Miller, Neal E

Miller, Neal E(lgar)

(born Aug. 3, 1909, Milwaukee, Wis., U.S.—died March 23, 2002, Hamden, Conn.) U.S. psychologist. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and remained at Yale's Institute of Human Relations to continue his experiments on learning. In Social Learning and Imitation (1941) and Personality and Psychotherapy (1950), he and John Dollard presented a theory of motivation based on the satisfaction of psychosocial drives, combining elements of earlier reinforcement theories of behaviour and learning. Miller suggested that behaviour patterns were produced through the modification of biologically or socially derived drives by conditioning and reinforcement. He taught at Rockefeller University (1966–81).