A History of Experimental Psychology

Boring argues that psychology needs a historically sophisticated self-understanding, and that the history he writes is deliberately selected and shaped by the present's concerns rather than aiming at neutral reconstruction. He rejects the antiquarian ideal of recording everything for its own sake. A Norwegian historiography essay identifies Boring's book as the paradigmatic 'presentist' history, in which today's situation determines the selection, and as a 'Whig history' written from the victor's perspective—a triumphal procession for experimental psychology . Boring himself stated that a psychologist without historical sophistication sees the present with a distorted perspective and cannot evaluate new movements . The book was never meant to be neutral; it was an intervention designed to orient the discipline.

H. P. Weld's 1931 review in Psychological Bulletin praised the book's warmth and personality, calling its style that of an excellent conversational lecturer, and noted that its facts and biographies were presented as human drama rather than dry chronicle . But Weld also raised a substantive objection: the title was misleading. He argued it should have been called a history of systematic psychology and its antecedents, and he did not think Boring succeeded in justifying his view that experimental psychology was the conjunction of philosophical and physiological streams . The criticism identifies a tension that would follow the book: Boring's definition of 'experimental psychology' was broader than the title suggested, encompassing systematic theory and philosophical context that exceeded strict experimental work.

Presentism means selecting and interpreting the past according to present-day concerns, values, and categories, rather than understanding each historical period on its own terms. The Norwegian essay describes Boring's book as the 'mother of all psychology histories' in this mode, shaping the past as a victory procession for experimental psychology . Later historians of psychology, often trained as historians rather than psychologists, criticized this approach for imposing contemporary categories onto the past and for ignoring dead ends and alternative trajectories. However, Boring was explicit about his method rather than pretending to neutrality. A Spanish historiographical analysis argues that ongoing criticism of Boring should be seen as a measure of his success, since he invited revision of history and his own work . The presentism is a methodological choice, not an oversight.

Boring wrote the book as a psychologist for psychologists, not as a professional historian. Franz Samelson argued in American Psychologist that Boring wrote it partly to justify his desertion of E. B. Titchener, his mentor, as psychology moved toward objective experimental science and away from Titchener's existential stance . A biographical study notes that Boring was around forty and at the height of his career when he composed the monumental work, not a retiree dabbling in history, and that he suggested he was compensating for a gap in his training—he had never studied in Germany, which shamed him . The book was thus both a scholarly monument and a strategic intervention in psychology's self-definition at Harvard and beyond.

The second edition, published in 1950 by Appleton-Century-Crofts, is the version most often cited and reprinted. It runs to 777 pages, includes a portrait and endpaper map, and belongs to the Century Psychology Series . The first edition was published in 1929 by The Century Co. and ran to 699 pages . The second edition revised and expanded the text substantially. Scholars must specify which edition they cite, as pagination and content differ. The 1950 edition is the source for the page references commonly found in the literature, and it was the edition used by generations of graduate students. A 1957 reprint also exists, cited in some historiography .

A History of Experimental Psychology (1929) was the first volume of a planned trilogy. The second, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (1942), took up the special fields whose designations augment the original title, and a third, never completed, was planned to cover feeling, emotion, learning, attention, action, and thought. The 1942 volume was described by reviewers as both a sequel and an elaboration, because perception had to be drawn upon heavily in any account of psychology's history as a whole. The two books were used by graduate students for decades. The relationship is one of extension: the 1929 book established the framework and the 1942 book applied it to a specific domain of experimental work.

Boring used the Zeitgeist—the 'spirit of the times'—as an explanatory concept for scientific change, suggesting that ideas emerge when the cultural and intellectual climate is ready for them. A Treccani encyclopedia entry notes that this context is no longer interpreted as a monolithic and coherent complex of theoretical assumptions and ideological choices, as Boring intended, but as a dynamic and articulated network of diverse cultural and scientific options that intertwine and interact over time . Later historiography thus treats the Zeitgeist as a shorthand for complex social and institutional processes rather than a causal force in itself. Boring's use of the concept was influential but has been substantially refined by subsequent historians of science.