William N. Schoenfeld

Who was William N. Schoenfeld?

William N. Schoenfeld was an American psychologist and author.

Born in New York City, he conducted original research in experimental psychology, and advocated behaviorism, which seeks to understand behavior as a function of environmental histories of experiencing consequences. Dr. Schoenfeld's own original contributions in a long research career were influenced by those of B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov. In a carefully devised set of experiments in 1953 he led a team of Columbia University psychologists in discovering that anxiety caused the human heart rate to slow rather than quicken under certain timing of stimuli.

He was the co-author with Fred S. Keller, a Columbia colleague, of Principles of Psychology, an influential college text published in 1950 that emphasized scientific methods in the study of psychology. Students first used it in courses at Columbia College, where the two professors offered two hours of lecture and, for the first time in psychology, four hours of laboratory work a week.