Hugo Münsterberg
Hugo Münsterberg was a German-American psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in applied psychology, extending his research and theories to industrial/organizational, legal, medical, clinical, educational and business settings. Münsterberg experienced immense turmoil with the outbreak of the First World War. Torn between his loyalty to the United States and his homeland, he often defended Germany's wartime actions, and was ostracized at Harvard.
Biography
Early life
Hugo Münsterberg was born into a merchant family in Danzig, then a port city in West Prussia. Münsterberg's family was Jewish, a heritage with which he felt no connection and would barely ever manifest publicly. His father Moritz, was a successful lumber merchant and his mother, Minna Anna Bernhardi, a recognized artist and musician, was Moritz's second wife. Moritz had two sons with his first wife, Otto and Emil, and two with Anna, Hugo and Oscar. The four sons remained close, and all of them became successful in their careers. A neo-Renaissance villa in Detmold, Germany, that Oscar lived in from 1886 to 1896 has recently been renovated and opened as a cultural center.The family had a great love of the arts, and Münsterberg was encouraged to explore music, literature, and art. Both his mother and his father died before he was 20 years old. When Münsterberg was 12, his mother died, transforming him from a care-free child to a much more serious young man. In 1880, his father also died.
Education and career
Münsterberg had many interests in his early years, including art, literature, poetry, foreign languages, music, and acting. Münsterberg's first years of school were spent at the Gymnasium of Danzig from which he graduated in 1882. He entered the University of Leipzig in 1883 where he heard a lecture by Wilhelm Wundt and became interested in psychology. Münsterberg eventually became Wundt's research assistant. He received his PhD in physiological psychology in 1885 under Wundt's supervision at the age of 22. In 1887, Münsterberg received his medical degree at the University of Heidelberg. He also wrote a third thesis there and met the university's other criteria for habilitation enabling him to lecture as a privatdocent. While at Freiburg he started a psychology laboratory and began publishing papers on a number of topics including attentional processes, memory, learning, and perception. In the same year he married a distant cousin, Selma Oppler of Strassburg, on August 7.In 1889, he was promoted to assistant professorship and attended the First International Congress of psychology where he met William James. They kept up a frequent correspondence and in 1892, James invited him to Harvard for a three-year term as a chair of the psychology lab even though Münsterberg did not speak English at the time. He learned to speak English rather quickly and as a result his classes became very popular with students, in fact he was attracting students from James's classes. Part of the responsibilities he assumed as part of his new position at Harvard was that he became the supervisor of the psychology graduate students, in this position directed their dissertation research. As a result, he had a great influence of many students including Mary Whiton Calkins. In 1895 he returned to Freiburg due to uncertainties of settling in the United States. However, because he could not obtain an academic position that he wanted, he wrote James and requested his old position back so that he could return to Harvard, which he did in 1897.. However, he never could separate himself from his homeland.
While at Harvard, Münsterberg's career was going very well. He was affiliated with many organizations including the American Psychological Association of which he became president, the American Philosophical Association of which he also became president, the Washington Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the organizer and vice-president of the International Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904, vice-president of the International Psychological Congress in Paris in 1900, and vice-president of the International Philosophical Congress at Heidelberg in 1907.
In 1910–1911, he was appointed exchange professor from Harvard to the University of Berlin. During that year, he founded the Amerika-Institut in Berlin. During his whole stay in the United States, he worked for the improvement of the relations between the United States and Germany, writing in the United States for a better understanding of Germany and in Germany for a higher appreciation of the United States.
Because of his work in applied psychology, Münsterberg was well known to the public, academic world, and scientific community. The outspoken views of Münsterberg on the issues of the upcoming First World War raised storms of controversy about his ideals and position. He appeared as probably the most eminent supporter of German policies in the United States. American supporters of France and Britain attacked him.
At his death, the general attitude toward Münsterberg had changed, and his death went relatively unnoticed because of his pro-German attitudes and his support of German policies. He tried to talk about the inaccurate stereotypes held by both the Germans and Americans. He wrote many books and articles attempting to correct them including The Americans. As the war approached, Münsterberg's support of the supposed efficiency and modernity of the German autocracy caused him to be suspected of being a German spy, and many Harvard colleagues disassociated themselves from him. There were also threats against his life. He remained at Harvard as a professor of experimental psychology and director of the Psychological Laboratory until his sudden death in 1916 from an intracerebral hemorrhage in a lecture at Radcliffe College.
Scholarship
Comparisons to Wundt and James
One major point of disagreement between Wundt and Münsterberg was their opposing views on how psychology should be practiced. For Wundt psychology should be a pure science detached from practical concerns, while Münsterberg wanted to apply psychological principles that could be applied to practical concerns. While working as Wundt's research assistant, Münsterberg studied voluntary activities through introspection, but they disagreed on the fundamental principles. Wundt believed that free will could be experienced as a conscious element of the mind during introspection, while Münsterberg did not. Münsterberg believed that as we prepare to act we consciously experience this bodily preparedness and mistakenly interpret it with the will to act a certain way. Münsterberg's beliefs support his interpretation of James's ideo-motor theory of behavior. For Münsterberg behavior causes ideas. However, for James ideas cause behavior. There are also similarities between James's theory of emotion and Münsterberg's analysis of voluntary behavior. For the James-Lange theory of emotion, "emotions are by-products of bodily reactions elicited by a situation." Whereas for Münsterberg "the feeling of willful actions results from an awareness of covert behavior, or a readiness to act overtly, elicited by a situation." In both cases, conscious experience is the result of behavior.In 1900 he published the Basics of Psychology which he dedicated to James. Later Münsterberg became unhappy with James's liberal attitude towards philosophy and psychology. He was unhappy about James's acceptance of Freudian psychoanalysis, psychic phenomena, and religious mysticism into the area of psychology. Münsterberg had said "Mysticism and mediums were one thing, psychology was quite another. Experimental psychology and psychic hocus-pocus did not mix."
Experimental psychology
Münsterberg made numerous contributions to experimental psychology, including discovering a visual illusion that is now named after him.Applied psychology
Over time Münsterberg's interests turned to the many practical applications of psychological principles, he felt very strongly that psychologists had the responsibility to uncover information that could then be used in real world applications. In fact he was the first to apply psychological principles to the legal field, creating forensic psychology. He wrote several papers on the application of psychological information in legal situations. The main objective in most of these articles was eyewitness testimony which examined the viability of said witness testimony. He also applied psychological principles to the field of clinical psychology attempting to help those who are ill through a variety of different treatments.Forensic psychology
Münsterberg studied eyewitness testimonies in 1906 when he got involved in a Chicago murder case. Richard Ivens was sentence to death for killing a woman. Sources suggest that Ivens was likely intellectually disabled and a local psychologist, J. Sanderson Christison, believed the confession was a result of hypnotic suggestion and he contacted Münsterberg and William James. After examining the evidence, Münsterberg concluded that dissociation and auto suggestion created Ivens false conviction and similar influences may have been the cause of many more. He recognized that psychology could inform the criminal justice process and set out to develop forensic psychology. In 1908, Münsterberg published his controversial book On the Witness Stand, which is a collection of magazine articles previously published by him where he discusses the many different psychological factors that can change a trial's outcome and pointed the way for rational and scientific means for probing the facts claimed by human witnesses by the application of experimental psychology to the administration of law. He is also credited with being among the first to consider jury research. He says "The lawyer alone is obdurate. The lawyer and the judge and the juryman are sure that they do not need the experimental psychologist... They go on thinking that their legal instinct and their common sense supplies them with all that is needed and somewhat more... Just in the line of the law it therefore seems necessary not to rely simply on the technical statements of scholarly treatises, but to carry the discussion in the most popular form possible before the wider tribunal of the general reader" cementing his position that while the lawyer, judge, and the jurymen are confident in their abilities, that with the use of experimental psychology he can show just how flawed their thinking can really be.Münsterberg points out the various reasons why eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. He describes how eyewitness testimony is inherently susceptible to what he calls "illusions" where a subject's perceptions could be affected by the circumstances, making their memory of the events that transpired or testimony inaccurate. He states that with regularity the testimony between two different individuals in the same circumstances can be radically different, even when neither of whom had the slightest interest in changing the facts as remembered. Münsterberg believes this is because memory, when all things are equal, is easily fallible. Because one's memory is affected by the associations, judgments, and suggestions that penetrate into every one of one's observations and taint our memory and our recollection of events.
Less well known but highly prescient, Münsterberg wrote about "Untrue Confessions." Appreciating the intuitive credibility of confession evidence in court, he expressed concern that confessions were fallible and speculated as to the psychological causes of false confessions.
Münsterberg conducted many experiments with his normal psychology students in his basic psychology course while at Harvard. He asked them, "without any theoretical introduction, at the beginning of an ordinary lecture, to write down careful answers to a number of questions referring to that which they would see or hear", and urged them "to do it as conscientiously and carefully as possible." The procedure went as follows. First he would show them a large sheet of white cardboard with a certain number of black dots on it spread in an irregular order. He exposed it for the students to view for only five seconds, and then asked them how many black dots that they thought were on the sheet. The results were surprising in that even with "highly trained, careful observers, whose attention was concentrated on the material, and who had full time for quiet scrutiny... there were some who believed that they saw seven or eight times more points than some other saw." He conducted similar experiments that referred to the perception of time, how rapidity is estimated, descriptions of sounds, and other similar experiments with similar results. Based on the results of his experiments, he "warned against the blind confidence in the observations of the average normal man" and concluded that one cannot rely on the accuracy of a normal person's memory. He questioned how one could be sure of the testimony of any given witness.
In a portion of the book which he calls "The Detection of Crime" he discusses the many factors that can influence testimony, gain confessions, and force a confession from those who are innocent. Münsterberg states that "brutality is still a favorite method of undermining the mental resistance of the accused." He discusses some of the ways that police of the time have of making suspects confess to crimes that they had not committed, including making the prisoner's life as uncomfortable as possible, to break down his or her energy, and "worst of all giving brutal shocks given with fiendish cruelty to the terrified imagination of the suspect." He states "that the method is ineffective in bringing out the real truth. At all times, innocent men have been accused by the tortured ones, crimes which were never committed have been confessed, infamous lies have been invented, to satisfy the demands of the torturers."
For years his groundbreaking work was not given the recognition it deserved in forensic psychology and other fields but more recent scholarship highlights his substantial contribution to these fields.