McDougall, William

McDougall, William, Canadian statesman

McDougall, William, 1822–1905, Canadian leader in the movement for Canadian confederation, b. Ontario. He was elected (1858) to the Legislative Assembly, and in 1864 he entered the "great coalition" ministry led by John A. Macdonald and George Brown. He was a delegate to the two Canadian conferences (1864) on confederation and to the Anglo-Canadian conference held in England (1866). In 1868 he again went to England, with Georges Étienne Cartier, to arrange the transfer to Canada of the territories of the Hudson's Bay Company, a project he had long urged. The following year he was appointed lieutenant governor of the newly acquired region, but on his way to assume his post he was turned back near the border by rebels of the Red River Settlement. This setback, for which he was removed from office, as well as the success of his opponents within the Liberal party, led to the decline of McDougall's influence.

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McDougall, William, American psychologist

McDougall, William, 1871–1938, American psychologist, b. Lancashire, England, educated at Cambridge, Oxford, and Gottingen. An important figure in the development of social and physiological psychology, he was a professor of psychology at Harvard (1920–27), and at Duke from 1927 until his death. He studied eugenics and heredity, and for 17 years conducted experiments on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He maintained that individuals are motivated by inherited instincts that push them toward goals which may be unknown to them. His works include An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908–50, repr. 1973) and Physiological Psychology (1920).