Famous Psychologist

Carol Gilligan

American Feminist, ethicist and psychologist. Famous from work with Lawrence Kohlberg on ethical relationships/ ethical community. Thinks mental processes of men vs women help develop moral development.

Abraham Maslow

American Psych professor. Famous for The Heirarchy of Needs and Humanistic Psychology. believe people were "good" by nature. Too positive in peers eyes

Roger Sperry

American Psychobiologist. Discovered brain is made of two parts and they serve different purposes.

Robert Sternberg

American Psychometrician. Now works as provost at Oklahoma State University. Had test anxiety while young. Developed intelligence test called Sternberg Test of mental Ability(STOMA). Created the triarchic theory of intelligence and Triangle theory of love.

Ken Wilber

American Writer and neoplatonic. Leader behind integral theory, founded Integral Institute in 1998. Famous for phenomenon called All Quadrants All Levels(AQAL). He described it as one suggested architecture of the kosmos. It is a model of manifest existence.

Mary Ainsworth

American child development psychologist. Known for work with emotional attachment of infants to their guardian. Used The strange situation experiment and attachment theory. Famous for proving that there are individual differences in attachment.

John Dewey

American psychologist, western philosopher, educational reformer. Laid foundation for functional psychology. Focused on epistemology in philosophy. Helped develop American school of thought called pragmatism(nature)

Leon Festinger

American social Psychologist. Pioneer of social comparison and cognitive dissonance theory. Set up advanced-level experimentation techniques in social psychology. Famous for theory on the proximity effect. Influenced by Kurt Lewin. Gave idea of propinquity(to do with interpersonal interaction)

George Alexander Kelly

American therapist, psychologist, educationist and personality theorist. leader in cognitive clinical psychology. Famous for theory called Personal Construct Theory.

Martin Seligman

American. Father of positive psychology, motivational speaker and leader of learned helplessness theory. Worked with Christopher Peterson.

William James

American. First educator in history to offer a course in psychology in the US. Advocate of pragmatism.

Paul ekman

American. First person to study human emotions and how it could be related to facial expressions.

Kay Redfield Jamison

American. Leader on bipolar disorder. Founded Mood Disorders Clinc at UCLA. Her own Bipolar disorder drove her to study it. Wrote books about her disorder.

Paul Watzlawick

Austrian American psychologist/philosopher. worked to develop theory of schizophrenia called double bind. Which describes when a person is trapped under mutually exclusive expectations. also gave Pragmatics of Human communication.

Konrad Lorenz

Austrian Zoologist. Nobel Prize winner. Father of Ethology. Quacked to his ducks and they started following him.

Otto Rank

Austrian writer, teacher and psychoanalyst. First psychoanalyst to view therapy as an experience of learning and unlearning. Leader in fields of existential psychotherapy, transpersonal psychology, gestalt psychology and humanistic psychology.

Viktor Frankl

Austrian. Founded Logotherapy and Existential Analysis. Survived the holocaust. Wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" after the holocaust.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian. Known mostly for field of neuropsychology. Coined "Oedipus Complex" and came up with three stages of immature sexual development. Worked a lot of dreams and unconciousness. Killed himself with morphine.

Melanie klein

Austrian. Legend in field of development psychology. Known for creating therapeutic techniques for children. Developed object relations theory. First to perform psychoanalysis on children.

Alice Miller

Author/Psychologist, Psychoanalysis Child abuse effects

Alfred Charles Kinsey

Biologist, Sexologist, Zoology Professor. Founded Sex research institute. First psychologist to create large scale inquiry system for human sex research

Max Werttheimer

Born in Prague. Founding members of Gestalt psychology. Born into a very educated family. His theory on Gestalt said that "wholes", determine how the individual parts act and not the other way around.

John Bowlby

British Psychologist, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist. Famous for work on child develoment and development of attachment theory. Believed behavior problems and mental issues were brought about from problems in childhood.

Julia Kristeva

Bulgarian. Member of Tel Quel political group. Famous for ideas about two components of signification in language: semiotic and symbolic.

B.F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederick Skinner- Behaviorist, psychologist, author, inventor, social philosopher. Helped develop Radical Behaviorism. Skinner Box

Steven Pinker

Canadian. Supported the computational theory of mind and evolutionary psychology. Famous for for work on theory of language acquisition. Thinks human mind is not complex.

Anna Freud

Co-founder of Psychoanalytic child psych with Melanie Klein. Sigmund Freud was her father and taught her.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Cognitive Neuroscientist. Famous for work with Autism. One theory says that Autism involves "mind blindness" and another says autism is an extreme form of the male brain. Proved Autism causes delay of the theory of mind in kids.

Aaron Beck

Cognitive Theory, addiction, depression and suicide treatment

Jacques Lacan

Controversial psycho-analyst. His ideas influenced many different fields like French philosophy, film theory, critical theory, and more.

Alfred Binet

Created Intelligence Quotient(IQ) Nice, france. Never studied for formal degree in psychology, only independent learning

Robert Hare

Created Psychopathy Checklist. Now works as Emertitus Professor of Psychology in the University of British Columbia. His checklist used to predict violent behavior and psychopathy.

Soren Kierkegaard

Danish. Father of Existentialism, made of 3 spheres(Human existence, knight of faith, and infinite qualitative distinction). Worked a lot with Christian Love.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Developed theory about the stages of moral development. The theory was inspired by Jean Piaget. theory based on the idea that humans are motivated to learn and broaden horizons through experiencing their world.

Phil McGraw

Dr. Phil! Was an inside linebacker.

Rollo May

Existential Psychologist. Rough Childhood. Established the fact the people develop through stages in life. Founded Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco.

Ernest Jones

Famous British psychoanalyst and neurologist. Biographer of Sigmund Freud. President of International Psychoanalytic Association

Fritz Perls

Famous German Psychotherapist and Psychiatrist. He worked heavily on Gestalt therapy- where the individual and the environment he interacts with usually is focused on.

Jerome Bruner

Famous for contributions in cognitive learning theory and human cognitive psychology. Ground breaking research in cognitive psychology. Taught in England for ten years. Found that sensation and perception are active processes rather than passive ones.

John Watson

Famous for popularizing behaviroism as an approach to psychology. Father left him in childhood. Studied with John Dewey. Interested in animal behavior. Wanted to make psychology more exact and science like.

nathaniel Branden

Famous for work in psychology of self-esteem. Worked with writer Ayn Rand with the concept of objectivism- saying that the existence of reality is independent of consciousness.

Harry harlow

Famous for work on social isolation, maternal separation and dependency needs. Experiments involved Rhesus monkeys. Worked with motherly love, care and affection in social/cognitive development in children.

Erich Fromm

Famous german social psychologist, humanistic philosopher, democratic socialist, sociologist, and psychoanalyst. Deep ties with Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

Rensis Likert

Famous in field of conflict management. Wrote six books about management. head of Division of Program Surveys in the US dept. of Agriculture

Carl Rogers

Founder of Humanistic Approach. Worked with Abraham Maslow in humanistic psych. Former president of American Psych Asso.

Henri Wallon

French psychologist, philosopher, teacher, neuro psychiatrist. Was a Marxist, worked in fields of child psychology and development. Theories influenced by Marxism. First to apply concept of dialectical materialism in psychology

Hans Eysenck

German famous for work in development of intelligence and personality theories. Eysenck personality Questionnaire

Karen Horney

German psychoanalyst. Faced opposition as an educated woman in her time. Tried to get with her brother. Famous for her theories on neurosis, the best even today.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

German, Leader in study of memory, discovering spacing effect and forgetting curve. Philosophy education interrupted because of Franco Prussian War.

Kurt Lewin

German-American Psychologist. Father of modern social psychology. Instead of choosing nature or nurture, he said they both worked to determine personality. Lewins equation for behavior: B = f(P,E). Worked to reduced racial/religious prejudices.

Hugo Munsterberg

German-American. Pioneer of applied psychology. Research in legal, medical, clinical, educational, industrial fields. Studied under Wilhelm Wundt. Also studied medicine later on. Invited by William James to be chair of psychology for 3 years at harvard

Wilhelm Wundt

German. Father of Experimental psychology. One of the founders of modern psychology. Founded first formal psychological laboratory in 1879.

Carl Gustav Jung

Helped develop analytic psychology. Made theories of intro/extroverted personality traits. Founded concepts like collective unconscious. Mysers-Briggs personality test based off his theories. Theories contrast Freuds

Margaret Mahler

Hungarian psychoanalyst. Inspired to study the symbiotic relationship between children and their parents when she saw a man bring in his son who would later die that night. Famous for Separation-Individuation Theory. Says infants go through 3 stages before recognizing separation from mother.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Hungarian. Currently works at Claremont graduate University. Given clifton Strengths Prize. Idea of happiness entitled "Flow: the psychology of optimal experience" Saying that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow.

G. Stanley hall

Inspired by Wilhelm Wundt. He got the first doctorate in Psychology in America! Thinks highschools should work more on the mental capacity of students rather than preparing for college.

William Glasser

Introduced the concepts of reality therapy and choice therapy. Warned against traditional psychiatry because it just wants to diagnose and prescribe drugs. Opened the Institute for Reality therapy in 1967

Virginia Satir

Known for works in Family Theory. Created Virginai Satir Change process Model- used to define the impact of change. Founded Mental Research Institute.

Charles Spearman

Leader in Factor analysis as a technique to reduce and interpret data. First psychologist to use mathematics to study the complex human mind. Developed General Intelligence(g factor)

Gordon Allport

Leader in personality psychology. believes every personality is unique and should be studied as it is in the present and not the past because personality is always changing.

Alhazen

Muslim Astronomer, Born in 965, Physicist, Scientist, mathematician, Wrote Book of optics

Solomon Asch

Polish. Helped create Gestalt Psychology and social psychology. Known for Asch conformity experiments. Showing the effects of social pressure on conformity.Left the world with Asch paradigms

Timothy Leary

Psychedelic Drug Advocate. Concord prison experiment and marsh Chapel experiment. Described as the most dangerous man in America by richard Nixon. Arrested on a regular basis. LSD

David Mcclelland

Psychological theorist who founded "Need Theory." Theory of Needs has 3 sub categories: need for achievement, need for authority/power, and the need for affiliation.

David Buss

Psychology Professor in Texas. Famous for his evolutionary research on mate selection with the basis on human sex differences. Mating strategies and relationships studied.

Stanley Milgram

Published Obedience to Authority. Studied Adolf Eichmann(nazi war criminal) to see why the nazis did what they did. Found that they were just following orders and often went against their own morals.

Albert Ellis

Rational Emotive behavior therapy(REBT). Lots of modern psychology theories. Worked in Clinical psych, psychotherapy, and philosophy.

Sabina Spielrein

Russian Physician. First Russian psychoanalyst. Known for work: "Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being" Strong ties with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud.

Lev Vygotsky

Russian Psychologist. Contributed to child development and cognitive psychology. Called Mozart of Psychology because he came up with many theories in a short amount of time. Died from tuberculosis at 38. Came up iwth Sociocultural theory- said social interaction was critical for cognition development.

Ivan Pavlov

Russian physiologist. Famous for work in classical conditioning, transmarginal inhibition and behavior modification. Father of modern russian physiology.

Urie Bronfenbrenner

Russian-American. Known for Ecological System Theory and co-founded the Head Start Programme.

Ronald David (R.D.) Laing

Scottish. Self-diagnosed his mother and fathers attitudes and personalities. Founded Philadelphia Association.

Elizabeth Loftus

Serious contributions to cognitive psychology and human memory. Worked on the misinformation effect and eye witness testimony.

Philip Zimbardo

Sicilian. Triple majored. famous for prison study in Stanford. Wrote The Time Paradox and The Lucifer Effect. IG nobel Award for Psychology for his report: Politicians' Uniquely simple Personalities in 2003.

Milton Erickson

Specialized in Family therapy and medical hypnosis. Founder of American society for clnical hypnosis. Had polio as a child and used self-hypnosis to heal himself.

Alfred Adler

Started individual psychology(saying humans are complex individuals and unique), medical doctor and psychotherapist. different personality ideas than Sigmund. Inferiority complex

Francis Galton

Successful psychologist, anthropologist, explorer, meteorologist, geographer, statistician. Fist to use statistical tools to study our behavior and humans level of intelligence in analyzing his theories.

jean Piaget

Swiss psychologist. Emphasized educating children. Worked with Alred Binet. Remembered for work in childrens cognitive development

Edgar Schein

Very famous in the field of organizational development and therefore a famous business theorist as well.

Herbert Simon

Was american politician, psychologist, economist, sociologist. over 1k published papers. Created terms of satisficing and bounded rationality. went to UC berkley

Edward Thorndike

Worked on Animal behavior, layed the foundation for modern educational psychology and proposed theory on connectionism. Theory on learned behavior.

Robert Cialdini

Wrote one of the most important publications on the subjects of psychology and persuasion- Influence: Science and Practice & Influence: Psychology of Persuasion. Godfather of Influence.

Albert Bandura

Youngest president of American Psych Association (82nd president). Amazing theory in self regulated learning.Theories in cognitive Theory, therapy to personality psych.

Daniel Kahneman

israeli-American psychologist famous for important work on decision making, behavioral economics, hedonic psychology.