William McDougall

William McDougall 1822-1905, Canadian leader in the movement for Canadian confederation, b. Ontario. He was elected (1858) to the Legislative Assembly, and in 1864 he entered the "great coalition" ministry led by John A. Macdonald and George Brown. He was a delegate to the two Canadian conferences (1864) on confederation and to the Anglo-Canadian conference held in England (1866). In 1868 he again went to England, with Georges Étienne Cartier, to arrange the transfer to Canada of the territories of the Hudson's Bay Company, a project he had long urged. The following year he was appointed lieutenant governor of the newly acquired region, but on his way to assume his post he was turned back near the border by rebels of the Red River Settlement. This setback, for which he was removed from office, as well as the success of his opponents within the Liberal party, led to the decline of McDougall's influence.

psychology Variously defined as the science of behaviour or the science of mind, psychology emerged as a distinct discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the work of researchers such as Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) who founded the first experimental laboratory of psychology in Leipzig. Much of the focus of the discipline has been on identifying the general mechanisms involved in processes such as perception, learning, motivation, and memory, although there has been some attention to individual differences, especially in relation to intelligence and personality.

Academic psychology has tended to be strongly positivist in orientation and the experimental method has been widely used—characteristics reflected in the strong support for behaviourism which became the dominant approach in Anglo-American psychology from early in the twentieth century through to the 1960s. The major focus of behaviourism was on learning and the approach was associated with a strong emphasis on environment and a rejection of the importance of innate factors in the development of human behaviour. Since the 1960s there has been a shift towards more cognitive approaches and acceptance of some innate capacities, with considerable attention paid to the way in which information is handled and processed. There has also been a renewed interest in neuropsychology. The experimental, positivist orientation remains, as does the long-standing hostility to psychoanalysis and other psycho-dynamic psychologies, although some psychologists and some departments are more eclectic than others. Certainly, both humanist and feminist psychology now usually find a place within the terrain of academic psychology.

As with other disciplines the delineation of fields changes over time. The older terrains of abnormal psychology or psychopathology have now been transformed and broadened into the field of health psychology. An important and long-standing area that has developed since the first decade of this century is that of social psychology. William McDougall published his Introduction to Social Psychology in 1908, though its terrain is ill-defined. Within the framework of psychology, social psychology focuses especially on the study of face-to-face social interaction, making considerable use of experimental studies of small groups. There is, however, a more sociological social psychology, particularly influenced by symbolic interactionism, and employing methods such as participant observation.

There is a large selection of introductory psychology texts from which to choose. Leonard Berkowitz , A Survey of Social Psychology (3rd edn., 1986)
and Louis A. Penner , Social Psychology (1986)
are both fairly comprehensive in their coverage.

will in philosophy and psychology, term used to describe that which is alleged to stimulate the motivation of purposeful activity. It is characteristic of the will that it can be observed only in oneself and can be attributed to others only by inference from their behavior. There is no generally accepted explanation in psychology for the apparent freedom people enjoy to do what they will, i.e., to originate the stimuli necessary to initiate a course of action. Until recently the psychological discussions of the will have been closely related to the philosophical. Disagreements have been extreme. One approach has been the doctrine of determinism, which denies the reality of the will. Another type simply accepts the will—the motive power of the personality—as the faculty or function of the person. This idea is generally based on intuitive grounds and is associated with Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, St. Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. Others have considered it the externalized result of the interaction of conflicting elements. These include Baruch Spinoza, G. W. von Leibniz, David Hume, J. G. Herbart, Wilhelm Wundt, Herbert Spencer, and Hugo Münsterberg. Still others have considered the will to be the manifestation of the personality striving to accomplish its purposes. Among these are St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, Thomas Hobbes, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, William McDougall, and John Dewey. Modern psychology has tended to consider the concept of the will as an unscientific principle. The problems involved in dealing with it are largely absorbed in other areas of investigation, such as the psychology of adjustment, the study of unconscious motivation, the concept of attention, and the influence of endocrine balance.