Drive Reduction Theory
Biography
Clark Hull did his undergraduate work at University of Michigan (1913) and later earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1918. He spent most of his professional career at the Institute of Psychology at Yale University (1929 until his death in 1952). At the age of 24 he contracted polio and suffered disabilities as a result of it.
Theory
Major influences on Hull's thinking included the work of Pavlov, Darwin, Thorndike and Tolman. His theory was an attempt to create a synthesis of the theories of these researchers plus Newtonian physics. He became interested in hypnosis, and wrote a book entitled Hypnosis and Suggestibility in 1933. During the 1940's and 1950's Hull's work was much-cited in the psychological literature.
He is best known for his Drive Reduction Theory which postulated that behavior occurs in response to "drives" such as hunger, thirst, sexual interest, feeling cold, etc. When the goal of the drive is attained (food, water, mating, warmth) the drive is reduced, at least temporarily. This reduction of drive serves as a reinforcer for learning. Thus learning involves a dynamic interplay between survival drives and their attainment. The bonding of the drive with the goal of the drive was a type of reinforcement, and his theory was a reinforcement theory of learning.
Hull believed that these drives and behaviors to fulfill the drives were influential in the evolutionary process as described by Darwin. Movement sequences lead to need reduction as survival adaptations. He assumed that learning could only occur with reinforcement of the responses that lead to meeting of survival needs, and that the mechanism of this reinforcement was the reduction of a biological drive.
Hull was only interested in operational descriptions of what was observable. He did not deny cognitive aspects such as purpose, ideas, intelligence, insight, values, or knowledge, but since these characteristics could not be directly observed, he did not include them as part of his theoretical constructs. He devised a complex calculus to quantify behavior.
Hull's work has been criticized because he assumed that his laws of behavior, which were derived from experiments with rats, would account for all human behavior, including social behavior. While his theory is not considered a major contributor to current understanding of learning, nonetheless he contributed to the methodology for experimentation in learning theory.
Hull had several graduate students who went on to make contributions to the body of knowledge concerning learning. Neal Miller developed a social learning theory that was successfully applied to psychotherapy and understanding neurosis. Carl I. Hovland studied and wrote about the psychology of war. O.H. Mowrer developed a two-factor learning model and demonstrated that fear is an acquirable drive. His most famous student was Kenneth W. Spence, who developed and extended Hull's theory and developed a discrimination learning theory.
Learning Theory Bibliography
Sahakian, W.S. (1976) Kearsley, G. (n.d.) Drive Reduction Theory. Retrieved November 9, /2002 from http://tip.psychology.org/hull.html
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