Clark Hull
American psychologist who built a formal drive-reduction theory of learning
American psychologist at Yale who tried to build a quantitative, deductive theory of learning around habit strength and drive reduction, set out in Principles of Behavior in 1943.
Why this person matters
Hull's system was widely cited in the 1940s and 1950s and gave students such as Neal Miller, John Dollard and Carl Hovland a framework to test and extend. It is now mainly taught as a case of ambitious, formal theory-building that experiments and later behaviourists overtook.
Main contributions
Aptitude testing and hypnosis
At Wisconsin he published Aptitude Testing (1928) and then Hypnosis and Suggestibility (1933), which summarised about a decade of experiments on suggestibility. The National Academy of Sciences memoir also records that he built a machine to compute correlations for test data.
Principles of Behavior
His 1943 book presented learning as the strengthening of habits when behaviour reduces a drive, expressed in equations. From 1936 he ran the Monday Night Meetings at Yale with Neal Miller, John Dollard, Hobart Mowrer and others to relate conditioning to Freudian ideas.
Context and limits
Tolman's maze experiments, which suggested learning without reinforcement, challenged Hull's account. Other behaviourists found the system too cumbersome for practical use, and Skinner's approach eclipsed it. Hull kept revising his formulas as exceptions appeared, and the National Academy of Sciences memoir says the changes behind the 1951 book were in many cases radical. He championed the hypothetico-deductive method, and the memoir calls him an exceedingly critical thinker.
In your introductory course
Learning.Appears in the learning and motivation chapters as the source of drive-reduction theory and as the main rival to Tolman's cognitive account of learning.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 6.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1918
Received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin.
- 1928
Published Aptitude Testing.
- 1929
Moved to Yale University as a research professor in the Institute of Psychology.
- 1943
Published Principles of Behavior.
- 1951
Published Essentials of Behavior, which revised his theory extensively.
Sources
- National Academy of Sciences, Clark Leonard Hull: A Biographical Memoir (Beach)Society or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Clark L. HullReference work. Reference article inspected.