Harry L. Hollingworth

Harry Levi Hollingworth (1880 to 1956) was one of the first psychologists to bring psychology into the advertising world and a pioneer of applied psychology. Born in De Witt, Nebraska, he taught school and was twenty-three before he entered the University of Nebraska, then took an assistantship offered by James McKeen Cattell at Columbia University and received his Columbia doctorate in 1909 with a dissertation on the accuracy of reaching. He married Leta Stetter Hollingworth in 1908 and taught at Barnard College. In 1911 the Coca-Cola Company, facing a federal lawsuit under the Pure Food and Drug Act, hired him to study the effects of caffeine on humans, and he insisted on a contract that kept the company and Columbia out of its advertising and left him free to publish; his three studies used blind and double-blind conditions on a scale not seen before in psychological research. In the First World War he provided psychological services to shell-shocked soldiers, and in 1927 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association.