Richard Herrnstein: biography of this American psychologist and author

Herrnstein is one of the great authors who stood out in the field of psychology during the second half of the 20th century in the United States.

Below we can learn more about the life of this author through a summarized biography of Richard Herrnstein, highlighting those works or publications that were especially relevant for the promotion of its career and that to this day continue to have some repercussion in the field of study to which correspond.

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Brief Biography of Richard Herrnstein

Richard Herrnstein was born in New York City, United States, in 1930. His family, who were of Jewish origin, had emigrated to America from Hungary. His parents were Rezso Herrnstein and Flora Irene Friedman. It was a humble family, in which the income came from the work Rezso carried out painting houses.

His training took place in public institutions, such as the High School of Music and Art, and the City College of New York, where Richard Herrnstein would complete his studies as psychologist. Thanks to his promising profile, he was able to enter the doctoral program at Harvard University.

This is how, in 1955, At just 25 years old, Herrnstein became a doctor, after having published a doctoral thesis on conditioning processes. Specifically, this work received the name of "Behavioral consequences of the elimination of a discriminative stimulus associated with the reinforcement of variable interval".

This thesis was made under the direction of nothing less than Burrhus Frederic Skinner, father of the psychological school of behaviorism. In fact, both authors maintained a magnificent relationship, Skinner being Herrnstein's mentor, whom he took as his favorite pupil.

In addition to advising him on his doctorate, they also collaborated in research carried out with pigeons, in a laboratory that Richard Herrnstein himself was in charge of managing after Skinner, and he would do it throughout his career of him. In addition to training academically, he served three years in the US Army.

Career at Harvard

Richard Herrnstein developed his entire career at Harvard University itself, where he had been able to learn from an eminence like B.F. Skinner and obtain a doctorate under his tutelage. As a result, Herrnstein began to build a reputation that would soon be endorsed with the work and research that he would develop.

One of these contributions to psychology was the so-called law of pairing. What this law affirms is that an animal, faced with two possible choices, will choose the one that provide a larger reward, with a frequency directly proportional to the amount of that reward. reward.

According to this reasoning, a pigeon (an animal that Skinner and Herrnstein habitually used for their experiments) that finds itself in the position of choosing between a Container with a certain amount of food, and another that contains twice as much as the previous one, is twice as likely to choose the second option with respect to the first.

But it was not the only contribution from Richard Herrnstein. Another of his great discoveries was that of the theory of improvement, which he developed in conjunction with the author William Vaughan Jr. This theory is a continuation of the research started with the law of pairing. In this sense, the theory of improvement proposes that animals will try harder the greater the improvement with respect to their situation that they can achieve.

Therefore, it introduces a new variable, since now the animal not only has to decide between two reward possibilities, a higher and a lower one, But you should also take into account the effort that each one of them implies, and finally you will choose the one whose work gives you the most benefit.

These processes are carried out automatically, without reasoning involved, since we are talking about reactions carried out by animals and not by human beings, so it is not a question rational.

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Continuation of his career and later years

With many years of work as an experimental psychologist at Harvard, Richard Herrnstein was already a recognized figure in his field. In 1965 another of his great publications arrived, the volume entitled "Reference book on the history of psychology", which he wrote in collaboration with his colleague, Edwin Boring.

In addition to his work as a researcher at Harvard, where he also directed the department of psychology itself between '67 and '71, Herrnstein also fulfilled other duties. He was commissioned to edit the psychology journal entitled "Psychological Bulletin". In addition, he became elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As for his personal life, Richard Herrnstein had two marriages. The first of them was with Barbara Brodo, with whom he married in 1951 and maintained a relationship of a decade, thanks to which his daughter Julia was born. After divorcing, in 1961 he married Susan Chalk Gouinlock, who would be the mother of children Max and James.

The last years of this researcher's life were marked by the lung cancer disease, for which he ended up dying in 1994, when he was only 64 years old. Very shortly before he died, he had published his last book, entitled "The bell curve", which would become his most controversial work.. We will see in detail the implications of it below.

The bell curve

Richard Herrnstein wrote "The Bell Curve" in collaboration with Charles Murray, in line with research that carried out during the last stage of his career, in which he studied the factors that affected the intelligence of being human. It is precisely the theme that the authors explored in this book.

One of the first claims Herrnstein makes in the volume is that intelligence depends on both genetic and environmental factors, which is a truth accepted in all circles of psychology, although some authors put more weight on some than on others, which has generated an intense debate that has been going on for decades. prolonging.

Richard Herrnstein also claims that socioeconomic status is the best predictor for a person's success in all respects. That is, the higher the socioeconomic level of a family, the more likely their children will have to have a better salary, to be a good worker or even more likely not to commit crimes.

At the beginning of the book, its authors establish a total of six points, which will be the basis for the rest of the contents of the work. The first one is that there are differences in the cognitive capacities of human beings and therefore not all of them would be the same according to said variable.

The second is that there are psychometric tests to measure an individual's IQ and, unlike academic tests, that can generate more doubts or be more subjective, these tests achieve their objective with great success, so the IQ of different people can be evaluated and compared each.

The third point that Richard Herrnstein mentions is that the result of this IQ test would be what would generally be understood as intelligence. Next, the author speaks of a stability in that level of intelligence throughout people's lives, for what, an IQ test carried out in different periods to the same individual, should not differ too much in its Outcome.

The fifth statement is that All of these tests are designed to avoid any bias that might appear against any race, ethnic or social group, so that all people would be on equal footing when subjected to the IQ test in question. Finally, Richard Herrnstein states that the inheritance factor in intelligence would be between 40% and 80%.

After these postulates, the authors continue to develop their work and tell us about the concept of a cognitive elite, which would be a sector of the United States with more intelligence and also more socioeconomic level that was progressively separating itself more and more from the rest of individuals, delving into these differences and making them more and more palpable.

Of course, all these concepts and ideas were not without controversy, since Richard Herrnstein He was putting on the table the idea that there could be groups of people who, in a genetic way, had a greater or lesser predisposition to be smarter than the rest.

This work has been followed by many others, some trying to demonstrate the falsity of the conclusions reached and others supporting his ideas.

Bibliographic references:

• Herrnstein, R.J. (1961). Relative and absolute strength of response as a function of frequency of reinforcement. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior.
• Herrnstein, R.J., Loveland, D.H., Cable, C. (1976). Natural concepts in pigeons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes.
• Herrnstein, R.J. (1997). The matching law: Papers in psychology and economics. Harvard University Press.
• Herrnstein, R.J., Murray, C. (2010). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. Free Press Paperbacks.