Historical Faculty
The Harvard Department of Psychology (together with the Department of Social Relations, which was folded into it) was home to some of the most eminent psychologists in history, including the founder of the field in the United States, one of the first women in experimental psychology (she invented "paired associate learning"), a Nobel laureate, two icons of the 1960s counterculture, the originators of the terms "identity crisis," and "six degrees of separation," and one of the twentieth century's pioneers in neuroscience. These biographical sketches of historic Harvard were written by Rebecca Sutherland and Steven Pinker.
Historical Faculty
Gordon W. Allport
(1897-1967)
Personality Trait Theory
Research on Predjudice and Discrimination
Gordon Willard Allport spent nearly his entire academic career at Harvard, completing both his bachelor’s degree and his PhD at the university, and serving as a faculty member from 1930 – 1967. Allport pioneered research on human personality. At a time...
Edwin G. Boring
(1886-1968)
First Major Historian of Psychology
Visual Perception Research
Edwin Garrigues “Gary” Boring was an experimental psychologist and a historian of psychology. He joined the Harvard faculty as an associate professor in 1922, and by 1928 he was full professor. In 1956 he retired, as the Edgar Pierce Professor of...
Roger Brown
(1925-1997)
Pioneer of the Modern Science of Language
Solidarity in Language and Syntheses of Social Psychology
Roger W. Brown was Professor of Social Psychology at Harvard University from 1962 to 1994. Today Brown is acknowledged as the founder of developmental psycholinguistics and as a pioneer in the study of how children acquire language. Brown first came to...
Jerome Bruner
(1915-2016)
Perceptual Organization, Cognition, and Learning Theory
The Role of Narrative in Psychology and Law
“Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.” – from The Process of Education Jerome Bruner was a leader of the Cognitive Revolution (pdf) that ended the reign of behaviorism in...
Mary Whiton Calkins
(1863-1930)
Paired - Associate Learning Paradigm in Memory Research
First Woman President of the American Psychological Association
Mary Whiton Calkins was ready for an academic career before the patriarchal academic world of the late nineteenth century was ready for her. After earning an undergraduate degree in 1882 from Smith College in classics and philosophy, Calkins began to...
Raymond Cattell
(1905-1998)
Theory of Personality - 16 Base Traits
Culture - Fair Intelligence Tests
Raymond Cattell was an influential psychologist who developed new analytic techniques that allowed for more nuanced empirical measurements of the components of personality and intelligence. Cattell did his doctoral work at University College London, under...
Erik Erikson
(1902-1994)
Psychosocial Theory of Human Development
Psychobiography
Erik Erikson’s relationship with Harvard spanned decades, coinciding with some of his most influential works. Born in Frankfurt, and trained in psychoanalysis in Vienna by Anna Freud, Erikson came to Boston in 1933. He accepted an appointment as a...
Richard J Herrnstein
(1930-1994)
The "Matcing Law" of the Allocation of Behavior
Intelligence and Class Stucture in American Society
In 1955, Richard Herrnstein received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, having worked with both B.F. Skinner and S. S. Stevens. Two years later Herrnstein joined the Harvard faculty, and he undertook research on the relative frequency of two or more...
William James
(1842-1910)
(1872-1907) at Harvard
Established Harvard's Psychology Department
William James, philosopher and psychologist, was instrumental in establishing Harvard's psychology department, which at its inception was tied to the department of philosophy. James himself remained unconvinced that psychology was in fact a distinct...
Jerome Kagan
(1929-2021)
Jerome Kagan was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Herbert Kelman
hck@wjh.harvard.edu(1927-2022)
Social Influence and Attitude Change
Professor Kelman received his Ph.D. at Yale University, where he worked with Carl Hovland in the early days of the Yale attitude change project. He first came to Harvard in 1957 as Lecturer on Social Psychology in the Social Relations Department. In 1962...
Karl Lashley
(1890-1958)
The Representation and Processing in the Mammalian Cebral Cortex
Karl Lashley joined the Harvard faculty in 1935, and in the ensuing twenty years he expanded his research on the representation and localization of sensory and motor activity in mammalian brains. Concurrent with the latter half of his tenure at Harvard...
Timothy Leary
(1920-1996)
The Effects of Psychotropic Drugs
One of the stranger claims to fame of the Department of Psychology at Harvard is that it was once home to two of the leading figures in the 1960s counterculture and culture of psychedelic drugs. In 1960, two promising young psychologists at Harvard...
Eleanor Maccoby
(1917-2018)
Research in Child Development and Family Dynamics
FIrst Comprehensive Empirical Survey of Gender DIfferences
Although she spent the majority of her academic career as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, Eleanor Maccoby’s interest in child development began while she was a researcher and instructor at Harvard. In 1950 Maccoby...
David McClelland
(1917-1998)
Human Achievement and Motivation Research
An expert in human motivation, David McClelland joined the Harvard faculty in 1956, where he taught and conducted research for 30 years. He was the Chair of the Department of Social Relations from 1962-1967. McClelland’s research spanned more than five...
Stanley Milgram
(1933-1984)
Obedience to Authority
The Small World Experiment - "Six Degrees of Separation"
In 1954 Harvard’s Department of Social Relations took the unusual step of admitting a bright young student who had not taken a single psychology course. Fortunately Stanley Milgram was soon up to speed in social psychology, and in the course of his...
George Armitage Miller
(1920-2012)
Father of the Cognitive Revolution
Cognitive Psychology, Psycholinguistics, and Cognitive Neuroscience
“My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.” So began perhaps the most famous paper in the history of experimental psychology. The Harvard psychologist George Miller, inspired by information theory, aimed to measure the “channel capacity” of...
Hugo Münsterberg
(1863-1916)
Pioneer of Applied Psychology in Industrym Law, Medicine and Education
Hugo Münsterberg came to Harvard in 1892 with a doctorate in psychology, earned under the supervision of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig, and a medical degree from the University of Heidelberg. Having already established the second psychology...
Henry Murray
(1893-1988)
Personality Research
Henry A. Murray completed his undergraduate studies in history at Harvard in 1915. More than a decade later, with graduate degrees in medicine and biology from Columbia University, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, and an expansive...
Jim Sidanius
sidanius@wjh.harvard.edu(1945-2020)
John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in memory of William James and of African and African American Studies
Jim Sidanius was a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Stockholm, Sweden and taught at several universities in the United States and Europe...
