MILLER, NEAL E(LGAR)

born Aug. 3, 1909, Milwaukee, Wis., U.S. American psychologist who, with John Dollard, developed a theory of motivation based on the satisfaction of psychosocial drives, combining elements of a number of earlier reinforcement theories of behaviour and learning. Miller attended the University of Washington (Seattle) and Stanford University (Palo Alto, Calif.) before receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1935. He 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 Dollard presented their results, which suggested that behaviour patterns were produced through the modification of biologically or socially derived drives by conditioning and reinforcement. Miller was appointed professor of psychology at Yale in 1950, resigning the position in 1966 to accept a professorship at Rockefeller University (emeritus from 1981).