard University in 1949 and in that same year published the second edition of A History of Experimental Psychology where he brought the text up to date on advancements in the field of psychology.[2] He emphasizes the role of the Zeitgeist providing a context for the great thinkers in psychology to advance their ideas.[3] Both volumes of the textbook were used by numerous graduate students in the 1960s and have played a large role in shaping psychologists' attitudes towards their field.[15] It was considered to be "a classic, replacing a classic" (p. 60) in the world of psychology.[3]

During the Second World War Boring made his contribution to the war efforts through his writing. Since the First World War there had been talk about the need for a textbook on military psychology but the war ended before the idea could be further developed.[2] With the second war underway the idea resurfaced, and Boring felt confident that with his experience from his BLW textbooks he could write the textbook on military psychology.[2]

The National Research Council's Emergency Committee on Psychology decided to create a book that would focus on the psychology of the majority of soldiers in the army, the ordinary GI, instead of focusing on the higher level officers.[2] In 1943, Psychology for the Fighting Man was published.[2] The book focused on practical information, such as boosting the morale of soldiers, personal-adjustment in the army, and obtainment of necessities such as food.[4] The book sold 380,000 copies and brought The National Research Council about $10,000.[2]

With that project complete Boring turned toward creating the military psychology textbook he had originally intended to work on. In 1945 he completed this work with the publication of Psychology for the Armed Services.[3]

He published an article on his own in 1951 in the American Psychologist that focused on women in the field and emphasized his beliefs.[18] He wrote about the disadvantages women in psychology face as the result of society which affects their professional advancement. He called this the "woman problem".[18] Boring describes the standard procedure men undergo to achieve prestige in their career: a man must receive a PhD, conduct meaningful research that gets published, and undertake administrative work.[18] If work is done well enough to impress their boss, men are likely to be promoted to higher positions and work in broader tasks such as publishing books, or becoming a dean or college president, allowing them to influence a wider range of people.[18] It was the pursuit of prestige at higher positions that women lacked, largely because they were blocked from the higher-level jobs in the first place.

Boring appeared on Psychology One, which was the first publicly televised introductory psychology course that aired in 1956.[3] The program was designed to introduce psychology to the general public and provided an entertaining but insightful form of instruction. Among the topics Boring discussed on the show were the physics of sensations such as light and sound, the structures of sense organs, perceptual constancy and illusions and learning.[3]

In 1961 Boring published a text about his career and life experiences. The book was titled Psychologist at Large: an Autobiography and Selected Essays.[3] It was the extension of a chapter written previously for the series he had edited since 1930, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, which at that time was four volumes and contained autobiographical narratives by 58 eminent psychologists.[3] Psychologist at Large was Boring's last book to be published.[3]

In his seventies he continued to make contributions to the field through his writing. He founded and edited a journal that was dedicated exclusively to psychology book reviews, Contemporary Psychology.[2] In this journal, Boring was able to shape the psychological works that were published. He demanded a high degree of quality which challenged psychologists to rise to his standard.