McDougall, William (1871–1938)

English psychologist. He had a great influence on social psychology in the English-speaking world. His main contribution lay in the study of instinct and emotion, which in his classification were interrelated, each instinctive impulse being accompanied by its own quality of emotional experience.

He was born in Chadderton, Lancashire, and graduated from Cambridge University in 1892. He then studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital, London. After qualification he became Wilde reader in mental philosophy at Oxford. During World War I he served in the RAMC. He taught psychology at Harvard University 1920–27, and was professor of psychology at Duke University, North Carolina 1927–38. He was particularly interested in psychical research and founded a department at Duke to study parapsychology. His teaching, which was a powerful counterbalance to the mechanistic view of human behaviour, is contained in a remarkable series of books: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), The Group Mind (1920), An Outline of Psychology (1923), An Outline of Abnormal Psychology (1926), Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution (1929), Religion and the Sciences of Life (1934), The Frontiers of Psychology (1935), and Psycho-Analysis and Social Psychology (1936).