Directory of people
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1870–
1937 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.
1913–
1999 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.
1944–
present Na'im Akbar
American clinical psychologist and scholar of Black psychology
Clinical psychologist who developed an African-centered 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.
1897–
1967 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.
1908–
2001 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 favored tailoring tests to their culture.
1942–
2025 Rubén Ardila
Colombian psychologist who promoted scientific psychology in Latin America
Colombian experimental psychologist who built psychology programs, societies and journals in Latin America and helped spread the experimental analysis of behavior. He founded the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología in 1969.
384 BCE–
322 BCE 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.
1907–
1996 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-judgment experiments, begun in 1951, in which participants faced a unanimous but wrong majority.
1929–
present 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.
1934–
present 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.
1954–
present Renée 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.
1956–
present 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.
1925–
2021 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.
1963–
present 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.
1886–
1969 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.
1927–
2018 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.
1899–
1994 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.
1921–
2021 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.
1944–
2014 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.
1931–
2001 Martha Bernal
American clinical psychologist of Mexican descent
American clinical psychologist (1931 to 2001) who studied behavioral 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.
1857–
1911 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.
1907–
1990 John Bowlby
British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founder of attachment theory
British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who proposed that attachment is an evolved behavior protecting infants. His 1951 World Health Organization report and the Attachment and Loss volumes shaped thinking on child care and hospital practice.
1926–
1993 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.
1824–
1880 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.
1917–
2005 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.
1915–
2016 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.
1893–
1974 Charlotte Bühler
German-born developmental psychologist and humanistic psychologist
German-born psychologist who built a child psychology program in Vienna, studied development across the whole lifespan, and helped organize humanistic psychology in the United States after emigrating in 1940.
1863–
1930 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.
1871–
1945 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.
1942–
present 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.
1860–
1944 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.
1905–
1998 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 crystallized intelligence. His writings on eugenics and race, and a 1997 award he withdrew from, remain contested.
1825–
1893 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.
1928–
present 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.
1914–
2005 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.
1917–
1983 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.
1950–
present 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 color and racial trauma. She helped create an APA division on ethnic minority issues and received the APA Gold Medal for Life Achievement in 2019.
1942–
present 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.
1934–
2021 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.
1944–
present 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.
1809–
1882 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.
1596–
1650 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 behavior as mechanism. His dualism set a problem that psychology and neuroscience still discuss.
1926–
2017 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 analyzed preserved tissue from Albert Einstein's brain.
1802–
1887 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.
1920–
2009 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.
1946–
present 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 popularized the fixed versus growth mindset in her 2006 book Mindset.
1938–
present 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.
1850–
1909 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.
1934–
2025 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.
1931–
2021 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.
1913–
2007 Albert Ellis
American clinical psychologist who developed rational emotive behavior therapy
American clinical psychologist who developed rational therapy in the 1950s as an active alternative to psychoanalysis. It later became rational emotive behavior therapy, which holds that beliefs about events shape emotional distress. He founded the institute now called the Albert Ellis Institute.
1902–
1994 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.
1916–
1997 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.
1925–
1961 Frantz Fanon
Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker
Trained psychiatrist who analyzed how racism and colonial rule shape the minds of the colonized. His books Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) are read in psychology, philosophy and postcolonial studies.
1801–
1887 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.
1919–
1989 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.
1952–
present 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.
1938–
present 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.
1905–
1997 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.
1908–
1958 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.
1895–
1982 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.
1856–
1939 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.
1758–
1828 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 localization idea fed later neuroscience.
1822–
1911 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 criticized.
1943–
present 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.
1939–
present 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.
1910–
2002 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.
1904–
1979 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.
1878–
1972 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.
1936–
present 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.
1937–
2003 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.
1886–
1959 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.
1955–
present 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.
1844–
1924 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.
1905–
1981 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.
1821–
1894 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.
1947–
present Janet Helms
American counseling psychologist known for racial identity theory
Counseling 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.
1942–
present 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.
1928–
2020 Geert Hofstede
Dutch social scientist who compared national cultures using IBM survey data
Dutch mechanical engineer turned social scientist who analyzed 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 criticized.
1886–
1939 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.
1885–
1952 Karen Horney
German-born physician and psychoanalyst
German-born physician and psychoanalyst who criticized Freud's account of women, argued that neurosis arises from social and cultural conditions, and wrote The Neurotic Personality of Our Time in 1937.
1884–
1952 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.
c. 965–
c. 1040 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.
1907–
2001 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.
1842–
1910 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.
1946–
present 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.
1859–
1947 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.
1896–
1987 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.
1875–
1961 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.
1934–
2024 Daniel Kahneman
Israeli-American psychologist of judgment and decision-making
Psychologist who worked at the Hebrew University, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton. With Amos Tversky he studied judgment under uncertainty and developed prospect theory. He shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
1882–
1960 Melanie Klein
Austrian-British psychoanalyst and pioneer of play therapy
Austrian-born psychoanalyst without formal university training who developed play technique for analyzing children and helped found object relations theory. She worked in London from 1926.
1886–
1941 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.
1927–
1987 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.
1887–
1967 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.
1856–
1926 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.
1946–
present 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.
1847–
1930 Christine Ladd-Franklin
American logician and psychologist known for a theory of color 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 color vision in London in 1892.
1923–
2004 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.
1890–
1958 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.
1937–
present 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.
1922–
2002 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.
1949–
present 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 defense are separate from conscious feelings of fear.
1890–
1947 Kurt Lewin
German-born psychologist who founded research on group dynamics
German-born psychologist who linked behavior 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.
1943–
present Marsha Linehan
American psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy
American clinical psychologist at the University of Washington who developed dialectical behavior therapy, first for suicidal behavior and later for borderline personality disorder and other disorders involving severe emotion dysregulation.
1632–
1704 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.
1944–
present 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.
1902–
1977 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.
1917–
2018 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.
1949–
present 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).
1942–
1989 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.
1946–
present 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.
1908–
1970 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 criticized.
1880–
1949 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 criticized.
1949–
present 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.
1901–
1978 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.
1933–
1984 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.
1920–
2012 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 judgment and immediate memory described chunking, and he co-founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies with Jerome Bruner.
1918–
present 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.
1930–
2018 Walter Mischel
Austrian-born American personality psychologist
Personality psychologist whose 1968 book Personality and Assessment questioned how consistent behavior is across situations. He also ran the preschool delay-of-gratification studies known as the marshmallow tests.
1870–
1952 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-centered learning with specially designed materials.
1863–
1916 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).
1893–
1988 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.
1928–
2012 Ulric Neisser
German-born American cognitive psychologist
German-born American psychologist whose 1967 book Cognitive Psychology helped launch the cognitive revolution. He later criticized laboratory-bound cognitive research and studied how memory reconstructs events, including memories of the Challenger explosion.
1941–
present 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.
1943–
2017 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.
1849–
1936 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.
1896–
1980 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.
c. 1895–
1934 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.
1852–
1934 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.
1898–
1935 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.
1902–
1987 Carl Rogers
American psychologist and founder of client-centered therapy
American psychologist who developed client-centered therapy and promoted unconditional positive regard. His books include Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942), Client-Centered Therapy (1951) and On Becoming a Person (1961).
1938–
present Eleanor Rosch
American cognitive psychologist of categorization
American psychologist, now emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on categorization, including prototype theory and basic-level categories, changed how psychologists describe the way people sort objects into everyday categories.
1929–
2012 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.
1916–
2014 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.
1922–
1997 Stanley Schachter
American social psychologist who studied affiliation, emotion and eating
Social psychologist who joined Kurt Lewin's group dynamics center 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.
1869–
1955 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.
1942–
present 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.
1907–
1982 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 popularized the modern use of the word stress. He also received funding from the tobacco industry.
1922–
1982 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.
c. 1906–
1988 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.
1942–
present 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.
1916–
2001 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.
1922–
1998 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.
1904–
1990 B. F. Skinner
American psychologist who developed radical behaviorism and the study of operant conditioning
American psychologist at Harvard who studied how consequences shape behavior using the operant chamber and cumulative recorder, and who argued for applying behavioral methods to education and society.
1863–
1945 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 pioneered factor analysis.
1949–
present 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.
1913–
1994 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.
1885–
1942 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.
1946–
present 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.
1949–
present 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.
1942–
present Derald Wing Sue
American counseling psychologist known for multicultural counseling 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 Different (1981; later editions titled Counseling the Culturally Diverse) and, with co-authors, the 2007 American Psychologist paper on racial microaggressions.
1895–
1954 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.
1919–
1982 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.
1954–
present 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.
1946–
present 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.
1877–
1956 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.
1874–
1949 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.
1887–
1955 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 co-founded the Psychometric Society in 1935 and its journal Psychometrika (first issue 1936).
1867–
1927 Edward Titchener
English-born psychologist, leader of structuralism at Cornell
English-born Cornell psychologist who advanced structural psychology, an approach that analyzed mind into elements such as sensations and affections, and who excluded women from his Experimentalists group.
1886–
1959 Edward Tolman
American psychologist who argued for purposive behaviorism and cognitive maps
American psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied maze learning in rats and argued that behavior is goal-directed and guided by internal representations he called cognitive maps.
1935–
2018 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.
1926–
2019 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.
1927–
2023 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.
1867–
1923 Charles Henry Turner
American zoologist who studied insect behavior 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.
1937–
1996 Amos Tversky
Israeli-American psychologist of judgment and decision-making
Psychologist who taught at Michigan, Harvard, the Hebrew University and Stanford. With Daniel Kahneman he studied cognitive illusions in judgment and developed prospect theory, a seminal work of behavioral economics.
1896–
1934 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.
1871–
1939 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.
1878–
1958 John B. Watson
American psychologist and early advocate of behaviorism
American psychologist who set out the behaviorist program 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.
1896–
1981 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.
1939–
2015 Naomi Weisstein
American vision psychologist and feminist activist
Vision researcher whose essay Psychology Constructs the Female criticized psychology for theorizing about women without evidence. She also co-founded the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.
1848–
1905 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.
1880–
1943 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 organization in 1923. With Koffka and Köhler he is counted as a founder of Gestalt psychology.
1932–
2017 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.
1930–
2020 Robert L. Williams
American clinical psychologist and critic of intelligence testing
Clinical psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis who helped organize the Association of Black Psychologists. He developed the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity in 1972 to show cultural bias in standardized tests, and coined the term Ebonics.
1867–
1956 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.
1874–
1947 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.
1832–
1920 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.
1932–
2018 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.
1900–
1988 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.
1933–
2024 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 criticized for its methods and ethics.