Leonard Berkowitz

Leonard Berkowitz (1926 to 2016) was an American social psychologist best known for his research on altruism and human aggression. He originated the cognitive neoassociation model of aggressive behavior, which was created to help explain instances of aggression that the frustration-aggression hypothesis could not account for. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1951 and served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1955 to 1989, with visiting appointments at Cambridge, Cornell, Oxford and Stanford, ending as Vilas Research Professor Emeritus. He wrote over 170 articles, books and textbooks, among them Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis (1962), A Survey of Social Psychology (1975) and Causes and Consequences of Feelings (2000), and he received the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology in 1988. A 2002 survey ranked him the 76th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century. He died in Madison, Wisconsin, aged 89.