author
Robert Sessions Woodworth
1869–1962
A leading American psychologist, he helped shape early 20th-century psychology with influential research on learning, motivation, and experimental method. His widely used textbooks introduced generations of students to the field, and his name is still linked to the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, an early personality test.
1 Audiobook
Psychology : A study of mental life
by Robert Sessions Woodworth
About the author
Born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on October 17, 1869, Robert Sessions Woodworth became one of the best-known American psychologists of his era. He studied at Amherst College, Harvard, and Columbia, and worked in a period when psychology was defining itself as a modern scientific discipline.
Woodworth spent much of his career at Columbia University, where he taught, carried out research, and wrote books that had a lasting impact on psychology education. He is especially associated with dynamic psychology, an approach that tried to explain behavior in terms of both outside conditions and inner drives or motives rather than reducing everything to a single school of thought.
He also conducted important work on learning and experimental psychology, and his textbook Psychology: A Study of Mental Life became a standard introduction for many students. Woodworth died in New York City on July 4, 1962, leaving behind a reputation as a careful, broad-minded scholar who helped connect different strands of psychological thought.