O. Hobart Mowrer

Introduction

Orval Hobart Mowrer (January 23, 1907 – June 20, 1982) was an American psychologist whose two-factor theory of learning shaped how both behaviorists and clinicians understood fear and avoidance for half a century. He argued that phobias and anxiety disorders persist because of two different learning processes operating in sequence: fear is acquired by classical conditioning, and avoidance is then maintained by operant reinforcement when it reduces that fear. He was president of the American Psychological Association in 1954, spent his most productive years at the University of Illinois, and was ranked the 98th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century in the Haggbloom et al. survey published in Review of General Psychology in 2002. His career also took a radical second turn: disillusioned with both psychoanalysis and behaviorism, he spent his last decades arguing that mental illness grows out of moral failure and dishonesty, and founded Integrity Groups as a treatment built on confession and restitution.

Early Life and Education

Mowrer grew up on the family farm near Unionville, Missouri. His father retired from farming and moved the family to town when Hobart reached school age; the older Mowrer's death when Hobart was thirteen changed the boy's life, and a year later he suffered the first of the major depressions that would recur throughout his life. He did well enough in high school to enter the University of Missouri in 1925, where he decided on psychology partly in the hope of understanding his own troubles.

At Missouri he became laboratory assistant to the university's only psychology professor, Max Friedrich Meyer — a German émigré with a PhD in physics and an uncompromising behaviorism that Mowrer absorbed. In his senior year he distributed a questionnaire on student sexual attitudes under a fabricated "Bureau of Personnel Research" letterhead; complaints from parents led to a scandal in which two faculty members lost their positions and the American Association of University Professors censured the university in the first such action in its history. Mowrer left without a degree in 1929 (it was granted years later) and entered Johns Hopkins University, where he worked under Knight Dunlap and completed his doctorate in 1932 on spatial orientation in pigeons, covering visual and vestibular mechanisms. His first psychoanalysis, undertaken during those years for depression, was one of several treatments he would seek over a lifetime.

Academic and Professional Career

Academic jobs were scarce in the Depression, so Mowrer took a Sterling Fellowship at Yale University in 1934, joining an Institute of Human Relations dominated by Clark Hull's stimulus-response formalism. He moved to Harvard in 1940, where — alongside Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, Gordon Allport, and Henry Murray — he helped establish the Department of Social Relations, and later served as editor of the Harvard Educational Review.

In 1948 he accepted a research professorship at the University of Illinois, where he remained until retiring in 1975, practising psychotherapy in Champaign-Urbana and at Galesburg State Research Hospital. The 1950s were his peak of professional authority: he was elected APA president in 1954 and published the papers and books that made two-factor learning theory the standard account of avoidance. From the late 1950s onward he turned increasingly to questions of conscience, guilt, and community, founding Integrity Groups — small therapeutic communities built on honesty, responsibility, and emotional involvement — and helping establish GROW self-help groups in the United States. He died on June 20, 1982, by his own hand, after a life marked by recurrent severe depression.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Two-Factor Theory of Learning

Mowrer's most cited idea holds that avoidance learning requires two separate processes. Through Pavlovian conditioning, a neutral stimulus comes to elicit fear — a conditioned emotional reaction that serves as a drive. Then, through instrumental learning, any response that removes the organism from the feared stimulus is reinforced because it reduces that drive. The theory explained the stubborn "neurotic paradox": avoidance persists precisely because the person never stays in the situation long enough to learn that the disaster will not occur.

Fear as an Acquired Drive and the Vocabulary of Anxiety Disorders

By treating conditioned fear as a motivator that obeyed the same laws as hunger, Mowrer gave learning theory a way to talk about emotion without abandoning behaviorism, and his framework became the canonical explanation of how phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder are acquired and maintained. It supplied the theoretical warrant for exposure therapy: if avoidance is maintained by fear reduction, then blocking avoidance and extinguishing fear should cure the problem.

Sign Learning Versus Solution Learning

In his 1947 paper "On the Dual Nature of Learning," Mowrer argued that the behaviorist–cognitivist dispute of the era was a false dichotomy. He distinguished "sign learning" — learning what predicts what, the territory associated with Edward Tolman — from "solution learning," learning what to do about it, and insisted that both are real and must be integrated. The paper is a landmark attempt to bridge conditioning and problem-solving within one framework.

The Bell-and-Pad Treatment for Enuresis

Long before he turned to moral philosophy, Mowrer with his wife Willie Mae ("Molly") built a practical device out of a bell and a cloth pad: when a sleeping child's urine completed a circuit, the bell rang, waking the child; over repeated nights, children learned to wake before wetting. The 1938 conditioning treatment for bedwetting remains one of the earliest and most successful applied behavior-therapy technologies, is still used, and is the practical invention for which Mowrer is best known outside academic psychology.

Integrity Therapy

Mowrer's later program reversed his earlier determinism: he came to believe that emotional disorder is largely the product of unconfessed wrongdoing and irresponsibility, and that recovery requires honest confession to a community and concrete restitution. Integrity Groups operationalized this — members reported their conduct publicly and were held accountable by peers — and he defended the position at length in The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion (1961) and Morality and Mental Health (1967).

Major Publications

Mowrer, O. H. (1947). On the dual nature of learning: A reinterpretation of "conditioning" and "problem-solving." Harvard Educational Review, 17, 102–148.
Mowrer, O. H. (1950). Learning Theory and Personality Dynamics. New York: Ronald Press.
Mowrer, O. H. (Ed.). (1953). Psychotherapy: Theory and Research. New York: Ronald Press.
Mowrer, O. H. (1960). Learning Theory and Behavior. New York: Wiley.
Mowrer, O. H. (1961). The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
Mowrer, O. H. (1967). Morality and Mental Health. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Impact and Legacy

Two-factor theory remains the textbook account of how avoidance begins, the bell-and-pad method is still a front-line treatment for enuresis, and Mowrer's integration of conditioning with motivation anticipated modern approaches to anxiety. His willingness to argue that psychology could not be value-neutral — that therapy involves responsibility, honesty, and community — also planted seeds that later reappeared in moral and meaning-centered therapies.

Both of his major programs drew heavy criticism:

The two-factor account of maintenance failed its own predictions. The theory requires that avoidance be sustained by fear, yet three findings cut directly against it. Herrnstein and Hineline (1966) showed that animals acquire avoidance even when the response does not terminate the warning signal, so long as the aversive event is omitted — which removes the fear reduction the theory says is the reinforcer. Solomon and Wynne (1953) found avoidance responses persisting in dogs after hundreds of fear-extinction trials. And Rachman and colleagues (1986) found that ending an exposure session while anxiety was still high did not strengthen avoidance, contradicting the clinical rule the theory implied. Herrnstein (1969) and Rachman and Hodgson's classic 1974 analysis concluded that the theory could not explain the persistence of avoidance without fear. Cognitive and safety-signal accounts, including work by Mowrer's own intellectual descendants, argued that what maintains avoidance is the expectation of catastrophe and the reassurance of safety, not the reduction of a conditioned drive.
The therapy works, but not for the reason he gave. Exposure treatment is demonstrably effective, yet contemporary inhibitory-learning and habituation models hold that improvement comes from new learning that competes with the old fear memory, not from extinguishing a fear drive — the mechanism has been largely superseded even where the practice survives.
Integrity therapy was rejected on empirical and ethical grounds. Colleagues objected that Mowrer's claim that neurosis follows from sin and dishonesty moralized illness, that the method had no controlled outcome evidence, and that public confession in peer groups risked harm to vulnerable people. His 1961 argument that psychiatry and liberal religion had both capitulated to determinism alienated much of his audience.
A cautionary personal dimension. Mowrer's own severe, recurring depressions and his death by suicide sit uneasily beside a late theory that located mental illness in moral failure; the gap between his explanatory framework and his own experience is frequently noted by historians of the field.

Learn More

Pavlovian Conditioning — the classical-conditioning half of Mowrer's two-factor theory.
PTSD — the disorder his model was most often invoked to explain.
Edward Tolman — the sign-learning position Mowrer tried to reconcile with solution learning.
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.

References

Mowrer, O. H., & Mowrer, W. M. (1938). Enuresis: A method for its study and treatment. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 8(4), 636-659.
Mowrer, O. H. (1947). On the dual nature of learning—a re-interpretation of “conditioning” and “problem-solving”. Harvard Educational Review, 17(2), 102-148.
Mowrer, O. H. (1950). Learning theory and personality dynamics. Ronald Press.
Mowrer, O. H. (1960). Learning theory and behavior. John Wiley & Sons.
Mowrer, O. H. (1960). Learning theory and the symbolic processes. John Wiley & Sons.
Mowrer, O. H. (1961). The crisis in psychiatry and religion. D. Van Nostrand.
Mowrer, O. H. (1967). Morality and mental health. Rand McNally.
Herrnstein, R. J., & Hineline, P. N. (1966). Negative reinforcement as shock-frequency reduction. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 9(5), 421-430.
Solomon, R. L., & Wynne, L. C. (1953). Traumatic avoidance learning: Acquisition in normal dogs. Psychological Monographs, 67(4), 1-19.
Haggbloom, S. J., Warnick, J. E., Warnick, R., Jones, V. K., Yarbrough, G. L., Russell, T. M., Borecky, C. M., McGahhey, R., Powell, J. L., Beavers, J., & Monte, E. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Review of General Psychology, 6(2), 139-152.