Robert S. Woodworth

Robert Sessions Woodworth was an American psychologist, born in Belchertown, Massachusetts in 1869 and died in 1962, who created the personality test that bears his name, the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet. A graduate of Amherst, Harvard and Columbia, he studied under William James. At Columbia he wrote the textbooks Psychology: A Study of Mental Life (1921) and Experimental Psychology (1938), which served as the first introduction to the field for generations of students. He introduced the Stimulus-Organism-Response formula to describe his functionalist approach to psychology and to set it apart from the strict stimulus-response view of the behaviorists. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1935 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1936.