BA Psychology

Home to one of the nation’s first psychology departments, UChicago is the birthplace of the study of behaviorism and the empirical investigation of sleep and dreams. Originally founded as the Laboratory of Psychology in 1893, the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago has been for a century a leading center of scholarship, research, and teaching in psychology and related fields. Among its distinguished faculty and students have been James Rowland Angell; John Dewey; George Herbert Mead; John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism; L. L. Thurstone, a pioneer in psychological measurement; and Roger Sperry, Nobel Prize winner for his work in cerebral lateralization. Today, faculty members investigate such topics as the behavior of nonhuman primates, auditory space perception, and gesture and speech in children.