author
Robert Mearns Yerkes
1876–1956
A pioneering psychologist who helped shape comparative psychology in the United States, he is remembered for his studies of animal behavior and especially for bringing serious scientific attention to primates. His career also included influential work on intelligence testing, a part of his legacy that remains controversial today.
2 Audiobooks
The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior
by Robert Mearns Yerkes
The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes: A Study of Ideational Behavior
by Robert Mearns Yerkes
About the author
Born in Pennsylvania in 1876, Robert Mearns Yerkes studied at Ursinus College and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1902. He went on to teach psychology at Harvard before continuing his work at Yale, where he became a leading figure in the study of animal behavior.
Yerkes is best known for developing comparative psychology and for his research on chimpanzees and other primates. His book The Great Apes, written with Ada Watterson Yerkes, was considered a major work in the field, and he later helped establish the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology.
His career also reached into human intelligence testing during World War I, which made him a prominent and debated figure in American psychology. Today he is remembered both for advancing the scientific study of primates and for the more troubling parts of early twentieth-century psychology that were tied to eugenic thinking.