Hugo Münsterberg

1863-1916 · German-American · Applied Psychology

The time is ripe to carry the results of the laboratory into the practical life of the world.

Hugo Münsterberg was a German-American psychologist, trained under Wundt and brought to Harvard by William James, who became the great founder and impresario of applied psychology — the man who insisted that the findings of the laboratory be carried out into the courtroom, the factory, the clinic, the classroom, and the cinema, and who single-handedly opened several fields at once. Prolific, energetic, and a gifted popularizer, he did more than anyone of his generation to bring psychology before the American public and to make it practically useful.

Topics Hugo Münsterberg addresses

• applied psychology
• forensic psychology
• the psychology of testimony
• the unreliability of eyewitness memory
• false confessions
• industrial-organizational psychology
• vocational selection
• aptitude testing
• industrial efficiency
• fatigue and monotony at work
• clinical psychotherapy
• the photoplay
• psychological film theory
• the close-up as attention made visible
• causal versus purposive psychology
• the action theory
• eternal values
• the two standpoints
• psychotechnics
• the free and valuing self
• fitting the worker to the work
• the psychologist in the courtroom
• the laboratory into the world
• the mind's laws in cinema

Converse with Hugo Münsterberg on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Hugo Münsterberg's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.