Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American cognitive scientist best-known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. He is also known for his work in behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences together with Vernon L. Smith. Kahneman's published empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. Kahneman became known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics."
Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist. He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University.
Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics. His work follows a common theme of Gestalt psychology that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters the parts. Asch stated: "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function". Asch is most well known for his conformity experiments, in which he demonstrated the influence of group pressure on opinions. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Asch as the 41st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Lee David Ross was a Canadian-American professor. He held the title of the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and was an influential social psychologist who studied attributional biases, shortcomings in judgment and decision making, and barriers to conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper. Ross was known for his identification and explication of the fundamental attribution error and for the demonstration and analysis of other phenomena and shortcomings that have become standard topics in textbooks and in some cases, even popular media. His interests included ongoing societal problems, in particular protracted inter-group conflicts, the individual and collective rationalization of evil, and the psychological processes that make it difficult to confront societal challenges. Ross went beyond the laboratory to involve himself in conflict resolution and public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and other areas of the world.
Béla Julesz was a Hungarian-born American visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual and auditory perception.
Roger Newland Shepard was an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" (1987). He was considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be comprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.
Stanley Schachter was an American social psychologist best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal and the explanation one attaches to this arousal. Schachter also studied and published many works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Schachter as the seventh most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Alvin Meyer Liberman was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception.
Michael A. Hogg is a British psychologist, and Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles. He is also an honorary Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent in the UK.
Alan M. Leslie is a Scottish psychologist and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive science at Rutgers University, where he directs the Cognitive Development Laboratory (CDL) and is co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RUCCS) along with Ernest Lepore.
Dr. Yueh-Ting Lee is a social and evolutionary psychologist, currently working as a professor at Southern Illinois University.
Takahiko Masuda is a cultural psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. Masuda received his B.A. from Hokkaido University in 1993, M.A from Kyoto university in 1996 under the supervision of Shinobu Kitayama, and later received his Ph.D from the University of Michigan where his adviser was Richard E. Nisbett. In perhaps his most popular study, Masuda displayed a series of images with characters of varied emotional expression. There was a distinct measurable difference in the way North Americans and Japanese perceived the emotion of the central figure of the image, such that for North Americans the perception of the emotion of the central figure was not affected by whether or not the figures in the background showed a congruent emotion. Whereas the Japanese participants were markedly influenced in their judgement of the central figures emotional state depending on the emotional states of the surrounding figure.
Irvin Rock (1922–1995) was an American experimental psychologist who studied visual perception at the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote a book, titled The Logic of Perception, and was regarded as an excellent perception psychologist. Rock is notable in the field of psychology for his 1957 experiment where he tilted a square to make it look like a diamond and then tilted his test subjects and asked them what shape they saw. The experiment tested Rock's hypothesis that perceptual phenomena could be explained by higher-level mental processes instead of merely by automatic processes. When his test subjects continued to perceive the shape as a diamond after being tilted to view the shape as a square, Rock concluded that perception is an intelligent, higher-level mental process. This differed from previous conclusions by Gestalt psychologists that perception was not a higher-level process. Rock later wrote another important book on the field of inattentional blindness.
Academic bias is the bias or perceived bias of scholars allowing their beliefs to shape their research and the scientific community. It can refer to several types of scholastic prejudice, e.g., logocentrism, phonocentrism, ethnocentrism or the belief that some sciences and disciplines rank higher than others.
Ronald F. Levant is a psychologist, a professor, and a former president of the American Psychological Association (APA). After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, Levant completed a Doctor of Education (EdD) at Harvard University. He also holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Boston University.
Emily E. Balcetis is an American social psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. Her research focuses on people's perception of world and how their motivations, goals, and emotions influence it, especially with regards to visual perception.
Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-American social psychologist. He helped develop social judgment theory and realistic conflict theory.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff," which studied depth perception in both human and animal species, leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the National Academy of Education in 1972, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
