American Philosophical Society
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1Name:  Dr. Howard Gardner
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1943
   
 
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A developmental psychologist by training, he has conducted research and written books in several areas, including developmental psychology, neuropsychology, cognitive science, arts education, structuralism, leadership, intelligence, ethics, creativity, and precollegiate education. Dr. Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists a single general intelligence that can be adequately assessed by psychometric instruments. Part of the original team of researchers at Project Zero when it was established by Nelson Goodman in 1967, Gardner went on to become co-director, then senior director. His research with Project Zero includes The Good Project (formerly the GoodWork Project), which promotes "excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society," and Higher Education in the 20th Century, a large-scale national study of college today. Recently, he and colleagues on The Good Project have been studying the fate of professions during a time of rapid change and enormous market pressures. The recipient of 31 honorary degrees, Dr. Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He is the author of 30 books, notably Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983); the most recent of which are Extraordinary minds: Portraits of exceptional individuals and an examination of our extraordinariness (1997), The disciplined mind: What all students should understand (1999), Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st Century (1999), Changing minds: The art and science of changing our own and other people’s minds (2004), and The App Generation (2013). Among his many awards are the Grawemeyer Award in Education, University of Louisville (1990), Presidential Citation, American Educational Research Association (1996), Presidential Citation, American Psychological Association (1998), George Ledlie Prize, President and Fellows of Harvard College (2000), Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic, Pio Manzù (2001), Prince of Asturias Prize in Social Science (2011), Brock International Prize in Education (2015), and the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award, the premier honor from the American Educational Research Association (2020).
 
2Name:  Dr. Philip N. Johnson-Laird
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1936
   
 
Philip N. Johnson-Laird was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1936. He left school at the age of 15 and spent ten years in a variety of occupations until he went to University College, London to read psychology. He later gained his Ph.D. there under the supervision of Peter Wason, and he joined the faculty in 1966. In 1971, he was a visiting member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, where he began a collaboration with George A. Miller. Subsequently, he held positions at the University of Sussex (1973-1981) and at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit (1981-1989) in Cambridge, where he was also a Fellow of Darwin College. He returned to Princeton in 1989 to be a member of the faculty at the University, where he is the Stuart Professor of Psychology. He has published 12 books and nearly 300 scientific articles. He has received the Spearman medal and the President's award of the British Psychology Society as well as six honorary degrees. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy. He is married to Maureen Johnson-Laird (née Sullivan) and has two grown-up children. In his spare time, if he had any, he would compose music and play modern jazz piano. Research: Dr. Johnson-Laird's study of the psychology of reasoning began in a collaboration with Peter Wason. They discovered that people make systematic and predictable errors in reasoning, and that they are affected by the content of inferences (see their joint publications 1969-1973, his study with Paolo and Maria Sonino Legrenzi, and the book, Psychology of Reasoning, 1972). Effects of content are embarrassment to the thesis that there is a mental logic consisting of formal rules of inference. During the 1970s, his research also concerned psycholinguistics, and the representation of meaning and discourse (see, e.g., Miller and Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception, 1976). Later, he proposed that individuals reason, not from the logical form of assertions, but from their representation of discourse in the form of mental models. Each mental model represents a different possibility. The fundamental principle of human rationality is accordingly that an inference is valid if it has no counterexamples, i.e., models of possibilities in which the premises are true but the conclusion false. His experiments corroborated the prediction that the greater the number of models of possibilities, the longer inferences take and the more likely reasoners are to make errors. He also began the development of a series of computer programs implementing the model theory. This research led to the publication of his book, Mental Models, in 1983, which integrated the theory of discourse representation and the theory of human reasoning. One gap in the theory concerned reasoning based on sentential connectives, such as "if" and "or". In research at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, Ruth Byrne and Johnson-Laird showed how to extend the theory to such inferences, implemented it in a computer program, and carried out a series of experiments corroborating the theory (see their book, Deduction, published in 1991). The computer program also solved a well-known problem in logic: the search for a maximally parsimonious circuit equivalent to a given circuit made up from Boolean units. In simple cases, naïve reasoners tend to draw the corresponding conclusions from premises containing sentential connectives. Since his move to Princeton, Dr. Johnson-Laird and his colleagues have extended the model theory to a number of novel domains, including temporal reasoning, causal reasoning, modal reasoning about what is possible and what is necessary, deontic reasoning about what is permissible and obligatory, and reasoning based on diagrams. This research has been carried out with many colleagues in different countries: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the USA. He has also developed a theory of emotions with his colleague Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto. This theory postulates that emotions serve a quasi-rational function, enabling social mammals including primates to make adaptive responses to their social environment without the need for complex cognition. Johnson-Laird's main recent discovery is of a psychological principle that severely constrains human rationality: individuals normally represent what is true, but do not represent what is false (the principle of truth). In this way, they try to overcome the bottleneck of working memory, which has a limited processing capacity. To represent only what is true appears to be sensible, but, as a computer program revealed, inferences exist where the principle leads reasoners astray. His series of recent studies have shown that highly intelligent adults readily succumb to these so-called "illusory" inferences (see, e.g., the publication in Science, 2000, with his colleagues, Vittorio Girotto, and Paolo and Maria Legrenzi). Although the illusory problem are sparse in the set of all possible inferences, the illusions take many forms. One compelling instance arises from premises of the following sort: If my hand contains a king then it contains an ace, or else if it doesn't contain a king then it contains an ace. My hand does contain a king. What follows? The obvious conclusion is that my hand contains an ace. But the inference is fallacious, because the force of "or else" is that one of the conditionals at the very least may be false. In his most recent research, Johnson-Laird is examining the regions of the brain underlying deductive reasoning using functional magnetic resonance imaging. He and his colleagues have shown that deduction activates right hemisphere, and that a search for counterexamples appears to depend on the right frontal pole. A separate series of brain -imaging studies has corroborated his behavioral findings that materials that evoke visual imagery impede reasoning (see his study in Memory & Language, 2002, with Markus Knauff).
 
3Name:  Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus
 Institution:  University of California, Irvine
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1944
   
 
For more than three decades, Elizabeth Loftus has been delving into the mysteries of human memory. Her fascination with memory began shortly after completing her undergraduate education at UCLA (where she majored in mathematics and psychology) when she was half way through her graduate education at Stanford, where she received a Ph.D. in psychology. That education helped to transform her from a puzzled, uncertain adolescent into a psychological scientist. Today, Elizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She holds positions in the Departments of Psychology & Social Behavior, and Criminology, Law & Society. She also holds appointments in the Department of Cognitive Sciences and the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Formerly, she was Professor of Psychology and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she taught for 29 years. Dr. Loftus's early studies were about semantic memory -- memory for language, concepts and general knowledge of the world. Soon she wanted to study some aspect of memory that had more obvious real-world applications. With a background in memory and a keen interest in legal issues, it was natural to turn to the study of witnesses to legally relevant events, like crimes and accidents. Her earliest studies of eyewitness testimony addressed several issues: When someone sees a crime or accident, how accurate is their memory? What happens when witnesses are questioned by police officers, and what if those questions are biased? Her early findings revealed that leading questions could contaminate or distort a witness's memory. Dr. Loftus began to apply these findings to issues in the justice system, where eyewitness testimony is often crucial evidence. Over the last several decades, she has published extensively on eyewitness memory, covering both its psychological and legal aspects. She has also investigated the issue of the accuracy of memories formed in childhood, and the possibility of recovery later in life of memories of traumatic events that had apparently been repressed. She has devoted much research effort to the possibility that recovered memories may be false, false memories that in some cases are due to therapeutic treatments designed to help patients dredge up memory. She has done scores of studies that show that memories can be distorted by suggestive influences, but also that entirely false memories can be planted in people's minds. She has succeeded in planting false memories of getting lost for an extended time as a child, facing a threat to one's life as a child, witnessing demonic possession as a child, seeing wounded animals as part of a traumatic bombing, and more. Because of the research, Dr. Loftus has been invited to consult or to testify in hundreds of cases, including the McMartin PreSchool Molestation case, the Hillside Strangler, the Abscam cases, the trial of Oliver North, the trial of the officers accused in the Rodney King beating, the Menendez brothers, the Michael Jackson case, the Bosnian War trials in the Hague, the Oklahoma bombing case, and the Martha Stewart case. Dr. Loftus also worked on numerous cases involving allegations of "repressed memories", such as the case involving Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. The research also has given her opportunities to consult with many government agencies on problems of human memory, including the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. Loftus has received eight honorary doctorates for her research, the first in 1982 from Miami University (Ohio), and the most recent from Australian National University in 2020. She was the 1998-99 President of the Association of Psychological Science and also served twice as President of the Western Psychological Association. For her research, Dr. Loftus has received numerous awards. She received the two top scientific awards from the Association of Psychological Science: The James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award in 1997 ("for a career of significant intellectual contributions to the science of psychology in the area of applied psychological research") and, in 2001, the William James Fellow Award (for "ingeniously and rigorously designed research studies that yielded clear objective evidence on difficult and controversial questions"). In 2003, the same year that she received the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Applications of Psychology, she was also elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. In 2004 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2005, she won the Grawemeyer Prize in Psychology (for Outstanding Ideas in the Science of Psychology), which came with a $200,000 monetary prize. That same year she was elected Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (which is Scotland's National Academy of Science & Letters, Est 1783 - some 40 years after the establishment of the American Philosophical Society). Also that year, she was honored by her own university (UC- Irvine) with the Lauds & Laurels, Faculty Achievement Award, (for "great professional prominence in their field" in research, teaching and public service; 9th recipient in UCI history). Loftus received the Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 2010, the UC Irvine Medal in 2012, the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013, and the Cornell University Lifetime Achievement in Human Development, Law & Psychology Award in 2015. Perhaps one of the most unusual signs of recognition of the impact of Dr. Loftus's research came in a study published by the Review of General Psychology which identified the top 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Well known names top the list: Freud, Skinner, and Piaget. Elizabeth Loftus was number 58, and the top ranked woman on the list.
 
Election Year
2006[X]