Henry A. Murray's personology theory

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

SIGNIFICANCE:Henry A. Murray’s study of personality, or personology, as he preferred to call it, highlights the uniqueness of the individual and the interaction between individual needs and environmental constraints. His theory precipitated the in-depth study of human needs and provided an instrument for assessing human personality.

Introduction

Henry A. Murray was born into a wealthy family in New York City in 1893. His early life was unremarkable, and unlike numerous other personality theorists, he experienced no major traumas that obviously influenced his theory. He was not trained in psychology, in fact, he greatly disliked psychology classes. Rather, he was trained as a biologist and later received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge. His interest in psychology and personality processes was ignited during a three-week stay with Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychoanalyst. This meeting led to a change in career aspirations, whereupon Murray was brought to Harvard University to engage in personality research and establish the Harvard Psychological Clinic.

Murray’s biomedical training is reflected in his belief that personality processes are dependent on brain functioning. He did not believe that personality actually existed. In fact, Murray believed that descriptions of personality were shorthand methods of describing various aspects of individuals and their behaviors. He thought that personality helped explain and predict an individual’s actions, drives, needs, goals, and plans. He stated that his system of personality, “personology,” was a tentative theory, as psychologists did not yet know enough to capture completely the essence of each individual.

As opposed to personality theorists who developed their ideas in the clinic, working with individuals with emotional or behavioral disabilities, Murray believed that the best way to investigate personality was to study normal individuals in their natural environments. While at Harvard, he undertook an intensive study of fifty-one male undergraduates over six months. The undergraduates were examined by a council of twenty-eight specialists with various training and expertise so they could fully understand the personality of the students.

From these studies, Murray developed his ideas about human needs. He believed that these needs helped individuals focus their attention on certain events and guided their behaviors to meet those needs. There are primary needs that originate from internal bodily processesfor example, air, water, food, and sexand secondary needs that are concerned with mental and emotional satisfactionfor example, achievement, dominance, understanding, and affiliation. He proposed a hierarchy of needs, a concept later elaborated on by Abraham Maslow, in which more basic needs, such as food, must be met before others can be addressed. Murray originally proposed a list of twenty basic human needs, although this list was later revised and expanded by his students and followers.

“Press” Concept

Although Murray’s elaboration and description of human needs were among his major contributions to psychology, his focus on the situational context for behavior foreshadowed psychology’s future emphasis on environmental events. He proposed the concept of “press,” or forces provided by situations or events in the environment. These forces may help or hinder individuals in reaching their goals. For example, a student may need to achieve something that would result in her attending college and receiving a degree. Environmental events such as poverty, however, may hinder her progress or pressure her away from these goals and necessitate that she take a job to support her family. In this situation, Murray also distinguished between “alpha press,” or actual pressure resulting from environmental situations, and “beta press,” or subjective pressure that results from individual interpretation of the events. In the example of going to college given above, the alpha press might be the college board scores or the money necessary to go to certain colleges. These are real, and they involve little interpretation. Beta press might be the interpretation that if the student does not get into a certain college, she will be viewed as an embarrassment and a failure. This type of pressure comes from an internal evaluation of environmental events.

Use of the Thematic Apperception Test

A final major contribution of Murray’s personology theory comes from the device he used to determine individual needs and, more generally, measure personality. Along with Christiana Morgan, Murray developed the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which continues to be a widely used instrument for assessing human personality. The TAT consists of a set of ambiguous black-and-white pictures for which an individual is instructed to make up a story. The test subject is asked to tell what led up to the event in the picture, what is happening in the picture, including how the characters are thinking and feeling, and what will happen to the characters in the future. Murray’s idea was that test subjects would project their needs into the picture, much as individuals on a diet will notice food in most situations they encounter. It is similar to the children’s game of identifying the shapes of clouds. Children may identify clouds with children’s themes of dragons, monsters, or dinosaurs. Adolescents may view these same clouds as other boys and girls, cars, or sports figures. Murray hypothesized that certain themes would emerge from individuals’ responses to the figures and that themes and expectations for the future would become evident. Mental health professionals continue to use the TAT for this purpose.

Achievement Need

Murray’s theoretical focus was to catalog all possible human needs, leading to a wide range of understanding. However, it was left to later researchers to add depth to the understanding of needs. One of the best researched of the secondary needs is the need for achievement. This need of individuals to overcome obstacles and accomplish difficult tasks has been investigated in detail by David McClelland and his colleague John Atkinson. They developed a system for scoring individuals’ responses to TAT cards to abstract achievement-oriented themes. They observed that individuals with a high need for achievement completed more tasks under competitive conditions, were more productive in their jobs, and tended to get better grades. They used this information and measuring system to develop a training program for an industry that has been shown to increase employees’ need for achievement and job productivity. Their system was found to be working even two years after the program began. Interesting questions remain, however; for example, at what level does the need for achievement become unproductive? Eventually, it will lead to unrealistic expectations, unnecessary stress, and related health problems. One of the fascinating things about the McClelland and Atkinson method of assessing an individual’s need for achievement is that it is not restricted to measuring responses from TAT cards. Their scoring system can be used with any written material; therefore, it can be adapted to a vast amount of literary, historical, and biographical information. McClelland conjectured that he could predict a country's economic growth and decline from the number of achievement themes evident in its children’s stories. He looked at the economic conditions of twenty-three countries from 1929 to 1950 and scored its children’s stories from the prior decade (1920–29). While it is apparent that children’s stories are not the only factor related to economic well-being, McClelland discovered that countries with more achievement themes in children’s stories experienced the most economic growth.

Gender Differences in Achievement

Another example of the importance of Murray’s pioneering work on the need for achievement comes from research on how this need is demonstrated differently by men and women. It has been evident for many years that the expression of achievement has been more acceptable for men than women. Only in the very late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries did the issues surrounding the achievement of women become a topic of investigation. Generally, women experience these issues much differently than men. The paths for understanding and expressing ideas of achievement for men and women differ very early in life. A series of studies support the idea that women with a high need for achievement come from relatively stressful and difficult home lives, whereas men with a similar level of achievement strivings come from supportive, nonstressful homes. Additionally, girls tend to evidence their needs for achievement because of a desire for adult approval, while boys demonstrate this motivation less often.

An interesting but distressing finding regarding sex differences concerning the need for achievement comes from the research of Matina Horner. She found that women experience considerable conflict and distress when faced with their need to achieve, whereas men do not experience a similar state. She proposed that the “smart girl” faced the prospect of considerable loss of social status and peer rejection as a result of her strivings to achieve. This may result in the behavior of acting “dumb” to prosper socially. Horner elaborated on Sigmund Freud’s original idea that women may fear success because of its social consequences.

In a famous study by Horner, she had men and women write a story after being given an opening line. The women were to write a story about a woman who found herself at the top of her medical school class after the first semester. The men had the same story, except that it was a man who was at the top of the class. Far more women wrote stories of the unappealing and sometimes tragic consequences for the smart woman in class. They wrote about possible rejections and losses of friends and indicated that she would have a poorer chance of getting married. Many of the women came up with situations related to removing the student from the conflict situation, such as dropping out of medical school or settling on becoming a nurse. Finally, some of the students even indicated that she might receive bodily harm as a result of her stellar performance.

This study showed society’s conflicting messages regarding achievement for women and highlighted their fight for equality. It was Murray’s pioneering study of human needs that laid the groundwork for these types of investigation, which have the potential to inspire long-overdue social changes.

Theoretical Contributions

Murray’s theory of personology was a unique contribution to the early years of personality theorizing. His system differed from those before itfor example, Freud’s psychoanalytic theoryin that it was not developed in a clinic as a result of working with clients. Murray studied normal individuals in great detail and gained knowledge from experts in several disciplines. This gave personality theory a degree of academic respectability it had not previously acquired. Murray was also a highly influential teacher, with many students who, in turn, made significant contributions to psychology.

Murray’s description of “needs” was a major contribution to the psychological study of motivation. His research spurred many investigations of individual human needs. Additionally, his complementary emphasis on environmental events (that is, “press”) later became a major shift in American psychology. The behavioral school of psychology, with its leaders John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, was to become the dominant force for many years. Their focus on the manipulation of environmental eventsor example, rewards and was to have a major influence on education, therapy, and child-rearing. The subjective interpretation of environmental events, or “beta press,” also was a precursor to a major shift in theory. The modern cognitive school of psychology focuses on these mental rearrangements of events and makes predictions based on individuals’ expectations and fears. Murray’s emphasis on the fact that the idiosyncratic perception of an event is not always the same as what actually happened is the foundation for this approach.

Murray’s development of the TAT alongside Christiana Morgan was an early and influential contribution to personality assessment science. Following Murry's work, the Personality Research Forum and the Jackson Personality Inventory were developed. Similar tests, such as the Rorschach inkblot test and the incomplete sentences blank, are frequently used for gathering personality information in the clinic. Even the weak reliability of the TAT led to the development of more objective personality tests with standardized questions and scoring example, different investigators may score the test very differently. Murray’s influence, both in the classroom and in the clinic, was substantial. Additionally, Murray's work influenced modern workplace management models in important ways, primarily informing the competency-based management model used to maximize efficiency.

Murray documented his work in personality theory in several works. His best-known work, Explorations in Personality (1938), explored seven original personality studies conducted at Harvard's Psychological Clinic in the early 1900s. McClelland continued Murray's research after his retirement in 1962. Radcliffe College established the Henry A. Murray Research Archive in Murray's honor in 1976.

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