1844-1924
Psychologist

Education.

G. Stanley Hall was one of the first American "scientific" psychologists. Along with William James and others he established psychology as an academic discipline in the United States. After receiving his education from Williams College and the Union Theological Seminary, he became a philosophy instructor at Antioch College, where in 1872 he read Wilhelm Wundt's book on physiological psychology and decided to redirect his efforts. Psychology had been considered a branch of philosophy until Wundt began to study the physiology of the nervous system, the localization of functions in the brain, and the physiology of sense perception. Hall returned to graduate school and received his doctorate under James at Harvard in 1878.

Experimentalist.

At Harvard, Hall performed experiments in the line of Wundt's famous research on reaction time. He was especially interested in the way perceptions were registered by muscles and also studied the...