author
Hugo Münsterberg
1863–1916
A pioneer of applied psychology, this German-American scholar pushed the field beyond the lab and into everyday life, from business and education to the courtroom. His work helped shape early industrial and forensic psychology while he taught at Harvard at the turn of the twentieth century.
5 Audiobooks
Psychotherapy
by Hugo Münsterberg
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
by Hugo Münsterberg
The Americans
by Hugo Münsterberg
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study
by Hugo Münsterberg
Psychology and Social Sanity
by Hugo Münsterberg
About the author
Born in Danzig on June 1, 1863, Hugo Münsterberg studied psychology under Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig and also earned a medical degree at Heidelberg. He moved to Harvard in 1892, where he became a leading voice for experimental psychology in the United States.
Münsterberg is best remembered for insisting that psychology should be useful in the real world. He wrote about how it could be applied to work, advertising, education, medicine, and law, and he became an important early figure in both industrial psychology and forensic psychology.
His career was influential but also complicated. During the First World War, his public defense of Germany made him controversial in the United States. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1916, leaving behind a body of work that still matters in the history of modern psychology.