Кларк Леонард Халл: Американ психологы және оның ғылыми еңбектері

American psychologist
the lieutenant governor of Connecticut

Clark Leonard Hull (May 24, 1884 – May 10, 1952) was an American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Hull is known for his debates with Edward C. Tolman. He is also known for his work in drive theory. Hull spent the mature part of his career at Yale University, where he was recruited by the president and former psychologist, James Rowland Angell. He performed research demonstrating that his theories could predict behavior. His most significant works were the Mathematico Deductive Theory of Rote Learning (1940), and Principles of Behavior (1943), which established his analysis of animal learning and conditioning as the dominant learning theory of its time. Hull's model is expressed in biological terms: Organisms suffer deprivation; deprivation creates needs; needs activate drives; drives activate behavior; behavior is goal directed; achieving the goal has survival value. He 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. Due to the lack of popularity of behaviorism in modern contexts it is little referenced today or bracketed as obsolete. Nonetheless, a Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hull as the 21st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Hull was born in a log house in Akron, New York on May 24, 1884. He was born to a powerful father who was known to have a violent temper. His intent was to qualify for a mining engineering program at another institution. In both his drive theory and hypnosis research, Hull made sure that his experiments were under strict control. Also, in his work he emphasized quantitative data so everything could be analyzed more precisely, and less open to interpretation than previous studies on the topics.

Hull has been honored by a number of scientific societies. Hull was president of the American Psychological Association from 1935 to 1936. Hull was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1935 and also to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1936. Hull received the Warren Medal during 1945 from the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Hull's ideas were so appealing in part because of his professional background in engineering. He was very good with math and numbers, and incorporated his numerical knowledge into the field of psychology. He followed the acceptable understanding of psychology at that time, and was influenced by the work and the conclusions of the pioneers of Behaviorism (Edward Thorndike, John B. Watson, and Ivan Pavlov). However, Hull was able to add his own twist to understanding reinforcement and learning in a way that had never been done before by putting everything in numbers and equations. Hull was also influenced by Isaac Newton's work. Hull contributed to the motivation domain of psychology. He had quantified the Drive concept in an equation to prove that habit strength is a function of reinforcement. Edward C. Tolman was a contemporary of Hull whose theory of learning was proved to be more logical and less complicated than Hull's work. Tolman showed that behavior is goal directed and not controlled by random drives and reinforcement. Tolman used maze experiments with rats to show that rats can learn without reinforcement and are better understood as directed by goals and driven by cognitive expectancies. This finding provided a serious challenge to much of Hull's learning theory.