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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

William James

(1842-1910)
(1872-1907) at Harvard
Estabished 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

Department of Psychology

Historical Faculty