Edwin Boring

Introduction

Edwin Garrigues Boring (October 23, 1886 – July 1, 1968) was an American experimental psychologist and historian of psychology whose A History of Experimental Psychology (1929) became the standard account of how psychology became a science. A student and devoted follower of Edward Titchener at Cornell, Boring spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he directed the psychological laboratory for a quarter century, led the separation of psychology from philosophy, and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1928. He also coined one of the most quoted — and most misunderstood — definitions in the field's history: "intelligence as a measurable capacity must at the start be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test," commonly compressed into the slogan "intelligence is what the tests test" (1923).

Early Life and Education

Boring was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He entered Cornell University intending to become an engineer and graduated in 1908 with an engineering degree. His path changed through an elective: a course in psychology captivated him — his first research project involved planarians — and in February 1911 he accepted an assistantship in the department. He earned his master's degree in 1912 under Madison Bentley and his Ph.D. in 1914 under Titchener, the leader of American structuralism, whose rigorous laboratory discipline formed Boring's lifelong ideal of psychology as an experimental science in the Wundtian tradition.

Because his early interests strayed outside Titchener's definition of psychology, it was Titchener who suggested his dissertation topic: visceral sensibility. Boring investigated it by swallowing a stomach tube and recording the sensations of his own alimentary tract, finding the stomach and oesophagus more sensitive to temperature and pressure than had been supposed. In June 1914 he married Lucy M. Day, who had taken her own Cornell PhD in 1912; they had four children. The couple both joined Titchener's laboratory group and became part of his selective inner circle, spending most of their Cornell years on Titchener's projects.

Boring remained at Cornell as an instructor until 1918, when he was commissioned a captain in the newly created Psychological Service of the U.S. Army Sanitary Corps, working under Robert Yerkes on the military's testing and personnel programs. He served as chief psychological examiner at Camp Upton on Long Island and helped compile the huge final report on army intelligence testing — the assessment effort that startled the nation by reporting that the average recruit had a mental age of thirteen. The war years also connected him to the applied side of psychology: he came away with a high regard for the mental testers, a group the Titchener in-group regarded as standing outside psychology altogether, and with a lasting unease about the probabilistic reasoning the field required.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1919 Boring became professor of experimental psychology at Clark University, filling the vacancy left by the death of John Wallace Baird. His Clark years ended in controversy: during the Red Scare of 1923, the university's new president, the geographer Wallace Atwood, became convinced that Boring was part of a secret Bolshevik underground at Clark — a charge without foundation, arising after the president interrupted a student Liberal Club lecture by a man reputed to be a communist and Boring, who had neither organised nor attended it, defended as a matter of principle the students' right "to hear all sides." He acquired a stomach ulcer from the episode and suffered from it for years.

Harvard had been interested since 1919, and Boring moved there in 1922 as an associate professor. The Stanford offer was better paid; he chose Harvard because, as he put it, he had a mission to "rescue Harvard psychology from the philosophers," who had inherited the department from Hugo Münsterberg. His tenure nearly ended before it began: shortly after arriving he was struck by a car on a rainy night and spent six weeks in hospital with a fractured skull. The concussion gave him firsthand experience of amnesia — he could converse intelligently and moments later have no recollection of what he had said — and a decade later he raised in print the question of whether such a person can be said to be conscious at all.

He directed the Harvard psychological laboratory from 1924 to 1949, at a time when funds were so tight that he sometimes paid his secretary out of his own pocket and when the departures of Herbert Langfeld and William McDougall left him carrying the department almost alone. In 1934, when Harvard created a separate Department of Psychology, he became its first chairman, resigning the chair after two years in favour of Gordon Allport.

His institutional influence was enormous. He was secretary of the American Psychological Association from 1920 to 1922 and its president in 1928, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1932, took over the editorship of the American Journal of Psychology when Titchener retired in 1925 and held it into the late 1940s, and served as secretary of the Ninth International Congress of Psychology in 1929. In 1933 he also undertook a year of psychoanalysis with Hanns Sachs, a former colleague of Freud; both men later published the conclusion that the treatment had failed — an unusually candid document about the limits of analysis on a skeptic. He abandoned the third volume of his planned historical trilogy in 1955 in order to become founding editor of the review journal Contemporary Psychology the following year.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Experimental Research on Sensation and Perception

Boring's own laboratory work concerned the classic problems of sensory psychology: cutaneous sensation, taste, and visual perception. His early studies of the sensation of the alimentary tract and of cutaneous sensation after nerve section are regarded as classics. With Albert Holway he conducted the definitive parametric studies of the moon illusion (1940), showing how the illusion changes with viewing distance and cues — research that became a fixture of perception textbooks.

A History of Experimental Psychology

Boring's magnum opus, published in 1929 and substantially revised in 1950, organized the field's past around the interplay of great scientists and the Zeitgeist: the march from philosophical speculation through Fechner, Wundt, and James to the experimental laboratories of the twentieth century. Each chapter ended with an extended informal notes section, and the book placed heavy emphasis on the German origins of psychology and especially on the Wundt–Titchener line of descent. For decades it was the history of psychology, the book through which generations of graduate students met the discipline's founders, and it established the writing of disciplinary history as a professional specialization rather than a retirement pastime.

Psychology's Identity as a Science

Boring was the field's most insistent theorist of what it means for psychology to be scientific. He argued that psychology's object is the observer's report, that objectivity requires operational definitions, and that progress demands measurement and controlled experiment. His 1923 one-liner about intelligence was meant precisely in this spirit — an operationalist caution against reifying mental traits — though it escaped his control and became a slogan in battles over testing that he did not intend.

Preserving the Discipline's Memory

Believing that psychologists' lives were poorly documented, Boring initiated the autobiographical series A History of Psychology in Autobiography in 1928, modelled on a German predecessor; the first volume appeared in 1930 and he served on the committee selecting its authors. He spent much of his later career on biography, obituary, and self-study, including his own memoir Psychologist at Large (1961).

Major Publications

Boring, E. G. (1929; 2nd ed. 1950). A History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Century / Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Boring, E. G. (1933). The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness. New York: Century.
Boring, E. G. (1942). Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century.
Psychology for the Fighting Man (1943). Prepared by the National Research Council with Boring among the editors — a wartime best-seller applying psychology to military life.
Boring, E. G. (1961). Psychologist at Large: An Autobiography and Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Boring, E. G. (1963). History, Science, and Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Impact and Legacy

Boring defined how American psychology remembered its own past, and his history remains a landmark even for those who reject its emphases. His insistence on experiment, operational definition, and institutional independence helped consolidate psychology's status as a laboratory science, and his students and editorial posts carried that standard across the profession.

The criticisms have been as influential as the book:

The "great man" narrative marginalized most of psychology. Later historians faulted Boring's account for centering a Wundt–Titchener experimental lineage while neglecting applied, clinical, industrial, and social psychology, as well as contributors outside his lineage. His war work and interest in testing sat awkwardly beside the history he wrote, and revisionist historians have spent decades widening the canon his book narrowed.
It created a whiggish Wundt. From the 1970s onward historians argued that the book overemphasised Wundt's Physiologische Psychologie while downplaying his Völkerpsychologie and his antipositivist voluntarism — that it constructed a Wundt in Titchener's image, as a founder of the experiment who happened to come before, rather than as the theorist he actually was.
The tongue map. In his 1942 sensory history, Boring mistranslated a German study, converting relative sensitivity into absolute sensitivity — and thereby popularized the "taste map" of the tongue that crowded textbooks for decades until research showed all regions detect all tastes. It is a cautionary case of an authoritative historian laundering an error into fact.
The moon illusion explanation did not survive. The Holway–Boring account of the illusion as size constancy scaling collapsed in 1962, when Kaufman and Rock demonstrated the illusion with a filled moon that eliminated distance cues. Boring's most celebrated experimental program was overturned in his lifetime.
A biased inheritance from Titchener. Boring's reverence for his mentor, whose experimentalist society excluded women, colored his early historiography; though he later wrote seriously about women in psychology's history, critics note the tension between his shrine-building and the exclusions it enshrined.
Operationalism's limits. His hard-line operationalism has been criticized by philosophers of science as prescribing a discipline too narrow to study meaning, development, or culture — an irony given that his own best work was interpretive and historical.
An administrator's cost. Even sympathetic biographers note the blunt fact that Boring produced no major experimental findings of his own after Cornell: administration, editing, and writing steadily drew him out of the laboratory, and the research he continued to direct was his students'.

Boring died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 1, 1968, having spent nearly half a century as the discipline's chief self-critic and memorialist.

Learn More

Edward Titchener — Boring's mentor and the last great structuralist.
Wilhelm Wundt — founder of the experimental psychology whose history Boring wrote, and whose reputation Boring's account reshaped.
William James — Harvard's homegrown psychological tradition, which Boring's department absorbed.
History of Psychology — the field Boring did the most to establish as a discipline.
Daniel N. Robinson — who wrote some of the most widely read intellectual histories of psychology

References

Boring, E. G. (1923). Intelligence as the tests test it. New Republic, 35, 35-37.