Curated playlist
20th-century American psychologists
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Thorndike timed hungry cats escaping from puzzle boxes. It led to his law of effect.
- Leon FestingerPsychologist Leon Festinger joined a doomsday group to see what believers do when the prophecy fails.
- William JamesWilliam James argued we do not run from a bear because we are afraid. We are afraid because we run.
- Allen NewellAllen Newell helped build what is widely regarded as the first true AI program, the Logic Theorist.
- Ram Dass"I didn't have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics." That is how Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, described his early self to a writer for Tufts Magazine in 2006. He said he had been inured to religion. This is a striking thing to…
- Herbert A. SimonHerbert Simon argued that people don't pick the best option, they settle for good enough. He called it satisficing.
- Walter PittsWalter Pitts, a homeless teenager, helped create the first mathematical model of a neural network.
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman won the 2002 economics Nobel without ever taking an economics course.
- Timothy LearyTimothy Leary escaped prison in September 1970 by climbing a telephone wire over the wall.
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner proposed steering missiles with pigeons. The birds pecked at a screen showing the target.
- Rollo MayRollo May was named after a fictional boy in children's books. He disliked the name until he found a Norman conqueror.
- Ernest BeckerErnest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize two months after he died. He never knew he had won for The Denial of Death.
- Amos TverskyAmos Tversky ran toward a live explosive to save a frozen soldier. The shrapnel stayed in his body for life.
- Erich FrommErich Fromm argued that falling in love is not love at all. His 1956 book The Art of Loving became a bestseller.
- Wilhelm ReichIn 1956, a United States court ordered six tons of Wilhelm Reich's books and papers burned.
- Frank RosenblattA 1969 book led many to wrongly think Rosenblatt's learning machines were fatally limited.
- John DeweyJohn Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and over his lifetime he published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and roughly 40 books. In 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, he wrote a line that would organize all that…