McDougall's interests and sympathies were broad. He was interested in eugenics, but departed from neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in maintaining the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as suggested by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; he carried out many experiments designed to demonstrate this process. Opposing behaviourism, he argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology (from Greek ὁρμή "hormḗ" "impulse"). He first outlined hormic psychology in An Introduction to Social Psychology (London, 1908.) Hormic psychology serves as one of the foundational frameworks for understanding the wide range of human motivational forces. The term “hormic” comes from the Greek word for impulse and according to Hilgard (1987) was drawn from the work of T. P. Nunn, a British colleague (Larson, 2014).