Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize for work on digestion, then became immortal for something he noticed by accident along the way. Measuring salivation in dogs, he observed that they began to salivate before the food arrived — at the sound of the attendant’s footsteps. He had stumbled onto classical conditioning. The mechanism: pair…
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B.F. Skinner was the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century and the architect of radical behaviourism. Where Pavlov explained reflexive associations, Skinner explained voluntary behaviour: operant conditioning, in which actions are shaped by their consequences. His framework is the one every habit app is quietly built on. Positive reinforcement adds something desirable, negative reinforcement…
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Robert Gagné was an American educational psychologist whose work bridged behaviourism and the emerging cognitive science of the 1960s and 70s. He took the information-processing model of the mind seriously and asked an engineer’s question: if we know how learning works internally, how should instruction be designed? His answer starts with the insight that “learning”…
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The protégé effect is the finding that teaching something is one of the most powerful ways to learn it. Prepare to explain a concept to someone else and you understand it better than if you had studied it purely for your own benefit — even if you never actually deliver the lesson. The mechanism is…
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The Transtheoretical Model, developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente in the late 1970s, reframed behaviour change from an event into a process with identifiable stages. It came out of studying how smokers actually quit — most of them without any treatment — and it explains why well-meaning advice so often lands badly. The stages:…
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Henry Mintzberg is a management scholar at McGill who did something radical in the early 1970s: instead of asking executives what managers should do, he followed them around and recorded what they actually did. The finding was that the classic picture of the reflective planner was fiction. Real managerial work was fragmented, verbal, interruption-driven and…
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Howard Gardner, a Harvard developmental psychologist, proposed in 1983 that intelligence isn’t a single general capacity measured by IQ but a set of relatively independent faculties. His original list had seven, later expanded: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. The theory was enormously influential in education, and its appeal is obvious —…
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In 1971 Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced “hedonic relativism” — the idea that humans adapt to improvements in their circumstances and drift back toward a baseline level of happiness. The treadmill metaphor stuck: you run, the scenery changes, you end up roughly where you started. Their most cited supporting evidence came from later work…
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