He was educated at
Culford School and
University College London where he won the Rosa Morison Medal in 1964 and a
James Sully Scholarship between 1964 and 1966. He achieved a BA there in 1964 and a PhD in 1967. He was elected to a Fellowship in 1994. His entry in
Who's Who (2007 edition) records the following career history: • Ten years of miscellaneous jobs, as surveyor, musician, hospital porter (alternative to National Service), librarian, before going to university. • Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, in Psychology,
UCL, 1966–73 • Visiting Member,
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, 1971–72 • Reader, 1973, Professor, 1978, in Experimental Psychology,
University of Sussex • Visiting Fellow,
Stanford University, 1980 • Assistant Director,
MRC Applied Psychology Unit,
University of Cambridge, 1983–89 • Fellow,
Darwin College, Cambridge, 1984–89 • Visiting Professorships:
Stanford University, 1985; Princeton Univ., 1986. He joined the department of psychology at Princeton University in 1989, where he became the Stuart Professor of Psychology in 1994. Johnson-Laird is a member of the
American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the
Royal Society, a Fellow of the
British Academy, a William James Fellow of the
Association for Psychological Science, and a Fellow of the
Cognitive Science Society. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from: Göteborg, 1983; Padua, 1997; Madrid, 2000; Dublin, 2000; Ghent, 2002; Palermo, 2005. He won the
Spearman Medal in 1974, the
British Psychological Society President's Award in 1985, and the International Prize from
Fyssen Foundation in 2002. Along with several other scholars, Johnson-Laird delivered the 2001
Gifford Lectures in
Natural Theology at the
University of Glasgow, published as
The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding (ed. Anthony Sanford, T & T Clark, 2003). He has been a member of the United States
National Academy of Sciences since 2007. ==Selected publications==