William J. Ryan, Jr. (September 20, 1923 – June 7, 2002) was a psychologist, civil rights activist and author.

[2] He joined the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, in which he served as a non-combatant, as a cryptographer in the Caribbean, ‘doing coding and decoding’.

[3] On leaving the army, at the age of twenty-five, he was able to enter college (possibly Boston University) because of the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, which paid full tuition for veterans in the educational institutions of their choice.

She was a graduate of Northeastern University, a psychiatric social worker in the local state mental health system and, like him, a civil rights activist.

[9] However, in 1996, he concluded that 'unfortunately psychology has become the science of understanding internal individual differences, which leads to kinds of ideological distortions that support inequality.