Oliver Zangwill

Oliver Louis Zangwill FRS (29 October 1913 – 12 October 1987) was an influential British neuropsychologist. He was Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, 1952–81, and then Professor Emeritus. His father was author Israel Zangwill; his mother was author Edith Ayrton, whose parents were physicist William Edward Ayrton and physician Matilda Chaplin. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977.

Zangwill was educated at University College School, London, and then at the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of King's College. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1935 and his MA in 1939, having completed the Natural Sciences Tripos, Part I in 1934 (Class 2), and the Moral Sciences Tripos (which then combined philosophy and psychology)), Part II in 1935, being awarded 1st class honours with special distinction.

As Professor of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge, Zangwill occupied a position of enormous influence. This was partly because, in that era, the norm for UK academic departments was to have only a single faculty member with the title "Professor", who was also permanent head of department, and Experimental Psychology was the only branch of the discipline to have a university department at Cambridge. He was active both in the Experimental Psychology Society (of which he was a founder member and convenor of the founding meeting) and the British Psychological Society. It can be argued that his influence in the two societies helped prevent their sometimes conflicting perspectives from leading to an open rift. He was always ready to advise and support those setting up new psychology degrees as the discipline spread through UK universities in the 1950s and 1960s, and served many departments as an external examiner both of undergraduate programmes and of PhDcandidates. As a result he exerted considerable influence at a period when UK psychology was expanding rapidly.

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