Edwin Boring

Edwin Garrigues Boring (1886 to 1968) was an American experimental psychologist who taught at Clark University and Harvard University and later became one of the first historians of psychology. Born in Philadelphia into a Quaker family interested in science, he first studied electrical engineering at Cornell University, then turned to psychology after taking a course with I. Madison Bentley under Edward B. Titchener. He earned his PhD at Cornell in 1914 with a thesis on visceral sensibility, a study in which he placed a stomach tube in his own stomach, and he joined Titchener's laboratory group. During the First World War he worked on army intelligence testing under Robert M. Yerkes and served as chief psychological examiner at Camp Upton. His 1929 book The History of Experimental Psychology grew out of the course he helped Titchener design. A 2002 survey in Review of General Psychology ranked him the 93rd most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.