Russell T. Hurlburt, the son of Richard G. Hurlburt and Ruth (neé Sherrard) Hurlburt, married Roberta Rochkar in 1967.[3][4] He earned his Bachelors of Science in engineering in aeronautical engineering from Princeton University. He received a M.S. in mechanical engineering in 1967 from the University of New Mexico.[5][6]
Hurlburt took up the study of psychology while playing trumpet at military funerals during the Vietnam War.[7] He was frustrated by the lack of attention psychology gave to everyday experiences and decided to pursue this. He earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with a dissertation titled Self-observation and self-control, at the University of South Dakota.[5][8]
Career
Hurlburt started developing Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) in the 1970s.[7] In 1973 he invented a beeper capable of delivering random beeps and patented it in 1976.[9] Hurlburt refined the method of interviewing about experience that occurred before random beeps. This continued over the next decades, with the help of frequent collaborators such as Christopher Heavey, Sarah Akther, and Alek Krumm. Hurlburt and collaborators wanted a method to examine inner experience while limiting memory errors, biases, heuristics, and self-schema-based preconceptions that can distort first-person reporting.[citation needed]
DES complies with Nisbett and Wilson's recommendations for how first-person reports could be more accurately obtained.[1] These include 1) interrupting a process at the moment it is occurring, 2) alerting subjects to pay careful attention to their cognitive process, and 3) coaching them in introspective procedures.[10]
Hurlburt's research started with the use of the beeper device in naturalistic settings. Originally he gave participants a questionnaire with a limited range of options. This facilitated quantitative comparison.[8] But reportedly, Hurlburt grew frustrated at the limitations this placed on unveiling experience. He moved towards more in-depth qualitative interviewing.[11] Acknowledging the work of Husserl and Heidegger, Hurlburt and colleagues said DES drew inspiration from phenomenology.[12]
When first refining the method, Hurlburt at first sampled himself extensively for around a year. He then concluded that it would be better not to use himself as a subject. Phenomena that he observed in himself he might more easily attribute to others. For the next 25 years or so he declined to participate in DES as a subject until the urgings of his students convinced him to try.[13]
While continuously refining the DES method, Hurlburt has written a number of books on the subject. He also wrote a textbook on statistics. Hurlburt is a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.[7] Summaries of his research can be found in publications like The New York Times[7] and The New Yorker.[2]
^Fernyhough, Charles (2016). The voices within: The history and science of how we talk to ourselves (1st ed.). Great Britain: Basic Books. ISBN978-0465096800.
^Heavey, Christopher L.; Lefforge, Noelle L.; Lapping-Carr, Leiszle; Hurlburt, Russell T. (January 30, 2017). "Mixed Emotions: Toward a Phenomenology of Blended and Multiple Feelings". Emotion Review. 9 (2): 105–110. doi:10.1177/1754073916639661. ISSN1754-0739. DES can be considered a phenomenological method for describing lived experience. Although DES is inspired by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others, it is aimed only at pristine experience and is not concerned with essences lying behind phenomena or with any other aspect beyond that which is directly apprehended.
