Curated playlist
20th-century American psychologists
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Lee Thorndike built one of the most influential theories in the history of psychology by watching cats try to escape from wooden boxes. Born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts in 1874, Thorndike would spend nearly his entire career at…
- Leon FestingerLeon Festinger spent months living a lie among people who believed the world would end on the 21st of December 1954. A suburban housewife named Dorothy Martin had told them she was receiving messages from beings called the Guardians, on a…
- William JamesWilliam James was born at the Astor House in New York City on the 11th of January 1842, and by the time he died in Chocorua, New Hampshire on the 26th of August 1910, he had left a mark on American intellectual life that no single label…
- Allen NewellAllen Newell was born on the 19th of March 1927, and by the time he died on the 19th of July 1992, he had helped build the intellectual foundations of an entirely new science. What that science would eventually become is something most…
- Herbert A. SimonHerbert Alexander Simon was born on the 15th of June 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of an electrical engineer who had crossed the Atlantic from Germany and a mother who was an accomplished pianist. He died on the 9th of February…
- Walter PittsWalter Pitts was born in Detroit, Michigan, on the 23rd of April 1923, and he died at age 46, leaving behind a body of work that still defines how scientists think about the brain as a computing device. He never earned a doctorate. He…
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman was born on the 5th of March, 1934, in Tel Aviv, while it was still the British Mandate of Palestine. He would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 despite never having taken a single economics…
- Timothy LearyTimothy Francis Leary was arrested 36 times between the 1960s and 1970s, a record that tells you something about how seriously the American establishment took him. President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America".…
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner died on the 18th of August 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just ten days after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association and delivering what amounted to a final lecture on his life's…
- Rollo MayRollo Reece May was born in Ada, Ohio, on the 21st of April, 1909, and he spent the next eight and a half decades asking questions that most people spend their lives avoiding: What is anxiety, really? What does love require of us? And why…
- Ernest BeckerErnest Becker died on the 6th of March 1974, at age 49, in Burnaby, British Columbia. Two months later, the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded him their highest honor in nonfiction for The Denial of Death. He never knew he had won. Becker…
- Amos TverskyAmos Nathan Tversky was born on the 16th of March 1937 in Haifa, British Palestine, and by the time he died in 1996, he had helped overturn one of the most confident assumptions in modern economics: that human beings, when making…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- Wilhelm ReichWilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of November 1957 in a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Between those two dates he published…
- Frank RosenblattFrank Rosenblatt died on the 11th of July, 1971 - his 43rd birthday - in a boating accident on Chesapeake Bay. It was the same date he was born, in 1928, in New Rochelle, New York. That strange symmetry frames a life that was itself full…