Biography

Hugo Münsterberg was born in Danzig (Gdansk), then in Prussia, of Jewish parentage.  In 1885 he obtained a PhD in Psychology from the University of Leipzig, and in 1887 an MD from Heidelberg University.  

He then began his academic career by alternating between being Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and at Berlin University until his death, making Harvard a centre of psychology.  

The most consequential of Münsterberg's many books was Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben, Leipzig (1912), translated and re-published as Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913).

"The United States, on entering the war in 1917, developed and applied army tests for two million men – an unprecedented experiment in the use of psychology," said Urwick in The Golden Book of Management. "In great measure owing to Münsterberg's work, industrial psychology was, by the end of the war, firmly established as one of the most important aspects of the science of management."

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