| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Gordon H. Bower | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | June 17, 2020 | | | | | | |
After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1959, Gordon H. Bower was associated with Stanford University as an assistant, associate and full professor of psychology, chair of the psychology department and associate dean of humanities and science. He had been Albert Ray Long Professor of Psychology since 1975. Dr. Bower's career centered on memory, its nature and manipulation. He began with animal learning but soon moved to mathematical modeling and human experiments, where he successfully championed all-or-none learning models. Next came studies of the key role of linguistic chunking in creating and storing memories, which led into a series of foci including the nature of associative memory, the role of memory structures both in facilitating and distorting memory, the impact of emotional states on memories, and most recently on the narrative organization of memory. His contributions have been most significant and influential, in part through many first-rate students. Dr. Bower was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1975. He recently received the nation's highest honor in science: the 2005 National Medal of Science. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Susan E. Carey | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Susan Carey is Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research illuminates the development and nature of human knowledge and charts the intuitive theories that organize children's and adults' concepts of numbers, living things and the material world. Concepts are the basic units of thought. Dr. Carey has shown how children's concepts gain meaning and functional use from theories they construct about the world, starting from a few innate notions. She initiated modern experimental studies of children's understanding of numbers and counting, of physical causation, and of biology with its associated concepts of person, animal, and living thing, arguing for parallels between infants' developing concepts of number and causality and similar changes over mankind's intellectual history. She has also made seminal contributions to areas such as language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative primate cognition, and science education. Her research sheds light on children's thought and language and shows how educators can enhance the teaching of science and mathematics. Dr. Carey has been a Fulbright Fellow and William James Fellow and has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2001) and the National Academy of Sciences (2002). | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Noam Chomsky | | | Institution: | University of Arizona | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | | | | |
Noam Chomsky is currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics, Agnese Nelms Haury Chair at the University of Arizona, having moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 2017. He has created a theory of generative grammar that unites formal analysis of natural language with the search for explanatory models in linguistics, and has adapted that theory to the description of individual languages. Dr. Chomsky holds that grammar represents the speaker's tacit knowledge of the language and so must be part of the mind/brain structure. He has argued that children learning a first language do not receive sufficient information to account for the knowledge they come to have; hence some knowledge of language must be genetically determined as part of a species-universal faculty of mind he calls Universal Grammar. For over 50 years Dr. Chomsky served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he has held the title of Institute Professor since 1976. When he left, he held the title of Institute Professor Emeritus and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus and had just won the 2016 Peace Abbey Foundation Courage of Conscience Award. He is the author of numerous works, including Syntactic Structures (1957); Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964); Language and Mind (1968); Linguistic Theory (1975); Knowledge of Language (1986); The Minimalist Program (1995); and On Nature and Language (2002). Dr. Chomsky is also well known for his political activism, from his 1967 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" to more recent explorations of media control, terrorism, anarchism and democracy. His 2003 book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance received considerable attention following a recommendation from Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez during his 2006 speech at the United Nations. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Dr. Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar, and the eighth most cited scholar overall. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1965 | | | | | | |
Jennifer Eberhardt is Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy, William R. Kimball Professor at the Graduate School of Business, Professor of Psychology and by courtesy, of Law, and Co-Director of SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions) at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993.
Jennifer Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide-ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Dr. Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice. For example, her work on looking “deathworthy” shows that Black defendants with more stereotypically Black faces are more than twice as likely to be on death row as other Black defendants, controlling for facial attractiveness and relevant features of the crime.
She is the author of Biased: Uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do (2020). Jennifer Eberhardt was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2023. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Susan T. Fiske | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Susan T. Fiske was Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University, becoming Emerita in 2023. (Ph.D., Harvard University; honorary doctorates, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands; Universität Basel, Switzerland). She investigates social cognition, especially cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, and neuro-scientific levels. Author of over 300 publications and winner of numerous scientific awards, she has most recently been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her just-published book is The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies (with Chris Malone, 2013). Sponsored by a Guggenheim, her 2011 Russell-Sage-Foundation book is Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us. With Shelley Taylor, she has written four editions of a classic text: Social Cognition (2013, 4/e). Currently an editor of Annual Review of Psychology, PNAS, and Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, she is also President of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Her graduate students arranged for her to win the University’s Mentoring Award. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. In 2017 she was awarded the Wilhelm Wundt - William James Award. | |
| 6 | Name: | 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). | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Douglas Hofstadter | | | Institution: | Indiana University | | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Douglas Hofstadter is currently a professor of cognitive science and computer science and of comparative literature at Indiana University, having previously been the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. His first book, Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), spans fields from philosophy of mind to mathematical logic, molecular biology and artificial intelligence. The book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the American Book Award for the same year and was the inspiration for the field of cognitive science. His collected Scientific American columns appeared in Metamagical Themas (1985), and his work Ambigrammi (1987) contains original art and an essay on creativity. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1994) summarizes two decades of research and articles on human analogy-making and creativity, with simulations of pattern perception and generation in alphabets, music and numbers, such as Copycat, Metacat, Magnificat, Jumbo, Tabletop, Letter Spirit, Seqsee and PHAEACO. Le Ton beau de Marot (1997) is a wide-ranging study of creative literary translation, stressing equal roles for form and content, and I Am a Strange Loop (2007) covers the nature of the self and human consciousness and won the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. John R. Anderson | | | Institution: | Carnegie Mellon University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
As winner of his field's highest honors, member of most honorary societies, recipient of numerous research grants, and publisher of hundreds of important articles and influential books, John Anderson has made numerous critically important contributions to cognitive psychology. These include: production of large scale architectures of human cognition that predict behavior from sensory input and perception to cognition, decision making and motor behavior; initiation of the field's movement to encompass adaptation to the demands of the environment, in large part through Bayesian modeling; the bringing of scientific models to practical applications in education, with highly successful computer based algebra and programming tutors; experimental demonstrations using functional magnetic resonance imaging that his system architecture is implemented in the brain in neural systems; and the linkage of formal behavioral models with neural architectures. His impact is hinted at by an enormous yearly citation count but goes well beyond this measure. Dr. Anderson is one of the pre-eminent cognitive scientists/psychologists in the world today. Since 2002 he has been Richard King Mellon Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has taught since 1978. He has also served on the Yale University faculty and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Most recent among his numerous awards is the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute. | |
| 9 | Name: | 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). | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Daniel Kahneman | | | Institution: | School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | | | | |
Daniel Kahneman's initial research on perception and attention shifted to decision making, his Nobel prize work, with A. Tversky. It has continued with others since Tversky's death. Ingenious experiments and novel concepts have focused on how the decision outcome is sharply affected by their framing and by the roles of heuristics, such as availability, and biases. They have cast severe doubt on the standard rationality assumption of economics. Prospect theory, a continuing well-spring for research, captured some of the discoveries theoretically. Important applications are to economic theory, finance, law, and medicine. Born in Israel in 1934, Dr. Kahneman holds a Ph.D. from the University of California (1961). He has taught at the Hebrew University (1961-78), the University of British Columbia (1978-86), the University of California, Berkeley (1986-94) and Princeton University, where he has been Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School since 1993. In 2007 he received the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology and in 2011 he was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Talcott Parsons Prize. His most recent book is Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). He was awarded the 2013 Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. | |
| 11 | Name: | 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. | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. James L. McClelland | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
James L. (Jay) McClelland received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. He served on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, where he became a University Professor and held the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Chair in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He was a founding co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. In 2006 he moved to Stanford University, where he is now Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Chair of the Department of Psychology, and the founding director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Computation. Over his career, McClelland has contributed to both the experimental and theoretical literatures in a number of areas, most notably in the application of connectionist/ parallel distributed processing/ neural network models to problems in perception, cognitive development, language learning, and the neurobiology of memory. Together with David E. Rumelhart he led the group that produced, in 1986, the two volume book Parallel Distributed Processing, laying out a neurally inspired framework for cognitive modeling and applying it to a wide range of topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. McClelland and Rumelhart jointly received the 1993 Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the 1996 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2001 Garwemeyer Prize in Psychology, and the 2002 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award for their pioneering work in this area. In 2014, he shared the NAS Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences with Elizabeth Shilin Spelke. McClelland has served as senior editor of Cognitive Science, as president of the Cognitive Science Society, and as a member of the National Advisory Mental Health Council. He is currently president-elect of the Federation of the Psychological, Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has received the APS William James Fellow Award for lifetime contributions to the basic science of psychology. McClelland currently teaches cognitive neuroscience and conducts research on learning, memory, conceptual development, spoken language, decision making, and semantic cognition. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Elissa L. Newport | | | Institution: | Georgetown University | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Elissa Newport became the Director of the new Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, and Professor of Neurology, at Georgetown University in July 2012. She had been the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and of Psychology at the University of Rochester since 1995. She began teaching at the University of California, San Diego, in 1974. She moved to the University of Illinois in 1979, then joined the University of Rochester faculty as Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and of Psychology in 1988. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010.
Elissa Newport has defined the modern approach to language learning with creative empirical research, insightful theory and computational analysis and modeling. She has led the way in identifying the critical importance of statistical learning (learning by combining individually ambiguous evidence across separate events) and has shown how within and cross-modality statistical learning can produce language learning in infants, children, deaf individuals and adults. Her research has also explored the stages of language learning and shown the importance of sensitive periods. Her influential "less is more" computational model assigns the advantage of younger over older learners to age related differences in data acquisition and categorization. Her best known research has demonstrated how infants (and adults) can use statistical information to segment speech units from continuous sound streams and combine these into words and phrases. She was awarded the Association of Psychological Science's William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research in 2013. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Jennifer Richeson | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1972 | | | | | | |
Jennifer A. Richeson is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Perception and Communication Laboratory at Yale University. For over 20 years, she has conducted research on the social psychology of cultural diversity. Specifically, she examines processes of mind and brain that influence the ways in which people experience diversity, with a primary focus on the dynamics that create, sustain, and sometimes challenge societal inequality. Much of her recent research considers the political consequences of the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the United States. Richeson also investigates how people reason about and respond to different forms of inequality and the implications of such processes for detecting and confronting injustice. Professor Richeson’s empirical and theoretical work has been published in numerous scholarly journals and has been featured in popular publications such as the Economist and the New York Times. She has been recognized with many honors and awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for her work "highlighting and analyzing major challenges facing all races in America and in the continuing role played by prejudice and stereotyping in our lives." Professor Richeson is also the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association (APA), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Nalini Ambady award for excellence in mentoring from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the SAGE–CASBS award.
Professor Richeson is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019 she received an honorary doctorate from Brown University for work that “expands the boundaries of knowledge on interracial interaction and the living contexts of diversity.” Richeson was born and raised in Baltimore, MD. She earned a Bachelor of Science in psychology
from Brown University, and a MA and PhD in social psychology from Harvard University. Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2016, Richeson held faculty appointments at Northwestern University and Dartmouth College. Through her teaching, writing, and research, Professor Richeson aims to discover promising interventions that will enable us to foster and maintain culturally diverse environments that are cohesive, equitable, and just.
Selected Recent Publications
Richeson, J.A. 2020 (September). The mythology of racial progress. The Atlantic Magazine
Onyeador, I.N., Daumeyer, N.M., Rucker, J.M., Duker, A., Kraus, M.W., & Richeson, J.A. 2020.
Disrupting beliefs in racial progress: Reminders of persistent racism alter perceptions of past,
but not current, racial economic equality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
McDermott, M., Knowles, E.D., & Richeson, J.A. 2019. Class perceptions and attitudes towards
immigration and race among working-class Whites. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
Daumeyer, N.M., Onyeador, I.N., Brown, X., & Richeson, J.A. 2019. Consequences of attributing
discrimination to implicit vs. explicit bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Kraus, M.W., Onyeador, I.N., Daumeyer, N.M., Rucker, J.M., & Richeson, J.A. 2019. The
misperception of racial economic inequality. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Craig, M.A., Rucker, J.M., & Richeson, J.A. 2018. Racial and political dynamics of an approaching
“majority-minority” United States. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 677(1): 204-214.
Destin, M., Rheinschmidt-Same, M., & J.A. Richeson. 2017. Status-based identity: A conceptual
approach integrating the social psychological study of socioeconomic status and identity.
Perspectives in Psychological Science, 12(2): 270-89.
McCall, L., Burk, D., Laperrière, M., & Richeson, J.A. 2017. Exposure to rising inequality shapes
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| 15 | Name: | Dr. Roger Newland Shepard | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | May 30, 2022 | | | | | | |
Roger Shepard received his Ph.D. from Yale University. Currently the Ray Lyman Wilber Professor of Social Science Emeritus at Stanford University, Dr. Shepard has also served as professor of psychology and director of the psychological laboratories at Harvard University and as a department head at Bell Telephone Laboratories. He is the recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Fund Award, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, the Wilbur Lucius Cross medal of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association, the Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science, and the National Medal of Science. He has also received honorary degrees from Harvard, Rutgers, and the University of Arizona. Dr. Shepard is the author of over 100 scientific papers and three books, including: (with L.A. Cooper) Mental Images and Their Transformations (1982) and Mind Sights (1990, with translations published in German, 1991, French, 1992, Japanese, 1993, and Korean, 1994). He has served as president of the Psychometric Society. Roger Shepard's influential experimental and theoretical contributions to the cognitive and behavioral sciences include his development of widely used methods of multidimensional scaling and clustering for the discovery and quantification of structures implied by qualitative data; his objective demonstration and quantification of the analog nature of imagined spatial transformations and mental imagery; his establishment of a universal law of generalization; and his demonstrations of the role of cognitive structures in visual perception, illusion, and art and in auditory perception, illusion, and music. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999. | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Richard M. Shiffrin | | | Institution: | Indiana University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Richard M. Shiffrin received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1968. Subsequently he joined the faculty at the University of Indiana as assistant professor, associate professor and professor. He became Luther Dana Waterman Research Professor in 1980 and director of the university's Cognitive Science Program in 1988. Dr. Shiffrin has played a major role in three research developments, each of which have placed him among the top rank of investigators in cognitive psychology. The first was the development of the first comprehensive computer model of short-term memory (with R.C. Atkinson). The model incorporated a critical distinction between memory structures versus control (mental strategies) processes, proposed an architecture for short-term memory, and provided mathematical derivations fit to extensive sets of experimental data. It set the theoretical framework and style for the major research in the psychology of memory up to the present. Dr. Shiffrin's second major contribution was a novel and incisive experimental method for distinguishing voluntary from involuntary attention. The method showed how automatic attention could be developed as a result of specific learning experiences, and it enabled the quantitative characterization of these two modes of attention. Dr. Shiffrin has also worked to develop and refine a network model for associative memory that integrates hitherto fragmented bodies of research on recognition and recall processes in memory into a single, coherent, computational theory. His masterful combination of mathematical modeling with experimental analyses has been a model for other investigators in all these fields. He continually evolves and refines the theory, more recently using a Bayesian framework for memory decision processes, and applying the theory to data from many studies of priming and implicit memory. His collected works must be considered one of the major contributions to modern theories of memory. A Guggenheim Fellow (1975-76) and recipient of the Merit Research Award from the National Institutes of Mental Health (1991-2001), Dr. Shiffrin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. In 2018 he was awarded the Atkinson Prize. | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. Claude M. Steele | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Claude Steele is currently Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1971 and taught at the University of Utah, the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, before arriving at Stanford. As a member of the faculty at Stanford University from 1991 to 2009, he held appointments as the Lucie Stern Professor of the Social Sciences, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He left Stanford to serve as Provost at Columbia University from 2009-11, where he also taught psychology. Upon returning to Stanford, he assumed the role of I. James Quillen Dean of the School of Education, which he left in 2014 to move to Berkeley. From 2014-2017, he served as the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Berkeley, and was also a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate School of Education.
Claude Steele is distinguished for his discovery and exploration of a psychological phenomenon known as "stereotype threat". He found that people's mere act of identifying their membership within a stereotyped group degrades their performance in related tests, e.g. members of a minority such as African Americans, aware of a societal stereotype regarding their poor academic performance, score less well when the test conditions prime them to think about their membership in the minority than when they do not. Women likewise do not perform as well on mathematical ability tests when the test conditions make their gender salient. Facing a challenge, the mere threat of conforming to a negative stereotype impairs performance. Steele and colleagues have shown that this dramatic and socially significant effect is quite robust, even if test takers are unaware of its influence. His book Whistling Vivaldi, and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (2010) addresses these themes. Additionally, Steele has made major contributions to the understanding of addictive behaviors and the way people cope with threats to their self-image. Claude Steele is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. Shelley Taylor | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Shelley Taylor's research on positive illusions has clarified the socioemotional resources that the human mind uses to foster psychological adjustment in spite of adversity. Her research has also investigated social support and relationships coping mechanisms. An important finding of Taylor's work is that people generally have unrealistically positive but adaptive views of themselves, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about the future. Shelley Taylor is one of the founders of the fields of health psychology and social cognition. She has written many influential theoretical papers, as well as rigorous empirical ones, published in the top journals. In 2010 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Psychological Association. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. Anne M. Treisman | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | Death Date: | February 9, 2018 | | | | | | |
Is attention involved in forming ordinary percepts of objects from the mosaic of color patches at the retina? Anne Treisman's thesis has been that attention is needed to bind together the component features of an object during early stages of visual processing. Without attention she showed they may be miscombined and mislocalized. Behavioral experiments and her fMRI studies provide strong supporting evidence. Another aspect concerns apparent motion: the illusory perception of continuous motion arising from temporally related but somewhat discontinuous visual events. Again, she showed that attention proves essential to that binding that is necessary to predict time paths of moving objects. Dr. Treisman was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Princeton University since 1995. She became emeritus in 2010. She also taught at Oxford University (1967-78), the University of British Columbia (1978-1986) and the University of California, Berkeley (1986-94). She received a D.Phil. From Oxford (1962) and was a member of the Psychonomic Society (governing board, 1985-89, chair 1988-89); the Royal Society (1989); the National Academy of Sciences (1994); and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995). She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2012. Anne Treisman died February 9, 2018, at the age of 82. | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal | | | Institution: | Yerkes Primate Research Center; Emory University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
At a time when animal behavior was classified as either instinctive or acquired through trial-and-error learning, Frans de Waal produced convincing evidence that chimpanzees jockey for status with cunning and strategic foresight. His observations of "chimpanzee politics" were documented with such care for detail, both qualitative and quantitative, that they greatly stimulated the cognitive study and interpretation of animal behavior. At the same time, Dr. de Waal reported how chimpanzees resolve conflicts, assist one another reciprocally and console distressed individuals. His research on peacemaking, tit-for-tat, and empathy has inspired a new approach to the study of animal behavior. To date, it has produced over 125 scientific publications on conflict resolution in animals and children and is in the process of replacing the traditional evolutionary view of "everyone for itself" with a postulate of shared interests among social animals and a consequent need for compromise and reconciliation. In his work, Dr. de Waal has skillfully translated novel ideas into testable hypotheses, leading to elegant studies in peer-reviewed journals, including Science and Nature. He has significantly raised methodological standards for the study of animal social behavior and is internationally recognized for his depiction of primates as complex social beings as well as his empirically supported opposition to the view that the natural world is necessarily ruled by selfishness. Dr. de Waal has directed the Living Links, Yerkes Primate Research Center since 1997 and has been Research Professor of Psychobiology at Emory University since 1991 and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior since 1996. Winner of the 1989 Los Angeles Times Book Award, he is the author of works such as Peacemaking Among Primates (1989); Good Natured (1996); Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (1997); Chimpanzee Politics (1998); The Ape and the Sushi Master (2001); The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009); The Bonobo and the Atheist (2013); Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016); and Mama's Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions (2019). | |
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