Clark Leonard Hull was born in Akron, New York, on May 24, 1884, and died in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 10, 1952. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1913, his master's degree in 1915, and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1918 from the University of Wisconsin. His graduate work was done primarily under the direction of Joseph Jastrow, Daniel Starch, and Vivian A. C. Henmon.

Hull recorded some of his earliest career plans in his Idea Books. "It seems," he wrote, "that the greatest need in the science at present is to create an experimental and a scientific knowledge of higher mental processes" (Ammons, 1962, p. 814). He planned to become the "supreme authority" in the psychology of abstraction, concept formation, and, possibly, reasoning—to "both know the literature and create the literature on the subject." His doctoral dissertation, Quantitative Aspects of the...