Michael Lamport Commons (b. 1939) is a theoretical behavioral scientist and a complex systems scientist. He developed the model of hierarchical complexity.
Michael Lamport Commons was born in 1939 in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood. Commons holds two B.A.s from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), one in mathematics, the other in psychology. He earned his M.A., and M.Phil. and in 1973 received his Ph.D., in psychology from Columbia University. Currently, he is Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School), and Director of the Dare Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His research interest is the quantitative analysis of psychological reality as it develops across the life span. With Francis Asbury Richards, Edward Trudeau, and Alexander Pekker, he developed the model of hierarchical complexity, a mathematical psychology model.
He is one of the cofounders of Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior, the Society for Research in Adult Development, the European Society for Research in Adult Development, the Society for Terrorism Research, and the Developmental Behavior Analysis Special Interest Group in the Association for Behavior Analysis International.