Edwin Boring

Intelligence testing in the First World War

During the First World War, Boring was not drafted because of the birth of his first son. Disappointment over not helping his country did not last for long. Robert M. Yerkes asked him to join in the development of intelligence testing. Boring was later appointed chief psychological examiner at Camp Upton in Long Island. Then, in 1918, Boring was asked to work on a massive report on the army intelligence program. Boring made his contribution during the war but was troubled afterward by the lack of scientific objectivity that resulted from intelligence testing. He found the use of probabilities to answer scientific questions to be particularly frustrating. At the time, Boring felt that science was a field of certainty, not probability. As a result, Boring remained cautious of intelligence testing throughout his life. When questions followed in later years about the definition of intelligence, Boring adopted the phrase "Intelligence is what the tests test" (p. 46).

Professor of Psychology

Clark University

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. Boring felt that the previous psychology professor, Hugo Münsterberg, had "vulgarized" (p. 46) 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. 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. Controversy was also stirred during the Red Scare, when Atwood accused Boring of being a Bolshevik encouraging underground radicalism at Clark. 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. 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.

Harvard University

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. Also, the accident resulted in temporary retroactive and progressive amnesia. The experience caused Boring to question what it means to be conscious. 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. In 1928, he received a full-time professorship; during that same year he was president of the American Psychological Association.

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.

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. 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. Boring emphasized the use of the experimental method, rather than the tools of philosophy, to investigate psychological questions. 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.

Psychoanalysis treatments

Boring's self-criticism, fear of failure, and need for peer-acceptance became unmanageable and affected the productivity of his work. In 1933, at the suggestion of his friends and family, Boring began psychoanalysis treatment with a former colleague of Freud, Hanns Sachs. Boring remained in psychoanalysis for a year, five sessions a week, but he found it to be ineffective in alleviating his concerns. Boring had hoped to achieve a change in personality by the end of the experience and was disappointed to find that he still had his old mindset. Four years later, both Sachs and Boring wrote about the experience in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. The two men agreed that the psychoanalysis was not successful.

Psychological organizations, conferences, and committees

In 1919–1922 Boring served as secretary of the American Psychological Association while James McKeen Cattell was president. The two men were both very passionate about their work and often clashed as a result. In 1928, Boring became president of the American Psychological Association.

Even with Boring's influence on the field of psychology, he influenced other disciplines as well. In 1945, he was elected as the chairman of the Publications Committee of the American Philosophical Society, of which he was a member. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

In 1945, Robert M. Yerkes asked Boring to join his Survey and Planning Committee, designed to bring psychologists together to discuss issues regarding the war and the role psychologists could play during wartime to help provide services to the country. Boring suggested uniting the American Psychological Association and the Association for Applied Psychology and all other societies that were willing. It was an influential move that restructured the American Psychological Association into what it is today. The Intersociety Constitutional Convention was formed and first met in 1943. Boring was the first chairman of this Intersociety.

In 1966, Division 26, the Division for the History of Psychology, of the American Psychological Association was formed. During its formation, the Division 26 members made a gesture to honor Boring for his tremendous contribution as a historian of psychology. Boring declined to run for president and was made "honorary president" (p. 308) of the Division as an acknowledgment of his work. He was then asked to introduce the first elected president, Robert I. Watson, at the first official meeting, but old age prevented Boring from making the trip. He introduced him by a written statement he mailed, read by John A. Popplestone. In this speech, Boring made jokes that he was the ghost of history's past, a comment that was echoed by his voice being present without his body.

Family

In 1914, he married fellow psychologist Lucy M. Day. They had four children; the first, a son, was born on January 11, 1916, the birthday of Edward B. Titchener, a colleague whom Boring held in high regard. Boring and his wife considered this to be a "happy omen" (p. 45). On July 1, 1968, Boring died in Cambridge, Massachusetts at 81 from multiple myeloma, a hereditary bone cancer which he acquired later in life. His remains were interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Work

Although Boring conducted a lot of research during his career, most of it resulted in minor contributions to psychology. The vast majority of his research centered around sensory and perceptual phenomena. However, most of his time was spent teaching, doing administrative work, writing, editing, or guiding the research of his graduate students.

Figure-ground phenomena research

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. 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. This description made Hill's young-woman/old-woman puzzle famous and earned it the title of the "Boring figure".

Tonal brightness research

One graduate student with whom Boring developed a student-professor relationship similar to the one Boring had had with Titchener was Stanley Smith Stevens. In 1936 the two published their research on tonal brightness. 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. 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. Boring suggested that they embrace the new technology and conduct the experiment with a cathode-ray oscilloscope and a wave-analyzer. They concluded through this study that tonal brightness is essentially the same as tonal density.

Moon illusion research

One of Boring's best-known projects is his 1940 study of the Moon illusion. 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. 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. 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. 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. This study exemplifies Boring's interest in misperceptions of sensory experience.

Legacy

Boring left his legacy on the field of psychology in many ways. He was a historian, researcher, professor, critic, editor, and served in positions on many committees and intellectual societies. He acted through a wide range of faculties to leave his mark on psychology.

Boring taught psychology at Harvard University for 27 years. He had a profound impact, training many students who would go on to become influential in the field of psychology such as Stanley Smith Stevens. He pushed psychologists to adopt better writing habits which ultimately benefited the audiences that would later read these works. Instead of focusing on gaining success through his students' work, Boring led a professional life full of integrity, and was willing to sacrifice his own needs for those of his students.

His textbooks also provided his interpretations of the field and were read by thousands of people. In this way, his written work influenced countless students and fellow psychologists with whom he never came into physical contact.

Through the years Boring's rigidity softened and he was able to contribute to many areas in psychology. He was a man of experimental psychology, objective science, but also philosophical science. His research was based on sensory and perceptual phenomena, but he was also a statesman and advocate for women in psychology and military psychology.

The many contributions Boring made in psychology were recognized later in his lifetime. In 1956 Clark University offered him an honorary degree. Then a year later in 1957 the Society of Experimental Psychologists, a group he was a charter member of, held a special dinner in his honor where students and colleagues gave donations to Harvard to start the Boring Liberty Fund. Perhaps the greatest recognition Boring received for his work in progressing the field of psychology was in 1959 when the American Psychological Association honored him with the gold medal, praising him for "his varied and distinguished contributions to psychology as investigator, teacher, historian, theorist, administrator and statesman, popular expositor, and editor" (p. 796).

Boring had such a profound impact on psychology that Robert Yerkes even dubbed him "Mr. Psychology" (p. 445).