Porter, Lyman W.: Seventh Recipient, SIOP Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award

Lyman W. Porter (“Port”) was a leader in the fields of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology and organizational behavior. Despite the fact that he spent his entire career at two California universities, he described himself as “a product of a middle-class, middle-west upbringing.” He was also the son of a university professor. Port graduated from Northwestern University and then pursued a PhD in experimental psychology at Yale. Toward the end of his studies at Yale, he became interested in applied psychology. Thus, he took a reading course during his final year as a PhD student and read every text in industrial psychology he could find. In the spring of 1956, Edwin Ghiselli, on the psychology department faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote ...