George Armitage Miller

Lore & Background

Miller was born on February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia, to George E. Miller and Florence Armitage Miller. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother during the Great Depression, attending public school and graduating from Charleston High School in 1937. He studied at George Washington University for a year before transferring to the University of Alabama, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in history and speech in 1940 and a Master of Arts in speech in 1941. He later received a Master of Arts in psychology in 1944 and a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology in 1946 from Harvard University. At Harvard, he worked in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory under Stanley Smith Stevens, researching military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II. His doctoral thesis, 'The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals,' was classified top secret by the US Army.

After receiving his doctorate, Miller stayed at Harvard as a research fellow and was appointed an assistant professor of psychology in 1948. He took a sabbatical in 1950 to spend a year as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1951, he joined MIT as an associate professor of psychology, leading the psychology group at the MIT Lincoln Lab. In 1955, he moved back to Harvard as a tenured associate professor and became a full professor in 1958. At Harvard, he met Noam Chomsky, and they spent a summer together at Stanford. In 1960, along with Jerome S. Bruner, he co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. Miller later taught at Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1979, then moved to Princeton University as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, where he helped found the Cognitive Science Laboratory in 1986 and directed the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Science.

Reader's Guide

George Armitage Miller is considered one of the great twentieth-century psychologists for moving psychology into the realm of mental processes and aligning that move with information theory, computation theory, and linguistics. He began his career when behaviorism dominated psychology, which eschewed the study of mental processes and focused on observable behavior. Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical methods to analyze mental processes, focusing particularly on speech and language. His 1956 paper 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two' is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture, establishing an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. He invented the term 'chunk' to describe how individuals cope with this limitation by grouping elements. Miller also directed the development of WordNet, a large computer-readable electronic reference usable in applications such as search engines. He won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science. A 2002 survey ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era. His work, along with that of Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky, founded the field of cognitive psychology, which largely replaced behaviorism as the framework governing research in psychology.

Did You Know?

• Miller's doctoral thesis, 'The Optimal Design of Jamming Signals,' was classified top secret by the US Army.
• He co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard in 1960 with Jerome S. Bruner.
• Miller invented the term 'chunk' to describe how individuals group elements to cope with the limit of short-term memory.
• He directed the development of WordNet, a large computer-readable electronic reference usable in applications such as search engines.