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...
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...
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...
“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”...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
In 1934 Stanley Smith Stevens received his Ph.D. from the newly independent psychology department at Harvard, and two years later accepted a position as instructor in experimental psychology. Known professionally as “S. S. Stevens” and by his colleagues...
