Wallace Craig

Wallace Craig (1876–1954) was an American experimental psychologist and behavior scientist. He provided a conceptual framework for the study of behavior organization and is regarded as one of the founders of ethology. Craig experimentally studied the behavioral expression of emotion, the way innate and learned behavioral tendencies are integrated, and how vocal as well as social behaviors are organized. He encouraged a view of behavior as an integrated process with evolutionary, motivational, experiential, social and ecological degrees of freedom. This integrative perspective helped shape modern behavioral science.

Wallace Craig was born on July 20, 1876, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of Alexander Craig of Edinburgh, a Scottish immigrant to the United States, and Marion Brookes of London, an Englishwoman. He married Mima Davis Jenness of Sheffield on October 12, 1904.

Craig graduated from Hyde Park High School, Chicago, Illinois, in 1895 and received both his Bachelor of Science degree (1898) and his Master of Science degree (1901) from the University of Illinois. From 1901 he studied with Charles O. Whitman and received his PhD from the University of Chicago, Illinois (1908), for his research on pigeon behavior.

Craig worked as a high school science teacher (1900, Harlan, Iowa; 1900–01 Fort Collins, Colorado; 1904–05 Coshocton, Ohio), as a university assistant in zoology (1901–04, University of Chicago), and as a psychology and biology teacher (1905–07, State Normal School, Valley City, North Dakota). In 1903 and 1906, he was a student at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

After receiving his doctorate, Craig became a professor of philosophy at the University of Maine at Orono (1908–22). During this period Craig published most of his papers on the principles of behavior organization. These include a series of articles comparing the expression of emotions across different species of pigeons (1909–11), articles on time keeping and behavioral synchronization (1916, 1917), as well as conceptual papers on appetites and aversions (1917, 1918) and on fighting (1921). The circumstances surrounding the end of Craig’s appointment at the University of Maine are not clear; determinants may include both a progressive loss of hearing and dissatisfaction with collegiality and with research conditions.

After 1922, Craig’s professional standing remained unstable. Thanks to support from Gordon Allport and James Woods of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Harvard University, Craig held various posts there until the mid-1930s (1922–23, lecturer in psychology; 1923–27, biophysics librarian; various other posts). He was unable to procure an established academic position or regular research program until 1937. During this period Craig and his wife lived in Scotland for two years. In the mid-1930s the American ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice instigated a contact with Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian naturalist. Craig and Lorenz exchanged letters concerning key concepts of behavior such as reflex, instinct, taxis, tropism, learning, as well as search, appetitive and aversive behavior. None of these letters has been located to date. Together with Craig’s published work, in particular his 1918 essay on appetites and aversions, they were regarded by Lorenz as foundational for the development of ethology. A key insight was that much behavior is expressed not in response to, but in search of sensory input – or the lack of such input. With increasing appetite, animals engage in an undirected search for food, and only once located will the food stimuli be tracked down and consumption ensue. The role of learning in these processes is to provide ever more ‘educated guesses’ during the initial search phase. In an essay from 1954, Lorenz refers to this view of a three-step organization of behavior as the Craig–Lorenz schema. Craig used a notably broad definition of appetite (p. 91, Craig 1918): “An appetite (…) is a state of agitation which continues so long as a certain stimulus, which may be called the appeted stimulus, is absent. When the appeted stimulus is at length received it stimulates a consummatory reaction, after which the appetitive behavior ceases and is succeeded by a state of relative rest”. Likewise, he defined aversion as “a state of agitation which continues so long as a certain stimulus, referred to as the disturbing stimulus, is present; but which ceases, being replaced by a state of relative rest, when that stimulus has ceased to act on the sense-organs.” One of the students of Lorenz, Monika Holzapfel, extended these notions to suggest that states of rest are goals of behavior (Holzapfel, 1940). Within his framework of appetites and aversions, Craig in his essay of 1921 described aggression as an aversion, in contrast to Lorenz, who regarded it as an appetite (Lorenz, 1966).

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