James Rowland Angell

James Rowland Angell (1869-1949) was an American psychologist and educator and one of the founders of the functionalist school. He was trained at the universities of Michigan and Harvard at a time when psychology was seeking to establish itself as a science separate from philosophy.

Angell studied with John Dewey at Michigan and then continued his training at Harvard and in Germany, though he never completed a doctorate. In 1905 he led the newly created psychology department at the University of Chicago, and in 1906 he presided over the American Psychological Association. His textbook Psychology (1904) became the most influential statement of the approach. He later left research for administrative posts and, from 1921 to 1937, served as president of Yale University.

For Angell, consciousness was not a sum of elements, as Titchener's structuralism proposed, but something to understand through its function: it appears when reflexes, instincts and habits fail to solve a problem of adaptation. Mind and body formed a single unit shaped by evolution, and psychology belonged among the biological sciences.

His influence can be seen in the opening of psychology to psychological tests, animal behaviour research and the experimental method. Among his students was John B. Watson, who later founded behaviorism.