George William Humphrey FRSC (17 July 1889 – 24 April 1966) was a British psychologist, author, and philosopher.
[1] Humphrey's research concentrated on behavioral studies such as reinforcement, habituation, and apparent movements, as well as psychophysical topics like audiogenic seizures.
He spent the last years of his life in St. John's College at Cambridge, where he was actively involved in the school and surrounded by close friends.
[2] Because of Humphrey's contributions, the university began to recognize psychology as being independent from the philosophy department, but wasn't formalized until 1949 after he left.
Humphrey also helped to develop military personnel tests and directed research for the Canadian Army during World War II.
With Freud in his prime, Humphrey expressed skepticism about psychoanalytic theory, arguing that the role of sex was grossly overemphasized in the development of children.
[1] In 1951, he wrote Thinking: An Introduction to Its Experimental Psychology, which had considerable success as it provided a written description of all research done on mental problem solving in humans conducted by Otto Selz, the Würzburg School, and other Gestalt psychologists.
Their findings largely supported Humphrey's assertion—discussed in his book Directed Thinking (1948)—that a sequence of thoughts is governed by motivation.
He particularly believed that watching movies helped "soothe the raw nerves" of people living in a post-war era.
Go Home Unicorn and Men Are Like Animals were science fiction novels that drew from Freudian psychology and were published pseudonymously in 1935 and 1937, respectively.