John Dollard

John Dollard (1900 to 1980) was an American psychologist and social scientist, born in Menasha, Wisconsin, who spent most of his career at Yale University. He trained first in English and commerce, took a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago, and studied psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute before returning to teach anthropology and then psychology at Yale, where he became a professor of psychology in 1952. He is known for his studies of race relations and social class, above all the classic community study Caste and Class in a Southern Town, and for arguing that culture and social class shape what a person learns. At Yale's Institute of Human Relations he belonged to the group around Neal E. Miller that tried to combine learning theory with psychoanalysis, and with Miller and colleagues he proposed the frustration-aggression hypothesis in the 1939 book Frustration and Aggression. During the Second World War he also studied fear and morale in combat.