Laslo Garai Hungarian scientist, theoretical psychologist. Date of Birth: 29.08.1938 Country: Hungary

Biography of Laszlo Garai

Laszlo Garai is a Hungarian scientist and psychological theorist. He is known for his research on social and economic psychology. He holds a PhD and is a professor and founder of the Department of Economic Psychology at the University of Szeged in Hungary and the University of Nice in France.

Garai received his diploma in psychology and philosophy from the Faculty of Humanities at the Roland Eötvös University in Budapest in 1959. He completed his candidate's dissertation on the specific human fundamental need and its dynamics in personality and social existence in 1968, and his doctoral dissertation on social identity and the paradoxes of its mental processing in 1988.

Garai is married to Margit Kecksi, who holds a candidate's degree in psychology and was a former postgraduate student of A.N. Leontiev. After teaching theoretical psychology at Moscow State University in 1969, social psychology at the University of Nice in France starting from 1981, and economic psychology at California State University in the United States in 1990, Garai returned to Hungary. He created the Department of Economic Psychology at the University of Szeged, where he served as head of the department from 1997 to 2000, as well as the Doctoral School of the Faculty of Economics from 1997 to 2005.

Garai began his career as an editor in the Encyclopedia Sector at the Hungarian Academy Publishing House from 1959 to 1961. After his postgraduate studies from 1961 to 1964, during which he conducted research on specific human needs, he became a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1964 to 1971, where he completed his first research. He was invited to the Institute for the History of Natural Science and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences as part of a Keldysh grant, where he conducted research in the Sector of Scientific Discoveries from 1969 to 1970.

In the Institute of Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1970, Garai created the Sector of Personality Psychology, which he headed until 1979. It became the first research center on economic psychology and the Center for Vygotskian theoretical research in Hungary. He worked at the European Laboratory of Social Psychology in Paris in 1971, 1973, and 1977. From 1991 to 1994, he was a member of the Advisory Council of the Minister of Finance. From 1994 to 2005, he directed the research on economic psychology funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund.