Richard Herrnstein

Richard J. Herrnstein ( born May 20, 1930 in New York; † 13 September 1994), was an American psychologist.

Life

Mr. Stein was the child of Austro-Hungarian immigrants, and first became interested in classical music. He therefore studied at the Music and Art High School in New York in 1952 and received a Bachelor of Arts. During the time he came, however, more and more of Experimental Psychology in contact and moved in 1952 to Harvard University to study psychology. At Harvard, he joined the research group led by behaviorist BF Skinner and became one of his most important students. In 1974, Herrnstein Skinner's successor as A. Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard. 20 years later, he died after a brief suffering from lung cancer.

Research Contributions

Mr. Stein's most important contribution to behaviorist oriented psychology has been the description of the Matching Laws, for the first time in 1961. This is also known as the "Law of the relative effect" learning law is an extension of Thorndike's law of effect and describes the behavior of an organism to a boost source taking into account the gains that the organism of other enhancement sourced. The Law of the relative effect states that the relative frequency of a behavior also depends on the consequences of simultaneously available alternative behaviors. The behavior frequency is thus a function of the subjective quality of an amplifier. Individuals share their preferences often drop out for the sake of curiosity or saturation ( variety seeking, looking for variety ), the less preferred alternative ( references to the purchase risk). If, for example, " Wiener Schnitzel " has a favorite food, you will still not want to eat it every day, but sometimes bread or a hamburger.

Mr. Stein worked in the period following the Matching Law to a theory of " matching theory ", from, with which he attempted to describe all the behavior of organisms. The Matching Law was applied to one of the most important behavioral descriptions within the behaviorist psychology and in many different areas of human behavior, including addictive behavior, economic behavior, but also basketball and football games.

Another focus of Mr. Stein's research was in the field of intelligence research. Mr. Stone was of the opinion that the importance of genetic differences in intelligence will always be greater in a world of increasing chance of freedom. This and others of his views, which he most recently in its 1994 along with Charles Murray published book The Bell Curve (Eng. The bell curve ) represented, often led to controversial discussions in which Mr. Stone has been criticized by some racism.

Works

• The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994 )
• The Matching Law: Papers in Psychology and Economics (1997, posthumous collection of Mr. Stein's most important essays on the Matching Law )