Guo Renyuan

Introduction

Guo Renyuan (郭任远, 1898–1970), publishing in English as Zing-Yang Kuo, was the most radical behaviorist of his generation — radical enough to be accused, half in admiration, of "out-Watsoning Watson." In 1921, while still a student at Berkeley, he published "Giving up Instincts in Psychology" in the Journal of Philosophy, an attack on the instinct theories of McDougall and the instinct-laden psychology of the day that helped ignite the behaviorist movement's anti-instinct turn in the 1920s. He then did what most polemicists do not: he went into the laboratory for forty years, rearing kittens with rats, watching chick embryos move through a window he invented in the shell, and assembling the case that behavior develops epigenetically, out of the organism's history rather than out of preinstalled instincts. His administrative career in China — acting president of Fudan in his twenties, president of Zhejiang University until students drove him out in 1936 — was turbulent and ended in exile; his scientific reputation, dormant for decades, was revived when developmental psychobiology caught up with his conclusions.

Early Life and Education

Guo was born in 1898 in Chaoyang County, Guangdong (now part of Shantou), into a wealthy merchant family. He entered Fudan Public School in Shanghai in 1916 and left for the University of California, Berkeley, in 1918 to study psychology, in the department where John B. Watson's behaviorist manifesto was still fresh news.

Academic and Professional Career

His 1921 anti-instinct paper made his name before he had a doctorate (he had met Berkeley's PhD requirements by 1923, but — after a dispute over demanded thesis revisions — left without defending and received the degree only in 1936). Returning to China around 1923, he taught at Fudan University, directed its Institute of Psychology, and served as acting president in the mid-1920s (1924–25 by most accounts) — an administrative rise that made him, at twenty-six, one of the most visible academics in China. From 1933 to 1936 he was president of National Zhejiang University, where his militarized, authoritarian campus rule provoked the student protests of 1936 that forced his resignation; the university's rescue by the celebrated meteorologist Zhu Kezhen began with Guo's fall. After the war he drifted through advisory posts and eventually settled in Hong Kong, spending his final years (around 1968–70) as a research professor at Nova University in Florida. He died in Hong Kong on August 14, 1970. Gilbert Gottlieb, whose epigenetic developmental psychobiology owes a direct debt to Kuo's work, wrote his scientific obituary.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The anti-instinct movement

The 1921 paper and its 1922 sequel asked the behaviorist question in its sharpest form: what work is the concept of instinct actually doing, and can the label survive the evidence? The debate it fed reshaped behaviorism in the 1920s and anticipates later fights over innate modules in cognitive science.

Development as epigenesis

Kuo's experiments were designed to replace instinct with developmental history. His famous 1930 study, "The genesis of the cat's response to the rat," reared kittens with rats and showed that rat-killing is largely learned, not innate. His 1930s series on chick embryos — observed directly through his Vaseline-window technique — documented behavior emerging epigenetically in the egg, decades before the mainstream accepted the view. His late synthesis, The Dynamics of Behavior Development (1967), collected the argument: development is organization, not unfolding.

Reputation recovered late

Kuo was too early and too abrasive for his contemporaries, and his Chinese administrative record further buried him. The centennial of his 1921 paper brought retrospectives crediting him as the anti-instinct movement's true instigator — a reminder that the discipline's history is written twice: once by contemporaries and once by successors.