Clark L. Hull

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Hull was born in a log house in Akron, New York on May 24, 1884, to a powerful father known for a violent temper and a shy mother from Connecticut. At age three or four, his family moved to a farm in Michigan, where he and his younger brother Wayne performed manual labor. He was educated at a small, one-room school in the village of Sickels, often missing school to help on the farm. He displayed early proficiency in mathematics but found grammar difficult. At 11 or 12, he was forcibly converted by the Christian Crusaders, an experience that led him to renounce religion entirely. At 17, he passed a teacher's examination and taught in a similar small schoolhouse. His religious crisis and teaching experience inspired him to seek further education. He attended high school in west Saginaw County, living with the superintendent of schools in exchange for household chores. Hull's atheism almost caused the superintendent to kick him out, but the superintendent's wife got him to reconsider. After high school, Hull studied at Alma Academy, excelling in geometry and reading the works of Baruch Spinoza, whom he admired but ultimately disagreed with. As he was about to graduate, he contracted a near-fatal case of typhoid from contaminated food at a banquet, leaving him with permanent amnesia and a general bad memory for names. He then studied math, physics, and chemistry at Alma College, intending to become an engineer. After two years, he moved to Hibbing, Minnesota, to work as an apprentice mining engineer, but after two months he was afflicted by polio, paralyzing one leg and forcing him to recover at his parents' home for a year. During recovery, he read William James' The Principles of Psychology and took interest in the works of Watson and Pavlov. He later married Bertha Iutzi with very little money, and they both attended the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1913. He earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin under Joseph Jastrow, with a dissertation titled 'Quantitative Aspects of the Evolution of Concepts.'

In 1929, Hull began employment at Yale University as a Sterling Professor, serving until his death. He taught a psychological test and measurement course, later changing it to aptitude testing focused on vocational guidance. He conducted research to build a machine that could perform correlational work automatically. After teaching an introductory class for premedical students, he took notice of suggestion and hypnosis, leading to ten years of experimental testing and his 1933 book Hypnosis and Suggestibility. In 1929, he was called to the Institute of Psychology at Yale as a research professor, working on systematic behavior theory. With other psychologists (Neal E. Miller, John Dollard, and O.H. Mower), he sought to understand conditioned reflex and behavior, which led to his work Principles of Behavior.

Reader's Guide

Clark L. Hull's significance lies in his systematic attempt to explain learning and motivation through scientific laws of behavior, expressed in biological terms: deprivation creates needs, needs activate drives, drives activate behavior, and behavior is goal directed. His model, detailed in Principles of Behavior (1943), became the dominant learning theory of its time. Hull is perhaps best known for the 'goal gradient' effect or hypothesis, wherein organisms spend disproportionate amounts of effort in the final stages of attainment of the object of drives. Although behaviorism has declined in popularity and Hull's work is often considered obsolete, more recent cognitive psychology research has found renewed support for goal-gradient-like effects in effortful cognitive tasks. A 2002 Review of General Psychology survey ranked Hull as the 21st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His emphasis on quantitative methodology and controlled experiments influenced the field, even as his specific theories have been superseded.

Did You Know?

• Hull was born in a log house in Akron, New York on May 24, 1884.
• At age 11 or 12, he was forcibly converted by a religious group known as the Christian Crusaders, which led him to renounce religion entirely.
• After contracting typhoid from contaminated food at a banquet, Hull was left with permanent amnesia and a general bad memory for names.
• He contracted polio after two months working as an apprentice mining engineer in Hibbing, Minnesota, paralyzing one leg.
• A 2002 Review of General Psychology survey ranked Hull as the 21st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.