LIAM HUDSON was a psychologist, educator and celebrated explorer of ideas. An original thinker always alertly attuned to contemporary culture, he was admired for his intellectual style and the felicity with which he expressed his ideas in his many books and articles.

He was born in Sutton, South London, in 1933. His father was a commercial traveller and sales lecturer; his mother an artist. After Whitgift School, he read modern history, philosophy and psychology at Exeter College, Oxford.

From 1957 to 1965 he was attached to the Psychological Laboratory, Cambridge, where he took his PhD. His marriage as an undergraduate to Wendy Ward in 1955 was dissolved and he married Bernadine Jacot in 1965. He was elected a Fellow of King’s College in 1966.

His astonishing first book, Contrary Imaginations (1966), reflected the thinking of the times — C. P. Snow had published his influential analysis of the two opposed “cultures” of science and art in 1959. Hudson, on the basis of the Getzels-Jackson test (one question: How many uses can you think of for a brick?) given to 95 schoolboys, differentiated two intellectual types: convergers and divergers. Convergers, specialising in mathematics and physical sciences, thought literally, prosaically and predictably; divergers, geared to the arts, were capable of surprising cognitive leaps.

These ideas were taken further in two more influential books, Frames of Mind (1968) and The Cult of the Fact (1972). Hudson aimed to refute the claim that scientific findings were value-free; he insisted that no matter how “objective” the research, the investigator’s presuppositions were always in operation.

In 1968 Hudson moved to be the Bell Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. In this role he was probably more esteemed for his writing, his illuminating conversation and his energetic promotion of the educational sciences than for his dedication to professorial chores.

From 1974 to 1975 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and in 1977 he was appointed a professorship of psychology at Brunel University. In the latter part of his time at Brunel, where he remained until 1987, he set up links with the Tavistock and Portman Clinics, where he then served as visiting professor from 1987 to 1996.

Hudson arranged research seminars with Peter Hildebrand. He encouraged others to be creative, helping to transform their ideas into useful and realistic research proposals. With the consultant psychotherapist Robert Hale and Lis Paice, he examined the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of junior hospital doctors in their working life. The London Postgraduate Deanery took notice: the Mednet services for doctors in need of psychological support were instituted and funded.

He explored his abiding interest in the differing ways that women and men think in a novel, The Nympholepts (1978), which concerns the “inside stories” of four characters.

He wrote presciently in 1977, in a talk for an international conference Creating the Productive Workplace, that the Nobel prizewinner Robert Stone “had the good sense to work at home with his wife” — he said that he always felt most at ease in his own home. In 1987 he set up the Balas Copartnership with his wife Bernadine Jacot. They wrote books jointly. The central idea of The Way Men Think (1991) was the male “wound” sustained by infant boys distancing themselves from the mother, as they identify with the father in order to develop masculinity; the benefits claimed are that men achieve abstract and mechanical reasoning, the accompanying penalties a liability to insensitivity, misogyny and sexual perversion (characteristics much rarer in women). The case histories presented in the book include the photographer Edward Weston, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and the painter Pierre Bonnard.

The jointly written Intimate Relations (1995) extended the analysis to include women, aiming to show that both sexes are poor at understanding the intimate needs of partners, on account of different early psychological development in each gender — these patterns of incomprehension contribute to heterosexual fascination. A parallel was drawn between erotic intimacy and art, both calling for the exercise of imaginative powers.

Hudson was a regular reviewer on psychological subjects for The Times Literary Supplement. In 1997 he was invited to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University. The first dealt with the science of mind; the second with his abiding interest: the visual arts and the creative imagination. Both lectures revealed his lifelong fascination with how ideas live in the minds of men and women, shaping our lives and our cultural history.

His wife, three sons and a daughter survive him.

Liam Hudson, psychologist and educator, was born on July 20, 1933. He died of a brain tumour on February 19, 2005, aged 71.