People in psychology
About this listExplore psychologists and the thinkers who shaped the field, ordered by birth year. Open a profile for contributions, context and sources.
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Born before 1800
- 384 BCE–
322 BCE (link to this row)Aristotle
Greek philosopher who wrote a treatise on the soul
Greek philosopher who studied at Plato's Academy and later directed his own school, the Lyceum. His treatise On the Soul treats psychology as the study of all living things, including perception and mind.
Contributions: The soul as the form of a living body; A hierarchy of faculties; Perception and the cause of movement
- c. 965–
c. 1040 (link to this row)Ibn al-Haytham
Arab scholar of optics and mathematics, known in Latin as Alhazen
Scholar born in Basra who worked in Cairo and wrote the seven-volume Book of Optics. It explained vision as light reaching the eye from objects and rejected the older idea that rays leave the eye.
Contributions: A theory of vision from light entering the eye; Visual cognition and binocular vision; Experiments in optics
- 1596–
1650 (link to this row)René Descartes
French philosopher and mathematician known for mind-body dualism
French philosopher who argued that mind and body are distinct substances and explained much animal and bodily behaviour as mechanism. His dualism set a problem that psychology and neuroscience still discuss.
Contributions: Mind-body dualism; Mechanical account of behaviour; Passions of the Soul
- 1632–
1704 (link to this row)John Locke
English philosopher who argued that ideas come from experience
English philosopher whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding argued that the mind starts without innate ideas and that knowledge is built from sensation and reflection.
Contributions: Ideas from experience; Argument against innate knowledge; Account of personal identity
- 1758–
1828 (link to this row)Franz Joseph Gall
German neuroanatomist whose skull-reading method, later called phrenology, was discredited
German physician and neuroanatomist who argued that the mind has separate faculties housed in different parts of the brain. His skull-reading method, later called phrenology, was not supported, but the localisation idea fed later neuroscience.
Contributions: Localisation of mental faculties; Cranioscopy; A new dissection method
Born 1800 to 1859
- 1801–
1887 (link to this row)Gustav Fechner
German physicist and philosopher who founded psychophysics
German physicist at Leipzig who sought an exact mathematical relation between physical stimuli and sensations. His Elemente der Psychophysik (1860) set out psychophysics and a logarithmic law of sensation.
Contributions: Founding psychophysics; The Weber-Fechner law; A view of a living universe
- 1802–
1887 (link to this row)Dorothea Dix
American social reformer who campaigned for hospital care for mentally ill people
American reformer who documented the conditions of mentally ill people held in jails and almshouses and lobbied state legislatures for public hospitals. She was a campaigner, not a psychologist or clinician.
Contributions: Investigating and reporting conditions; Lobbying for state hospitals; Union Army nursing
- 1809–
1882 (link to this row)Charles Darwin
English naturalist who set out the theory of evolution by natural selection
English naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) presented evolution by natural selection. His later books applied evolutionary thinking to humans and to emotional expression.
Contributions: Natural selection; Humans as animals; Emotional expression
- 1821–
1894 (link to this row)Hermann von Helmholtz
German physician, physiologist and physicist who studied sensory perception
German physiologist and physicist who measured the speed of nerve signals and wrote major handbooks on the physiology of vision and hearing. Wilhelm Wundt is described as his student.
Contributions: Timing nerve conduction; Physiological optics; Sensations of tone
- 1822–
1911 (link to this row)Francis Galton
English polymath who measured individual differences and coined the term eugenics
English polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin who measured human differences, defined an index of correlation and coined the term eugenics in 1883. His eugenics and racial inquiries are widely criticised.
Contributions: Measuring human differences; Correlation and regression; A twin study
- 1824–
1880 (link to this row)Paul Broca
French surgeon and anatomist who linked speech production to the left frontal lobe
French surgeon and anatomist whose 1861 study of a patient who could say only "tan" linked speech production to the left frontal lobe. He also founded an anthropological society and used skull measurement to rank races, a practice now rejected.
Contributions: Leborgne and speech production; Founding the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris; Craniometry
- 1825–
1893 (link to this row)Jean-Martin Charcot
French neurologist who worked at the Salpêtrière and demonstrated hysteria and hypnosis
French neurologist who taught at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, described multiple sclerosis and used hypnosis in public demonstrations of hysteria. Bernheim and others argued that the phenomena reflected suggestion.
Contributions: A neurology clinic at the Salpêtrière; Describing multiple sclerosis; Hysteria and hypnosis demonstrations
- 1832–
1920 (link to this row)Wilhelm Wundt
German physician, philosopher and experimental psychologist
German physician and philosopher who worked in a Leipzig laboratory for psychological experiments from 1879 and supervised about 185 doctoral students, many of whom carried experimental methods to other countries.
Contributions: Leipzig psychological laboratory; Principles of Physiological Psychology; Völkerpsychologie
- 1842–
1910 (link to this row)William James
American physician, psychologist and philosopher
American Harvard teacher who taught an experimental psychology course in 1875 to 1876, wrote the 1890 Principles of Psychology, advanced a theory of emotion and helped establish the philosophy of pragmatism.
Contributions: The Principles of Psychology; James-Lange theory of emotion; Pragmatism and psychical research
- 1844–
1924 (link to this row)G. Stanley Hall
American psychologist and university president
American psychologist who began a psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins, founded the American Journal of Psychology in 1887, became first president of the American Psychological Association in 1892, wrote Adolescence (1904) and invited Freud and Jung to Clark University in 1909.
Contributions: Institution building; Adolescence; Clark University conference of 1909
- 1847–
1930 (link to this row)Christine Ladd-Franklin
American logician and psychologist known for a theory of colour vision
American logician and psychologist who completed Johns Hopkins doctoral requirements in 1882 but received the degree only in 1926, and who presented an evolutionary theory of colour vision in London in 1892.
Contributions: Colour vision theory; Logic and the antilogism; Teaching without status
- 1848–
1905 (link to this row)Carl Wernicke
German neurologist and psychiatrist who described sensory aphasia
German neurologist who in 1874 described a form of aphasia with fluent but disordered speech and poor comprehension, linked to the left temporal lobe. Wernicke's aphasia is named after him.
Contributions: Sensory aphasia; The Wernicke-Lichtheim model; Wernicke encephalopathy
- 1849–
1936 (link to this row)Ivan Pavlov
Russian physiologist who described conditioned reflexes
Russian physiologist who won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on digestion and then studied conditioned reflexes in dogs. He was a physiologist, not a psychologist.
Contributions: Digestive gland research; The conditioned reflex; Chronic experiments on dogs
- 1850–
1909 (link to this row)Hermann Ebbinghaus
German psychologist who began the experimental study of memory
German psychologist who studied memory by testing himself on lists of nonsense syllables, published in 1885, and described the forgetting curve, the measure of savings and the benefit of spreading practice.
Contributions: Nonsense syllables and self-testing; Forgetting curve and savings; Work on schoolchildren
- 1852–
1934 (link to this row)Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Spanish histologist who supported the neuron doctrine
Spanish histologist who adopted Golgi's silver staining method and used it to show that neurons are separate cells. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Camillo Golgi.
Contributions: Applying and improving the Golgi stain; The neuron doctrine; Neural plasticity
- 1856–
1939 (link to this row)Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis
Viennese neurologist who developed psychoanalysis, a method and theory of the unconscious, from clinical work in the 1890s; its scientific status and the evidential value of his case histories remain disputed.
Contributions: Studies on Hysteria and the talking method; The Interpretation of Dreams; Case histories
- 1856–
1926 (link to this row)Emil Kraepelin
German psychiatrist who built an influential system of classifying mental illness
German psychiatrist who worked in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory and classified mental illness by its course, separating dementia praecox from manic-depressive illness. He also promoted eugenics and racial hygiene.
Contributions: Compendium der Psychiatrie; Classification by course of illness; Research institute in Munich
- 1857–
1911 (link to this row)Alfred Binet
French psychologist who co-created the Binet-Simon intelligence scale
French psychologist who, with the psychiatrist Théodore Simon, produced the 1905 scale to identify schoolchildren needing special help, a forerunner of modern intelligence tests.
Contributions: Binet-Simon scale; Cautions about measurement; Child study and journal
- 1859–
1947 (link to this row)Pierre Janet
French philosopher, physician and psychologist
French philosopher, physician and psychologist who studied hysteria and psychological automatism, used dissociation and subconscious as technical terms, and held the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France from 1902.
Contributions: Dissociation and automatism; Hysteria and psychasthenia; Hierarchy of tendencies
Born 1860 to 1889
- 1860–
1944 (link to this row)James McKeen Cattell
American psychologist, editor and promoter of mental tests
American psychologist who took his doctorate under Wundt at Leipzig, became the first professor of psychology in the United States, promoted mental tests, edited Science and helped found the Psychological Corporation.
Contributions: Mental tests; Professorships and journals; Applied psychology organisations
- 1863–
1930 (link to this row)Mary Whiton Calkins
American psychologist and philosopher
American psychologist who completed the requirements for a Harvard PhD in 1895 but was refused the degree because she was a woman, introduced the paired-associate technique and became president of the American Psychological Association in 1905.
Contributions: Paired-associate technique; Wellesley laboratory; Self psychology
- 1863–
1916 (link to this row)Hugo Münsterberg
German-American psychologist and early applied psychologist
German-born Harvard psychologist who applied psychology to testimony, industry and treatment, and wrote On the Witness Stand (1908) and Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913)
Contributions: Forensic psychology; Industrial psychology; Psychotherapy and film
- 1863–
1945 (link to this row)Charles Spearman
English psychologist and statistician who proposed the g factor
English army officer turned psychologist who proposed that performance on varied mental tests reflects a general factor, g, published the rank correlation coefficient in 1904 and is credited with coining the term factor analysis.
Contributions: General intelligence (g); Factor analysis; Rank correlation
- 1867–
1927 (link to this row)Edward Titchener
English-born psychologist, leader of structuralism at Cornell
English-born Cornell psychologist who advanced structural psychology, an approach that analysed mind into elements such as sensations and affections, and who excluded women from his Experimentalists group.
Contributions: Structural psychology; The stimulus error; Cornell doctoral programme
- 1867–
1923 (link to this row)Charles Henry Turner
American zoologist who studied insect behaviour and learning
American zoologist who earned a University of Chicago PhD in 1907, reported that bees and cockroaches learn from experience and described how ants circle before entering their nests. He did most of this work while teaching high school in St. Louis.
Contributions: Learning and memory in insects; Turner's circling; Invertebrate research
- 1867–
1956 (link to this row)Lightner Witmer
American psychologist who founded a pioneering psychological clinic
American psychologist who opened a psychological clinic for children at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, used the term clinical psychology that year and founded the journal The Psychological Clinic in 1907.
Contributions: The Penn psychological clinic; 'Clinical Psychology' and the journal; Residential schools and speech clinic
- 1869–
1955 (link to this row)Walter Dill Scott
American psychologist of advertising and personnel, later university president
American psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and applied psychology to advertising and personnel selection at Northwestern University. He worked on Army officer selection in the First World War and was Northwestern's president from 1920 to 1939.
Contributions: Psychology of advertising; Salesman selection; Army personnel selection
- 1870–
1937 (link to this row)Alfred Adler
Austrian physician and founder of individual psychology
Viennese physician who left Freud's circle in 1911 and developed individual psychology, with its focus on inferiority feelings, compensation, social interest and birth order, and who opened child guidance clinics in Vienna after the First World War.
Contributions: Individual psychology; Child guidance clinics; Breaking with Freud
- 1870–
1952 (link to this row)Maria Montessori
Italian physician and educator who developed the Montessori method
Italian physician who graduated in medicine in 1896, opened the first Casa dei Bambini in Rome in 1907 and developed the Montessori method of child-centred learning with specially designed materials.
Contributions: Casa dei Bambini; The Montessori method; International spread
- 1871–
1945 (link to this row)Walter Cannon
American physiologist at Harvard Medical School
American physiologist at Harvard who described the emergency response now called fight or flight, introduced the term homeostasis in 1926, and with Philip Bard gave his name to the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, an alternative to the James-Lange account.
Contributions: The emergency response and the sympathoadrenal system; Homeostasis; Challenge to the James-Lange theory
- 1871–
1939 (link to this row)Margaret Floy Washburn
American psychologist, first woman to earn a psychology PhD in the United States
American psychologist who received a Cornell PhD under Titchener in 1894, described as the first awarded to a woman in psychology, and wrote The Animal Mind (1908), a comparative psychology textbook.
Contributions: The Animal Mind; Motor theory of consciousness; Cornell, Columbia and Vassar
- 1874–
1949 (link to this row)Edward Thorndike
American psychologist of learning and educational psychology
American psychologist who studied animal learning with puzzle boxes for his 1898 Columbia doctorate, described the law of effect and spent his career at Teachers College, Columbia, working on educational psychology and testing.
Contributions: Puzzle boxes and the law of effect; Revision of the law of effect; Educational psychology and testing
- 1874–
1947 (link to this row)Helen Thompson Woolley
American psychologist known for early experimental research on sex differences
American psychologist whose 1900 University of Chicago dissertation compared 25 men and 25 women on psychological and physical tests, and who later directed a Cincinnati bureau studying working children and became the first woman president of the National Vocational Guidance Association.
Contributions: Sex differences dissertation; Literature review of 1910; Work on children and vocational guidance
- 1875–
1961 (link to this row)Carl Jung
Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology
Swiss psychiatrist who worked at the Burghölzli, collaborated with Freud until 1912 to 1913 and then developed analytical psychology, including psychological types, archetypes and the collective unconscious.
Contributions: Word association studies; Psychological Types; Analytical psychology
- 1877–
1956 (link to this row)Lewis Terman
American psychologist at Stanford and author of the Stanford-Binet
American psychologist at Stanford who published the Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon test in 1916 and began the Genetic Studies of Genius in 1921. He was also a prominent eugenicist who wrote about racial differences in test scores.
Contributions: Stanford-Binet test; Genetic Studies of Genius; Army testing
- 1878–
1972 (link to this row)Lillian Gilbreth
American industrial psychologist and engineer
American psychologist and management consultant who applied psychology to work and motion study with her husband Frank Gilbreth. She completed a Brown University doctorate in 1915 and later taught at Purdue.
Contributions: The Psychology of Management; Motion study with Frank Gilbreth; Work after 1924
- 1878–
1958 (link to this row)John B. Watson
American psychologist and early advocate of behaviourism
American psychologist who set out the behaviourist programme in 1913 and, with Rosalie Rayner, reported the 1920 Little Albert conditioning study. He left Johns Hopkins in 1920 after a scandal and later worked in advertising.
Contributions: Behaviourist programme; Conditioned emotional reactions in an infant; Popular child-rearing advice
- 1880–
1949 (link to this row)Elton Mayo
Australian-born philosopher and industrial researcher at Harvard Business School
Australian-born academic who trained in philosophy and psychology and taught philosophy before moving to the United States. At Harvard Business School he promoted a human relations view of work, based partly on the Hawthorne studies, which later scholars criticised.
Contributions: Philosophy teaching and shell-shock treatment; Industrial research in the United States; Hawthorne studies and human relations
- 1880–
1943 (link to this row)Max Wertheimer
Czech-born psychologist and co-founder of Gestalt psychology
Psychologist born in Prague who studied apparent motion in 1910 and published principles of perceptual organisation in 1923. With Koffka and Köhler he is counted as a founder of Gestalt psychology.
Contributions: Studies of apparent motion; Laws of organisation in perceptual forms; Productive thinking
- 1882–
1960 (link to this row)Melanie Klein
Austrian-British psychoanalyst and pioneer of play therapy
Austrian-born psychoanalyst without formal university training who developed play technique for analysing children and helped found object relations theory. She worked in London from 1926.
Contributions: Play technique; Object relations and positions
- 1884–
1952 (link to this row)Clark Hull
American psychologist who built a formal drive-reduction theory of learning
American psychologist at Yale who tried to build a quantitative, deductive theory of learning around habit strength and drive reduction, set out in Principles of Behavior in 1943.
Contributions: Aptitude testing and hypnosis; Principles of Behavior
- 1885–
1952 (link to this row)Karen Horney
German-born physician and psychoanalyst
German-born physician and psychoanalyst who criticised Freud's account of women, argued that neurosis arises from social and cultural conditions, and wrote The Neurotic Personality of Our Time in 1937.
Contributions: Critique of Freud on women; Neurosis and culture; Institutions
- 1885–
1942 (link to this row)Sabina Spielrein
Russian physician and early psychoanalyst
Russian physician and psychoanalyst who trained in Zurich, presented a 1912 paper on destruction and creation that Freud later cited, and worked in Geneva and Moscow. She and her two daughters were killed in Rostov-on-Don in 1942.
Contributions: Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being; Clinical and child work
- 1886–
1969 (link to this row)Frederic Bartlett
British psychologist who studied memory as reconstruction
British psychologist at Cambridge whose 1932 book Remembering developed a schema account of memory and included the 'War of the Ghosts' recall study. He also worked with Kenneth Craik on the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit.
Contributions: Remembering and schemas; The War of the Ghosts; Applied psychology
- 1886–
1959 (link to this row)Florence Goodenough
American child psychologist and test author
American child psychologist who created the Draw-a-Man test of children's intelligence, published in 1926, and worked at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Welfare from 1925.
Contributions: Draw-a-Man test; Observation of young children; Textbooks
- 1886–
1939 (link to this row)Leta Hollingworth
American psychologist who tested claims about sex differences and studied gifted children
American psychologist at Columbia who tested claims that menstruation impairs women's mental performance and that men vary more than women. She then spent much of her career on gifted children.
Contributions: Testing functional periodicity; Challenging the variability hypothesis; Gifted children
- 1886–
1941 (link to this row)Kurt Koffka
German psychologist and co-founder of Gestalt psychology
German psychologist who was a subject in Max Wertheimer's apparent-motion studies, introduced Gestalt theory to American psychologists in 1922, and taught at Smith College from 1927 until his death in 1941.
Contributions: Introducing Gestalt theory; Gestalt child psychology; Principles of Gestalt Psychology
- 1886–
1959 (link to this row)Edward Tolman
American psychologist who argued for purposive behaviourism and cognitive maps
American psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied maze learning in rats and argued that behaviour is goal-directed and guided by internal representations he called cognitive maps.
Contributions: Purposive behaviourism; Latent learning and cognitive maps
- 1887–
1967 (link to this row)Wolfgang Köhler
German psychologist and co-founder of Gestalt psychology
German psychologist who, with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, developed Gestalt psychology. He is known for his work with chimpanzees on Tenerife, which he interpreted as insight rather than blind trial and error.
Contributions: Insight in chimpanzees; Gestalt theory; Berlin Institute
- 1887–
1955 (link to this row)Louis Thurstone
American psychometrician and factor analyst
American psychometrician who developed multiple factor analysis, a model of seven primary mental abilities, the law of comparative judgment and an attitude scale. He helped found the journal Psychometrika and the Psychometric Society.
Contributions: Primary mental abilities; Law of comparative judgment; Attitude scale
Born 1890 to 1919
- 1890–
1958 (link to this row)Karl Lashley
American psychologist and neuroscientist who searched for the brain's memory traces
American psychologist who removed parts of rats' cortex after maze training to look for where memories are stored. He concluded that memory is widely distributed, a view later research revised.
Contributions: Lesion studies of maze learning; Mass action and equipotentiality
- 1890–
1947 (link to this row)Kurt Lewin
German-born psychologist who founded research on group dynamics
German-born psychologist who linked behaviour to the person and the environment, studied leadership climates in groups in Iowa, and promoted action research and group training before his death in 1947.
Contributions: Field theory; Leadership climates; Action research and group training
- 1893–
1974 (link to this row)Charlotte Bühler
German-born developmental psychologist and humanistic psychologist
German-born psychologist who built a child psychology programme in Vienna, studied development across the whole lifespan, and helped organise humanistic psychology in the United States after emigrating in 1940.
Contributions: Vienna child psychology school; Lifespan and autobiographical method; Humanistic psychology
- 1893–
1988 (link to this row)Henry Murray
American psychologist of personality at Harvard
American psychologist at Harvard who developed a need-based theory of personality and, with Christiana Morgan, the Thematic Apperception Test. Experiments he ran on Harvard undergraduates from 1959 to 1962 are described as likely unethical.
Contributions: Needs and press; Thematic Apperception Test; Wartime assessment and profiling
- 1895–
1982 (link to this row)Anna Freud
Austrian-British psychoanalyst who worked with children
Austrian-born child psychoanalyst, daughter of Sigmund Freud. She wrote The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, ran the Hampstead War Nursery during the Second World War, and founded a child therapy clinic in London.
Contributions: Defence mechanisms and ego psychology; Child analysis and clinical work; Developmental lines
- c. 1895–
1934 (link to this row)Inez Beverly Prosser
American educator and researcher on segregated schooling
American educator who completed a University of Cincinnati doctorate in 1933 with a study of Black children in mixed and segregated schools. Some sources call her the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in psychology; others limit that claim.
Contributions: Dissertation on mixed and segregated schools; Teacher and administrator
- 1895–
1954 (link to this row)Francis Cecil Sumner
American psychologist and founder of Howard University's psychology department
American psychologist who earned a PhD at Clark University in 1920, widely described as the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology, and who built Howard University's psychology department.
Contributions: Doctorate and early career; Howard University department; Research and abstracting
- 1896–
1987 (link to this row)Mary Cover Jones
American developmental psychologist known for early work on removing children's fears
American developmental psychologist who reported in 1924 that a three-year-old's fear of a rabbit could be reduced by feeding him while the rabbit was brought gradually closer. She later worked on the Oakland Growth Study at Berkeley.
Contributions: The case of Peter; Oakland Growth Study
- 1896–
1980 (link to this row)Jean Piaget
Swiss psychologist who proposed stages of cognitive development
Swiss psychologist who described children's thinking as passing through four stages, from the sensorimotor stage in infancy to formal operational thought in adolescence. He founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955.
Contributions: Children's errors as evidence; Four stages of development; Institutions in Geneva
- 1896–
1934 (link to this row)Lev Vygotsky
Soviet psychologist who developed cultural-historical psychology
Soviet psychologist who argued that children's thinking develops through social interaction and language. He introduced the zone of proximal development and died of tuberculosis at 37, leaving his work unfinished.
Contributions: Higher psychological functions; Zone of proximal development; Thought and speech
- 1896–
1981 (link to this row)David Wechsler
Romanian-American clinical psychologist and test author
Romanian-born American psychologist, chief psychologist at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital from 1932 to 1967, who created the Wechsler-Bellevue test and the adult and child intelligence scales that followed from it.
Contributions: Wechsler-Bellevue and later scales; Deviation IQ; Broader view of intelligence
- 1897–
1967 (link to this row)Gordon Allport
American psychologist of personality and prejudice
American psychologist at Harvard who built an early trait theory of personality, wrote The Nature of Prejudice (1954) and, with Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor. He sorted traits into cardinal, central and secondary levels.
Contributions: Trait theory of personality; The Nature of Prejudice; Psychology of rumour
- 1898–
1935 (link to this row)Rosalie Rayner
American research assistant and co-author of the Little Albert study
American graduate student and research assistant at Johns Hopkins who co-authored the 1920 Little Albert paper with John B. Watson. She left graduate study without a degree and married Watson on 31 December 1920.
Contributions: Little Albert study; Writing on child-rearing
- 1899–
1994 (link to this row)Nancy Bayley
American developmental psychologist
American developmental psychologist who directed the Berkeley Growth Study and created the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. In 1966 she was the first woman to receive the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
Contributions: Berkeley Growth Study; Bayley Scales of Infant Development; Intelligence across childhood
- 1901–
1978 (link to this row)Margaret Mead
American cultural anthropologist
American anthropologist whose Samoa fieldwork, published in 1928, argued that adolescent turmoil depends on culture, and whose New Guinea work argued that gender traits vary between societies. Both books remain contested.
Contributions: Coming of Age in Samoa; Sex and Temperament; Public and interdisciplinary role
- 1901–
1988 (link to this row)Bluma Zeigarnik
Lithuanian-born psychologist known for the Zeigarnik effect and Soviet pathopsychology
Psychologist who found in Kurt Lewin's Berlin research group that interrupted tasks were remembered better than completed ones. She moved to Moscow in 1931 and worked in Soviet pathopsychology.
Contributions: The Zeigarnik effect; Pathopsychology in Moscow
- 1902–
1994 (link to this row)Erik Erikson
German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst
German-born American psychoanalyst known for the eight stages of psychosocial development, the phrase identity crisis, and the 1950 book Childhood and Society.
Contributions: Eight stages of psychosocial development; Identity crisis; Cross-cultural fieldwork
- 1902–
1977 (link to this row)Alexander Luria
Soviet psychologist and neuropsychologist
Soviet psychologist who worked with Lev Vygotsky and later became a founder of neuropsychology. He wrote detailed case studies, including The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man with a Shattered World.
Contributions: Cultural-historical psychology; Neuropsychology of language and brain injury; Case studies
- 1902–
1987 (link to this row)Carl Rogers
American psychologist and founder of client-centred therapy
American psychologist who developed client-centred therapy and promoted unconditional positive regard. His books include Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942), Client-Centered Therapy (1951) and On Becoming a Person (1961).
Contributions: Client-centred therapy; Core conditions; Person-centred organisations
- 1904–
1979 (link to this row)James J. Gibson
American perceptual psychologist at Cornell University
American psychologist who argued that perceivers pick up information from the structure of light, developed the ecological approach to perception, and put forward the concept of affordances. During the Second World War he led work on pilot-screening tests.
Contributions: Optical information and the 1950 book; The ecological approach and affordances; Wartime aviation research
- 1904–
1990 (link to this row)B. F. Skinner
American psychologist who developed radical behaviourism and the study of operant conditioning
American psychologist at Harvard who studied how consequences shape behaviour using the operant chamber and cumulative recorder, and who argued for applying behavioural methods to education and society.
Contributions: Operant behaviour; Language and teaching; Social proposals
- 1905–
1998 (link to this row)Raymond Cattell
British-American personality and intelligence researcher
British-born psychologist who used factor analysis to identify 16 source traits of personality and distinguished fluid from crystallised intelligence. His writings on eugenics and race, and a 1997 award he withdrew from, remain contested.
Contributions: The 16PF and source traits; Fluid and crystallised intelligence; Factor-analytic methods
- 1905–
1997 (link to this row)Viktor Frankl
Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy
Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, which treats the search for meaning as a central human motivation, and wrote Man's Search for Meaning after surviving Nazi camps.
Contributions: Logotherapy; Man's Search for Meaning; Clinical and academic posts
- 1905–
1981 (link to this row)Harry Harlow
American psychologist known for primate attachment experiments
American psychologist at the University of Wisconsin whose experiments with infant rhesus monkeys and cloth and wire surrogate mothers showed the importance of contact comfort. His isolation experiments are now widely considered unethical.
Contributions: Surrogate mother experiments; The Nature of Love; Isolation studies
- c. 1906–
1988 (link to this row)Muzafer Sherif
Turkish-born American social psychologist
Turkish-born social psychologist who studied group norms with the autokinetic effect and led the 1954 Robbers Cave study of intergroup conflict and cooperation with colleagues including Carolyn Wood Sherif.
Contributions: Group norms and the autokinetic effect; Robbers Cave experiment; Social judgment theory
- 1907–
1996 (link to this row)Solomon Asch
Polish-born American Gestalt-influenced social psychologist
Social psychologist trained in Gestalt psychology who taught at Swarthmore College. He is known for line-judgement experiments, begun in 1951, in which participants faced a unanimous but wrong majority.
Contributions: Line-judgement conformity experiments; The effect of one ally; Social Psychology textbook
- 1907–
1990 (link to this row)John Bowlby
British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founder of attachment theory
British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who proposed that attachment is an evolved behaviour protecting infants. His 1951 World Health Organization report and the Attachment and Loss volumes shaped thinking on child care and hospital practice.
Contributions: Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves; Maternal Care and Mental Health; Attachment and Loss
- 1907–
2001 (link to this row)Marie Jahoda
Austrian-British social psychologist
Austrian-born social psychologist who, with Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel, studied the effects of mass unemployment in Marienthal and later proposed components of positive mental health.
Contributions: Marienthal study; Five categories of experience; Positive mental health
- 1907–
1982 (link to this row)Hans Selye
Austro-Hungarian-born Canadian medical researcher who developed the stress concept
Medical researcher born in Vienna who worked in Montreal. From animal studies in the 1930s and 1940s he developed the general adaptation syndrome and popularised the modern use of the word stress. He also received funding from the tobacco industry.
Contributions: General adaptation syndrome; The stress concept; Institutes for stress research
- 1908–
2001 (link to this row)Anne Anastasi
American psychologist and authority on psychological testing
American psychologist at Fordham University whose textbook Psychological Testing taught generations of students test construction and interpretation. She argued that a fully culturally unbiased test cannot be written and favoured tailoring tests to their culture.
Contributions: Psychological Testing; Culture and testing; Heredity and environment
- 1908–
1958 (link to this row)Else Frenkel-Brunswik
Austrian-American psychologist of personality and prejudice
Austrian-born psychologist at Berkeley who co-authored The Authoritarian Personality (1950) with Theodor Adorno, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford, and wrote on intolerance of ambiguity and prejudice in children.
Contributions: The Authoritarian Personality; Intolerance of ambiguity; Prejudice in children
- 1908–
1970 (link to this row)Abraham Maslow
American psychologist of motivation and humanistic psychology
American psychologist who proposed a hierarchy of human needs in 1943 and helped establish humanistic psychology. His hierarchy remains widely taught and widely criticised.
Contributions: Hierarchy of needs; Self-actualisation; Humanistic psychology
- 1910–
2002 (link to this row)Eleanor Gibson
American psychologist of perceptual learning and development
American psychologist at Cornell University. With Richard Walk she designed the visual cliff to test depth perception in infants and animals, and she helped establish perceptual learning as a research area.
Contributions: The visual cliff (1960); Perceptual learning; Ecological approach
- 1913–
1999 (link to this row)Mary Ainsworth
American developmental psychologist and attachment researcher
American developmental psychologist who studied mother-infant interaction in Uganda, designed the Strange Situation procedure and described secure, avoidant and ambivalent attachment patterns, working closely with John Bowlby.
Contributions: Uganda study; Strange Situation; Attachment patterns
- 1913–
2007 (link to this row)Albert Ellis
American clinical psychologist who developed rational emotive behaviour therapy
American clinical psychologist who developed rational therapy in the 1950s as an active alternative to psychoanalysis. It later became rational emotive behaviour therapy, which holds that beliefs about events shape emotional distress. He founded the institute now called the Albert Ellis Institute.
Contributions: Rational emotive behaviour therapy; Institute for Rational Living; Public writing
- 1913–
1994 (link to this row)Roger Sperry
American neurobiologist known for split-brain research
American neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology. He proposed that nerve connections form through chemical markers, led split-brain research with his student Michael Gazzaniga, and shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Contributions: Split-brain research; Chemoaffinity hypothesis
- 1914–
2005 (link to this row)Kenneth Clark
American social psychologist and civil rights researcher
American psychologist who, with Mamie Phipps Clark, ran the doll studies on Black children's racial self-image, worked on school desegregation cases, and is described as the first African American president of the APA.
Contributions: Doll studies; Expert evidence in school cases; Community institutions
- 1915–
2016 (link to this row)Jerome Bruner
American psychologist of perception, thinking and education
American psychologist who worked at Harvard, Oxford and New York University. He studied how needs and expectations shape perception, published A Study of Thinking in 1956, and is credited with the educational term scaffolding.
Contributions: New Look perception studies; A Study of Thinking; Scaffolding
- 1916–
1997 (link to this row)Hans Eysenck
German-born British psychologist of personality and individual differences
German-born British psychologist known for the extraversion and neuroticism dimensions of personality and for questioning the evidence for psychotherapy. King's College London later judged the published results of studies co-authored with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek unsafe.
Contributions: Dimensions of personality; Personality questionnaires; Challenge to psychotherapy
- 1916–
2014 (link to this row)Julian Rotter
American clinical and personality psychologist
American psychologist who developed a social learning theory of personality and the concept of locus of control. He taught at Ohio State University and, from 1963, at the University of Connecticut.
Contributions: Social learning theory of personality; Locus of control and the I-E scale; Clinical assessment and training
- 1916–
2001 (link to this row)Herbert Simon
American economist and computer scientist who worked on decision-making and problem solving
American social scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He proposed bounded rationality and satisficing, built early artificial intelligence programs with Allen Newell, and won the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Contributions: Bounded rationality and satisficing; Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver; Recognition across fields
- 1917–
2005 (link to this row)Urie Bronfenbrenner
Russian-born American developmental psychologist at Cornell
Moscow-born developmental psychologist at Cornell. He proposed an ecological theory of human development, published in 1979, and sat on the Head Start planning committee in 1965.
Contributions: The ecology of human development; Head Start and child policy; Bioecological revisions
- 1917–
1983 (link to this row)Mamie Phipps Clark
American child psychologist and founder of the Northside Center
American psychologist who studied the development of racial identity in Black children, co-conducted the doll studies with Kenneth Clark, and founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem.
Contributions: Research on racial identity in children; Doll test; Northside Center
- 1917–
2018 (link to this row)Eleanor Maccoby
American developmental psychologist of gender and parenting
American developmental psychologist at Stanford who co-wrote The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974) with Carol Jacklin and later studied how girls and boys grow up apart and together.
Contributions: The Psychology of Sex Differences; Patterns of Child-Rearing; The Two Sexes
- 1918–
? (link to this row)Brenda Milner
British-born Canadian neuropsychologist who studied memory in patient H.M
Neuropsychologist at McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute. Her studies of patient H.M., after removal of both medial temporal lobes, showed that memory depends on more than one brain system.
Contributions: Scoville and Milner (1957); Skill learning without conscious memory; Neuropsychology with epilepsy patients
- 1919–
1989 (link to this row)Leon Festinger
American social psychologist who proposed cognitive dissonance theory
Student of Kurt Lewin who proposed social comparison theory in 1954 and cognitive dissonance theory in 1957. His 1959 experiment with James Carlsmith on forced compliance is a standard textbook study.
Contributions: Social comparison theory; Cognitive dissonance theory; Forced compliance experiment
- 1919–
1982 (link to this row)Henri Tajfel
Polish-born British social psychologist, co-originator of social identity theory
Polish-born social psychologist who survived the Second World War as a prisoner of war and held the chair of social psychology at Bristol from 1967. His minimal group studies and social identity theory, developed with John Turner, shaped research on discrimination.
Contributions: Minimal group paradigm; Social identity theory; European social psychology
Born 1920 to 1949
- 1920–
2009 (link to this row)Takeo Doi
Japanese psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Japanese psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose book The Anatomy of Dependence (1971) used the concept of amae, a wish to be understood and taken care of, to describe Japanese social life.
Contributions: The concept of amae; Bridging Japanese and Western psychiatry; Later work on self and society
- 1920–
2012 (link to this row)George A. Miller
American psychologist of memory, language and cognition
American psychologist who worked at Harvard, MIT, Rockefeller and Princeton. His 1956 paper on the limits of absolute judgement and immediate memory described chunking, and he co-founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies with Jerome Bruner.
Contributions: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two; Plans and the Structure of Behavior; Institutions and WordNet
- 1921–
2021 (link to this row)Aaron Beck
American psychiatrist who developed cognitive therapy
American psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania who began as a supporter of psychoanalysis and developed cognitive therapy from his work with depressed patients. He also created the Beck Depression Inventory and co-founded the Beck Institute.
Contributions: Cognitive theory and therapy of depression; Beck Depression Inventory; Testing and training in cognitive therapy
- 1922–
2002 (link to this row)Richard Lazarus
American psychologist known for cognitive appraisal theory of stress and emotion
American psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who argued that stress and emotion depend on how people appraise events and their own resources. He developed the appraisal and coping framework with his former student Susan Folkman.
Contributions: Cognitive appraisal; Stress and coping; Daily hassles and defences
- 1922–
1997 (link to this row)Stanley Schachter
American social psychologist who studied affiliation, emotion and eating
Social psychologist who joined Kurt Lewin's group dynamics centre in 1946 and later became a Columbia professor. Known for the two-factor theory of emotion with Jerome Singer (1962), affiliation studies and work on obesity and external food cues.
Contributions: Two-factor theory of emotion; Affiliation research; Obesity and external cues
- 1922–
1982 (link to this row)Carolyn Wood Sherif
American social psychologist and pioneer of the psychology of women
Social psychologist who co-authored the Robbers Cave and social judgment work with Muzafer Sherif, then turned to gender, status and power. She helped create women's studies courses and led APA Division 35.
Contributions: Collaborative group and attitude research; Gender as social status; Building the psychology of women
- 1922–
1998 (link to this row)Durganand Sinha
Indian psychologist who built cross-cultural and social psychology in India
Indian psychologist trained at Patna University and Cambridge who founded the psychology department at the University of Allahabad and wrote Psychology in a Third World Country (1986). He held office in Indian and international psychology bodies.
Contributions: Building departments and societies; International cross-cultural bodies; Writing on psychology in a developing society
- 1923–
2004 (link to this row)Thomas Adeoye Lambo
Nigerian psychiatrist and pioneer of transcultural psychiatry
Nigerian psychiatrist who took charge of the new Aro hospital in Abeokuta in 1954 and combined modern treatment with traditional healing and community living. He later became Deputy Director General of the World Health Organization.
Contributions: Aro village system; Combining modern and traditional care; International health leadership
- 1925–
2021 (link to this row)Albert Bandura
Canadian-American psychologist of social learning and self-efficacy
Stanford psychologist who showed through the Bobo doll studies that children imitate observed aggression, developed social learning theory, and later focused on self-efficacy beliefs.
Contributions: Bobo doll studies; Social learning theory; Self-efficacy
- 1925–
1961 (link to this row)Frantz Fanon
Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker
Trained psychiatrist who analysed how racism and colonial rule shape the minds of the colonised. His books Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) are read in psychology, philosophy and postcolonial studies.
Contributions: Psychological analysis of anti-Black racism; Community-oriented psychiatry; Writing on colonial violence
- 1926–
1993 (link to this row)Donald Broadbent
British experimental psychologist of attention and applied cognition
British psychologist at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge and later Oxford. His 1958 book Perception and Communication proposed a filter model of selective attention that became a starting point for later attention research.
Contributions: Perception and Communication (1958); Filter model of attention; Applied Psychology Unit
- 1926–
2017 (link to this row)Marian Diamond
American neuroanatomist known for enriched-environment research
American anatomist at the University of California, Berkeley. With David Krech, Mark Rosenzweig and Edward Bennett she reported that enriched environments changed the rat cerebral cortex, and she later analysed preserved tissue from Albert Einstein's brain.
Contributions: Enriched environments and the cortex; Einstein's brain
- 1926–
2019 (link to this row)Harry Triandis
Greek-born American social and cross-cultural psychologist
Psychologist at the University of Illinois whose research made individualism and collectivism a main way to compare cultures. Colleagues called him the father of modern cross-cultural psychology.
Contributions: Individualism and collectivism; Subjective culture; Building the field
- 1927–
2018 (link to this row)Diana Baumrind
American developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley
American developmental psychologist at Berkeley's Institute of Human Development. She described authoritarian, permissive and authoritative parenting and wrote a 1964 critique of the ethics of Milgram's obedience study.
Contributions: Typology of parenting styles; Ethical critique of Milgram (1964); Family Socialization and Developmental Competence Project
- 1927–
1987 (link to this row)Lawrence Kohlberg
American developmental psychologist known for stages of moral reasoning
Developmental psychologist who proposed six stages of moral reasoning in three levels. He assessed them through dilemma interviews such as the Heinz dilemma and later worked on democratic school communities.
Contributions: Stages of moral development; Moral Judgment Interview; Just community schools
- 1927–
2023 (link to this row)Endel Tulving
Estonian-Canadian experimental psychologist of memory
Estonian-born Canadian psychologist at the University of Toronto. He distinguished episodic from semantic memory in 1972 and, with Donald Thomson, described the encoding specificity principle in 1973.
Contributions: Episodic and semantic memory; Encoding specificity; Autonoetic consciousness
- 1928–
? (link to this row)Noam Chomsky
American linguist
American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His generative grammar and his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior shaped how psychologists thought about language and learning.
Contributions: Generative grammar; Review of Verbal Behavior; Universal grammar
- 1928–
2020 (link to this row)Geert Hofstede
Dutch social scientist who compared national cultures using IBM survey data
Dutch mechanical engineer turned social scientist who analysed employee surveys from IBM subsidiaries in many countries and proposed dimensions of national culture. His 1980 book Culture's Consequences is widely cited and widely criticised.
Contributions: The IBM survey; Dimensions of national culture; Intercultural institutions
- 1928–
2012 (link to this row)Ulric Neisser
German-born American cognitive psychologist
German-born American psychologist whose 1967 book Cognitive Psychology helped launch the cognitive revolution. He later criticised laboratory-bound cognitive research and studied how memory reconstructs events, including memories of the Challenger explosion.
Contributions: Cognitive Psychology (1967); Cognition and Reality (1976); Challenger memory study
- 1929–
? (link to this row)Richard Atkinson
American psychologist and university leader
American psychologist who proposed the 1968 multi-store model of memory with his student Richard Shiffrin. He later directed the National Science Foundation, led UC San Diego and the University of California, and in 2001 recommended dropping the SAT requirement.
Contributions: The 1968 modal model of memory; Control processes and formal modelling; Science policy and the SAT
- 1929–
2012 (link to this row)David Rosenhan
American psychologist known for the 1973 pseudopatient study
American psychologist and Stanford professor of law and psychology. His 1973 Science paper On Being Sane in Insane Places reported that healthy volunteers were admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Later investigations have questioned the reliability of the study.
Contributions: The pseudopatient study; The follow-up with a warned hospital; Argument about labels
- 1930–
2018 (link to this row)Walter Mischel
Austrian-born American personality psychologist
Personality psychologist whose 1968 book Personality and Assessment questioned how consistent behaviour is across situations. He also ran the preschool delay-of-gratification studies known as the marshmallow tests.
Contributions: Personality and Assessment and the person-situation debate; Delay of gratification studies; Self-regulation work
- 1930–
2020 (link to this row)Robert L. Williams
American clinical psychologist and critic of intelligence testing
Clinical psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis who helped organise the Association of Black Psychologists. He developed the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity in 1972 to show cultural bias in standardised tests, and coined the term Ebonics.
Contributions: Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity; Ebonics; Institution building
- 1931–
2001 (link to this row)Martha Bernal
American clinical psychologist of Mexican descent
American clinical psychologist (1931 to 2001) who studied behavioural treatment of children with conduct problems and the development of ethnic identity in Mexican American children. She also worked on the training of ethnic minority psychologists.
Contributions: Behavioural treatment of children's behaviour problems; Ethnic identity in Mexican American children; Training of ethnic minority psychologists
- 1931–
2021 (link to this row)Nawal El Saadawi
Egyptian physician and feminist writer
Egyptian doctor and writer who qualified at Cairo University in 1955, researched women and neurosis at Ain Shams University, and wrote about women's bodies and violence against them. Women and Sex and Woman at Point Zero made her a prominent Arab feminist.
Contributions: Women and Sex; Research on women and neurosis; Organisation and imprisonment
- 1932–
2017 (link to this row)Joseph White
American clinical psychologist and a founder of Black psychology
Psychologist at the University of California, Irvine who helped found the Association of Black Psychologists in 1968 and wrote the 1970 Ebony article Toward a Black Psychology. He became known as the godfather of Black psychology.
Contributions: Toward a Black Psychology; Association of Black Psychologists; Books and programmes
- 1932–
2018 (link to this row)Kuo-Shu Yang
Taiwanese psychologist and leader of indigenous Chinese psychology
Psychologist at National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica who argued that psychology should be built from Chinese contexts. He led the indigenous psychology movement in Chinese societies and founded a research team and a journal for it.
Contributions: Indigenous psychology in Chinese societies; Theories of Chinese personality; Books and papers
- 1933–
1984 (link to this row)Stanley Milgram
American social psychologist known for the obedience experiments
Social psychologist who ran the Yale obedience experiments in 1961 and 1962 and published them in 1963. He also devised the small-world and lost-letter studies. His obedience work is central to debates on research ethics.
Contributions: Obedience experiments; Small-world experiment; Lost-letter technique
- 1933–
2024 (link to this row)Philip Zimbardo
American social psychologist who led the Stanford prison experiment
Stanford psychologist who ran the 1971 Stanford prison experiment and later wrote The Lucifer Effect. He also wrote on shyness and time perspective. The prison study has been heavily criticised for its methods and ethics.
Contributions: Stanford prison experiment; Shyness and time perspective; The Lucifer Effect
- 1934–
? (link to this row)Alan Baddeley
British psychologist of working memory
British psychologist who worked at Cambridge, Bristol and York. With Graham Hitch he proposed the multicomponent model of working memory in 1974 and later added a fourth component, the episodic buffer.
Contributions: Working memory model; Studies of amnesia; Word length effect
- 1934–
2021 (link to this row)Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Hungarian-born American psychologist known for the concept of flow
Psychologist born in Fiume who worked in the United States, best known for describing flow, a state of full immersion in an activity when skill matches challenge, and for helping to introduce positive psychology.
Contributions: Flow; Positive psychology; Quality of Life Research Center
- 1934–
2025 (link to this row)Paul Ekman
American psychologist known for research on facial expressions and basic emotions
American psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who with Wallace Friesen studied facial expressions across cultures and developed the Facial Action Coding System. He is associated with the idea of basic emotions.
Contributions: Cross-cultural facial expression studies; Facial Action Coding System; Microexpressions and deception
- 1934–
2024 (link to this row)Daniel Kahneman
Israeli-American psychologist of judgement and decision-making
Psychologist who worked at the Hebrew University, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton. With Amos Tversky he studied judgement under uncertainty and developed prospect theory. He shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Contributions: Heuristics and biases with Tversky; Prospect theory; Thinking, Fast and Slow
- 1935–
2018 (link to this row)Anne Treisman
British-born American cognitive psychologist of attention
British-born psychologist who worked at Oxford, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton. She proposed the attenuation model of attention and, with Garry Gelade, feature integration theory.
Contributions: Attenuation model (1964); Feature integration theory; Illusory conjunctions
- 1936–
? (link to this row)Carol Gilligan
American psychologist and ethicist known for the ethics of care
Harvard-trained psychologist who, in the 1982 book In a Different Voice, challenged Kohlberg's account of moral development and described an ethic of care alongside an ethic of justice.
Contributions: In a Different Voice; Challenge to Kohlberg; Studies of girls and adolescence
- 1937–
2003 (link to this row)Patricia Goldman-Rakic
American neuroscientist of the prefrontal cortex and working memory
American neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Yale. Her studies in nonhuman primates linked the prefrontal cortex to working memory and examined the role of dopamine in prefrontal function.
Contributions: Prefrontal cortex and working memory; Dopamine and prefrontal function; Methods across levels
- 1937–
? (link to this row)Bibb Latané
American social psychologist known for bystander research with John Darley
Social psychologist who, with John Darley, showed in staged emergencies that the presence of other bystanders can reduce helping. He also proposed social impact theory and later commented on the Kitty Genovese story.
Contributions: Bystander inhibition experiments; Social impact theory; Reading the Genovese case
- 1937–
1996 (link to this row)Amos Tversky
Israeli-American psychologist of judgement and decision-making
Psychologist who taught at Michigan, Harvard, the Hebrew University and Stanford. With Daniel Kahneman he studied cognitive illusions in judgement and developed prospect theory, a seminal work of behavioural economics.
Contributions: Heuristics and biases; Prospect theory
- 1938–
? (link to this row)Alice Eagly
American social psychologist of gender, attitudes and leadership
American social psychologist, emerita at Northwestern University. She developed social role theory to account for differences and similarities between women and men, and used meta-analysis to study gender, attitudes and leadership.
Contributions: Social role theory; Meta-analysis in the psychology of gender and attitudes; Women and leadership
- 1938–
? (link to this row)Susan Folkman
American psychologist of stress, coping and health
American psychologist who studied how people appraise and cope with stress. She co-wrote Stress, Appraisal and Coping with Richard Lazarus (1984) and later studied caregiving, bereavement and chronic illness.
Contributions: Problem-focused and emotion-focused coping; Stress, Appraisal and Coping (1984); Stress, coping and positive emotion in illness
- 1938–
? (link to this row)Eleanor Rosch
American cognitive psychologist of categorisation
American psychologist, now emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on categorisation, including prototype theory and basic-level categories, changed how psychologists describe the way people sort objects into everyday categories.
Contributions: Prototype theory; Basic-level categories; Later research directions
- 1939–
? (link to this row)Michael Gazzaniga
American neuroscientist and psychobiologist of split-brain research
American neuroscientist who trained under Roger Sperry at Caltech and studied split-brain patients. He proposed the left-hemisphere interpreter and, with George A. Miller, helped give cognitive neuroscience its name in 1978.
Contributions: Split-brain research with Sperry; The left-hemisphere interpreter; Cognitive neuroscience
- 1939–
2015 (link to this row)Naomi Weisstein
American vision psychologist and feminist activist
Vision researcher whose essay Psychology Constructs the Female criticised psychology for theorising about women without evidence. She also co-founded the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.
Contributions: Psychology Constructs the Female; Vision research; Feminist organising and music
- 1941–
? (link to this row)Richard Nisbett
American social psychologist who studied culture, cognition and attribution
Social psychologist at the University of Michigan whose work includes the actor-observer bias, a 1977 paper on limits of introspection, and The Geography of Thought (2003), which argues that East Asian and Western ways of thinking differ.
Contributions: Actor-observer bias; Telling more than we can know; Culture and ways of thinking
- 1942–
2025 (link to this row)Rubén Ardila
Colombian psychologist who promoted scientific psychology in Latin America
Colombian experimental psychologist who built psychology programmes, societies and journals in Latin America and helped spread the experimental analysis of behaviour. He founded the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología in 1969.
Contributions: Journals and societies; University programmes; Textbooks and behavioural synthesis
- 1942–
? (link to this row)Susan Carey
American cognitive and developmental psychologist of conceptual change
American psychologist at Harvard who studies how children's concepts change. She coined the term fast mapping with Elsa Bartlett, wrote Conceptual Change in Childhood and The Origin of Concepts, and worked on core cognition with Elizabeth Spelke.
Contributions: Fast mapping (1978); Conceptual change; Core cognition and bootstrapping
- 1942–
? (link to this row)Paul Costa
American personality psychologist associated with the National Institute on Aging
American personality researcher who, with Robert McCrae, developed the NEO Personality Inventory and helped establish the five-factor model of traits, and who studied adult personality stability and change at the National Institute on Aging.
Contributions: NEO inventory and NEO PI-R; The five-factor model as a shared project; Stability and change in adult personality
- 1942–
? (link to this row)Judith Herman
American psychiatrist known for research on trauma and recovery
American psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School whose book Trauma and Recovery (1992) distinguished single-incident trauma from complex, repeated trauma and set out a three-stage approach to treatment.
Contributions: Trauma and Recovery; Complex post-traumatic stress; Three stages of recovery
- 1942–
1989 (link to this row)Ignacio Martín-Baró
Spanish-born Jesuit social psychologist in El Salvador
Jesuit priest and social psychologist at the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador who argued that psychology should serve the poor and address the social conditions of Latin America. He was killed in 1989.
Contributions: Psychology of liberation; Influence on community and critical psychology; Public opinion research at the UCA
- 1942–
? (link to this row)Martin Seligman
American psychologist known for learned helplessness and positive psychology
American psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. With Steven Maier he reported learned helplessness in dogs in the 1960s, and after his 1998 election as president of the American Psychological Association he promoted positive psychology.
Contributions: Learned helplessness; Positive psychology; Revision of helplessness theory
- 1942–
? (link to this row)Richard Shiffrin
American cognitive scientist at Indiana University
American cognitive scientist who co-authored the 1968 multi-store model of memory with Richard Atkinson and later built formal models of recall and recognition, including SAM and REM, at Indiana University.
Contributions: The 1968 modal model with Atkinson; SAM, a search model of recall; REM, a model of recognition
- 1942–
? (link to this row)Derald Wing Sue
American counselling psychologist known for multicultural counselling and microaggression research
Professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He co-founded the Asian American Psychological Association and wrote Counseling the Culturally Diverse (1981) and, with co-authors, the 2007 American Psychologist paper on racial microaggressions.
Contributions: Multicultural counselling textbook; Taxonomy of racial microaggressions; Professional leadership
- 1943–
? (link to this row)Howard Gardner
American developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Harvard psychologist whose book Frames of Mind (1983) proposed multiple intelligences, arguing that abilities such as music, movement and understanding people are distinct intelligences. The theory is popular in schools and disputed in psychology.
Contributions: Frames of Mind and the theory of multiple intelligences; A list of eight intelligences; Project Zero and The Good Project
- 1943–
? (link to this row)Marsha Linehan
American psychologist who developed dialectical behaviour therapy
American clinical psychologist at the University of Washington who developed dialectical behaviour therapy, first for suicidal behaviour and later for borderline personality disorder and other disorders involving severe emotion dysregulation.
Contributions: Dialectical behaviour therapy; Treatment research with suicidal patients; Clinics and training materials
- 1943–
2017 (link to this row)Jaak Panksepp
Estonian-born American neuroscientist who coined the term affective neuroscience
Neuroscientist born in Tartu who worked at Bowling Green State University and Washington State University. He coined the term affective neuroscience and described seven emotional systems in mammals, partly from experiments on rats, including tickling.
Contributions: Affective neuroscience; Seven primary emotional systems; Rat play and laughter
- 1944–
? (link to this row)Na'im Akbar
American clinical psychologist and scholar of Black psychology
Clinical psychologist who developed an African-centred approach to psychology and taught at Morehouse College and Florida State University. His books include Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery and Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery.
Contributions: Black psychology teaching; Concepts of psychological slavery; Professional service
- 1944–
2014 (link to this row)Sandra Bem
American psychologist of gender, androgyny and gender schema theory
Cornell psychologist who created the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (1974), treated masculinity and femininity as separate dimensions, and proposed gender schema theory in 1981.
Contributions: Bem Sex-Role Inventory; Gender schema theory; The Lenses of Gender
- 1944–
? (link to this row)Antonio Damasio
Portuguese-American neurologist and neuroscientist known for the somatic marker hypothesis
Neurologist born in Lisbon who worked at the University of Iowa and then the University of Southern California. He proposed that bodily signals of emotion help guide decisions, in the somatic marker hypothesis.
Contributions: Somatic marker hypothesis; Descartes' Error; Lesion method with Hanna Damasio
- 1944–
? (link to this row)Elizabeth Loftus
American psychologist of memory and eyewitness testimony
American psychologist who worked at the University of Washington and then the University of California, Irvine. She is best known for the misinformation effect, research on false memories and work on eyewitness testimony.
Contributions: Loftus and Palmer car crash study (1974); Misinformation effect and false memory; Expert testimony
- 1946–
? (link to this row)Carol Dweck
American psychologist known for implicit theories and the growth mindset
Stanford psychologist who studied how beliefs about the malleability of ability shape motivation and achievement. She popularised the fixed versus growth mindset in her 2006 book Mindset.
Contributions: Learned helplessness and attributions; Implicit theories; Mindset
- 1946–
? (link to this row)Kay Redfield Jamison
American clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry known for research on mood disorders
American clinical psychologist with a UCLA doctorate who founded UCLA's Affective Disorders Clinic and later became a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Her scholarly work covers mood disorders, suicide and the link between mood disorders and creativity.
Contributions: Manic-Depressive Illness; Touched with Fire; Night Falls Fast
- 1946–
? (link to this row)Patricia Kuhl
American speech and hearing scientist of infant language learning
American scientist at the University of Washington who studies early language and brain development. She proposed the Native Language Magnet and Neural Commitment theory of how infants' speech perception becomes tuned to their own language.
Contributions: Native Language Magnet and Neural Commitment; Brain measures of early language learning; The Scientist in the Crib
- 1946–
? (link to this row)Christina Maslach
American social psychologist of job burnout
American social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, known for research on job burnout. With Susan Jackson she created the Maslach Burnout Inventory (1981). She also objected to the treatment of prisoners in the Stanford prison experiment in 1971.
Contributions: Maslach Burnout Inventory; From emotion research to burnout; Objection during the Stanford prison experiment
- 1946–
? (link to this row)Claude Steele
American social psychologist known for stereotype threat
Social psychologist who, with Joshua Aronson, reported in 1995 that the threat of confirming a negative stereotype can lower test performance, and who developed self-affirmation theory in the 1980s.
Contributions: Stereotype threat; Self-affirmation theory; Whistling Vivaldi
- 1946–
? (link to this row)Shelley Taylor
American social and health psychologist
UCLA psychologist who co-wrote Social Cognition with Susan Fiske, argued with Jonathon Brown that positive illusions can support mental health, and proposed the tend-and-befriend response to stress.
Contributions: Social cognition; Positive illusions; Tend-and-befriend
- 1947–
? (link to this row)Janet Helms
American counselling psychologist known for racial identity theory
Counselling psychologist, professor emerita at Boston College, known for racial identity theory, research on test fairness and the study of racism as trauma. She is associated with Boston College's Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture.
Contributions: Racial identity theory; Test fairness; Books for practice and public readers
- 1949–
? (link to this row)Joseph LeDoux
American neuroscientist known for research on the amygdala and threat responses
Neuroscientist, long based at New York University, who used Pavlovian fear conditioning in rodents to trace how the amygdala handles threat. He later argued that circuits for defence are separate from conscious feelings of fear.
Contributions: Amygdala and threat conditioning; The Emotional Brain; Survival circuits
- 1949–
? (link to this row)Hazel Rose Markus
British-born American social and cultural psychologist
Stanford social and cultural psychologist known for self-schemas (1977), possible selves (1986) and, with Shinobu Kitayama, the contrast between independent and interdependent self-construals (1991).
Contributions: Self-schemas and possible selves; Independent and interdependent self; Culture cycle and race
- 1949–
? (link to this row)Robert McCrae
American personality psychologist associated with the National Institute on Aging
American personality researcher who, with Paul Costa, developed the NEO Personality Inventory and helped establish the five-factor model, and who formulated five-factor theory and studied how traits vary across age and culture.
Contributions: NEO inventory and NEO PI-R; Five-factor theory; Age and cultural comparisons
- 1949–
? (link to this row)Elizabeth Spelke
American developmental psychologist of infant cognition
American developmental psychologist at Harvard. She proposed that infants rely on core knowledge systems for objects, number, space, action and social categories, and studied infant object perception with looking-time methods.
Contributions: Core knowledge systems; Infant object perception
- 1949–
? (link to this row)Robert Sternberg
American psychologist and professor of human development at Cornell
American psychologist known for the triarchic theory of intelligence, which adds creative and practical intelligence to analytical ability, and the triangular theory of love, which describes love as intimacy, passion and commitment.
Contributions: Triarchic theory of intelligence; Triangular theory of love; Assessments beyond IQ tests
Born 1950 onward
- 1950–
? (link to this row)Lillian Comas-Díaz
Puerto Rican and American clinical psychologist working on multicultural therapy
Clinical psychologist who developed ethnocultural and multicultural approaches to psychotherapy, with attention to women of colour and racial trauma. She helped create an APA division on ethnic minority issues and received the APA Gold Medal for Life Achievement in 2019.
Contributions: Ethnocultural and multicultural therapy; Women of colour in therapy; Building APA structures
- 1952–
? (link to this row)Susan Fiske
American social psychologist of stereotyping and social cognition
Princeton social psychologist known for the stereotype content model of warmth and competence, ambivalent sexism theory with Peter Glick, and the continuum model of impression formation.
Contributions: Stereotype content model; Ambivalent sexism theory; Social cognition and impression formation
- 1954–
? (link to this row)Renee Baillargeon
Canadian-American developmental psychologist of infant reasoning
Developmental psychologist, now emerita at the University of Illinois. Using violation-of-expectation experiments she argued that infants reason about physical events much earlier than Piaget's account of object permanence suggested.
Contributions: Violation-of-expectation experiments; Early physical reasoning; Four reasoning domains
- 1954–
? (link to this row)Beverly Daniel Tatum
American clinical psychologist, educator and college president
Clinical psychologist who applied racial identity development theory to schools and campuses. Her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (1997) brought the theory to a general audience. She was president of Spelman College from 2002 to 2015.
Contributions: Racial identity in education; Popular book on identity; Leadership in colleges
- 1955–
? (link to this row)Alison Gopnik
American developmental psychologist of children's learning
American developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for the theory theory, the proposal that children build causal models of the world much as scientists develop theories, and for applying Bayesian models to learning.
Contributions: Theory theory; Bayesian models of learning; Books for general readers
- 1956–
? (link to this row)Mahzarin Banaji
Indian-born American social psychologist of implicit social cognition
Social psychologist at Harvard who studies the gap between conscious attitudes and implicit associations. She developed the concept of implicit bias with Anthony Greenwald and uses the Implicit Association Test, introduced by Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz in 1998, in her laboratory.
Contributions: Implicit social cognition; Implicit Association Test; Public communication of implicit bias
- 1963–
? (link to this row)Lisa Feldman Barrett
Canadian-American psychologist known for the theory of constructed emotion
Psychologist at Northeastern University who argues that emotions are constructed by the brain from bodily signals, past experience and culture. She co-authored a 2019 review that questioned inferring emotion from facial movements.
Contributions: Theory of constructed emotion; Review of facial expression evidence; Affective science community
About this list
This site holds 180 selected profiles: 133 psychologists, 7 precursors and 40 people from allied disciplines such as neurology, psychiatry, linguistics and anthropology.60 are women and the people come from 8 world regions. The selection is not complete, and it leans toward Europe and North America because most of the research that introductory courses teach came from there.
Rows are ordered by birth year, which is why the sections read "Born 1860 to 1889" rather than by period of work. Years of active work appear inside each profile. Birth and death years are shown only where a source checked them. A question mark means that no death year has been established; the person may be living. A precursor is an earlier thinker whose ideas fed psychology before it existed as a discipline; an allied discipline marks someone who worked mainly in a neighbouring field.
Each profile lists inspected sources and distinguishes text passages, abstracts, biographies, reference articles and publication records. Some of the work described here, including research on intelligence, eugenics and experiments on people, is contested or harmful, and the profiles say so. Influence is not the same as being correct. The site is a history and learning resource, offers no medical advice and has no tracker. Your text size choice is stored only in your browser.
Course connections use OpenStax Psychology 2e. The selection was compared with relevant sections of Introductory Psychology 2e, Discovering Psychology (4th edition) and A Little History of Psychology. These readings connect course topics; they do not independently establish every historical claim.
Companion site: Psy101 Timeline, a chronology of studies, ideas and events.