The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Psychology,
#1
Leda Cosmides
#600
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#2
Mary Ainsworth
#405
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver.
Go to Profile#3
Eleanor Rosch
#549
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#4
Susan Blackmore
#887
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#5
Élisabeth Roudinesco
#686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Élisabeth Roudinesco is a French scholar, historian and psychoanalyst. She conducts a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis at the École Normale Supérieure. Roudinesco's work focuses mainly on psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis in France, but also worldwide. She has written biographies of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Her biography of Freud, Freud, In his Time and Ours, was awarded the "Prix Décembre" 2014 and The "Prix des Prix" 2014. With Michel Plon, she published a huge Dictionary of Psychoanalysis , which was translated into many languages, though not yet into English. Her book Généalogies was awarded The Best Book Prize by The Société française d'histoire de la médecine.
Go to Profile#6
Elizabeth Loftus
#1470
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#7
Marsha M. Linehan
#1232
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Marsha M. Linehan is an American psychologist and author. She is the creator of dialectical behavior therapy , a type of psychotherapy that combines cognitive restructuring with acceptance, mindfulness, and shaping.
Go to Profile#8
Carol Ryff
#4031
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carol Diane Ryff is an American academic and psychologist. She received her doctorate in 1978. She is known for studying psychological well-being and psychological resilience. Ryff is the Hilldale Professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the Institute on Aging. Ryff developed the six-factor model of psychological well-being.
Go to Profile#9
Ellen Langer
#4061
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ellen Jane Langer is an American professor of psychology at Harvard University; in 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Langer studies the illusion of control, decision-making, aging, and mindfulness theory. Her most influential work is Counterclockwise, published in 2009, which answers questions about aging from her research and interest in the particulars of aging across the nation.
Go to Profile#10
Bärbel Inhelder
#2119
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Bärbel Elisabeth Inhelder was a Swiss psychologist most known for her work under psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget and their contributions toward child development. Born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Inhelder initially showed interest in education. While attending high school she became interested in Sigmund Freud's writing and information on adolescents. She then moved to Geneva where she studied at the University of Geneva Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau earning her bachelor's and doctoral degrees both in psychology. Inhelder continued her work at the University of Geneva up until her retirement.
Go to Profile#11
Sonja Lyubomirsky
#4448
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Russian-born American professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.
Go to Profile#12
Nancy Chodorow
#2194
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
Go to Profile#13
Lisa Feldman Barrett
#3332
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#14
Margaret Singer
#2170
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Margaret Thaler Singer was an American clinical psychologist and researcher with her colleague Lyman Wynne on family communication. She was a prominent figure in the study of undue influence in social and religious contexts, and a proponent of the brainwashing theory of new religious movements.
Go to Profile#15
Daisy L. Hung
#4369
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Daisy Lan Hung is a Taiwanese psychologist. She is the founding director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the National Central University in Taiwan. Her research areas are involved with cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and neurolinguistics. In addition to conducting research, Hung also translates scientific works, educates children on reading habits and lectures on her research topics.
Go to Profile#16
Jessica Benjamin
#3562
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jessica Benjamin is a psychoanalyst known for her contributions to psychoanalysis and social thought. She is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Jessica Benjamin is one of the original contributors to the fields of relational psychoanalysis, theories of intersubjectivity, and gender studies and feminism as it relates to psychoanalysis and society. She is known for her ideas about recognition in both...
Go to Profile#17
Anne Treisman
#4133
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Anne Marie Treisman was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology. Treisman researched visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with Garry Gelade in 1980. Treisman taught at the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Notable postdoctoral fellows she supervised included Nancy Kanwisher and Nilli Lavie.
Go to Profile#18
Juliet Mitchell
#2042
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Juliet Mitchell, Lady Goody is a British psychoanalyst, socialist feminist, research professor and author. Early life and education Mitchell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1940, and then moved to England in 1944, where she stayed with her grandparents in the midlands. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English in 1962, as well as doing postgraduate work. She taught English literature from 1962 to 1970 at Leeds University and Reading University. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell was active in leftist politics, and was on the editorial committee of...
Go to Profile#19
Lyn Yvonne Abramson
#5644
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lyn Yvonne Abramson is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was born in Benson, Minnesota. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 before attaining her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1978.
Go to Profile#20
Susan Fiske
#4435
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#21
Brenda Milner
#1626
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (106 years)
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. , she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development.
Go to Profile#22
Linda Gottfredson
#3532
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve .
Go to Profile#23
Barbara Fredrickson
#3483
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#24
Jane Goodall
#149
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dame Jane Morris Goodall , formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzeess, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.
Go to Profile#25
Lera Boroditsky
#4793
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford.
Go to Profile#26
Marie Jahoda
#2977
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Marie Jahoda was an Austrian-British social psychologist. Biography Jahoda was born in Vienna to a Jewish merchant's family, and like many other psychologists of her time, grew up in Austria where political oppression against socialists was rampant henceforward Engelbert Dollfuss claimed power. Starting in her adolescent years she became engaged in the Austrian Social Democratic Party in ″Red Vienna.″ This was a major influence on her life. She is considered as Grande Dame of European socialism. In 1928, she earned her teaching diploma from the Pedagogical Academy of Vienna, and in 1933 earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#27
Margaret Boden
#1206
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
Go to Profile#28
Edna B. Foa
#5101
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Edna Foa is an Israeli professor of clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as the director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. Foa is an internationally renowned authority in the field of psychopathology and treatment of anxiety. She approaches the understanding and treatment of mental disorders from a cognitive-behavioral perspective.
Go to Profile#29
Carol Dweck
#3302
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Carol Susan Dweck is an American psychologist. She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on motivation and mindset. She was on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Harvard, and Columbia before joining the Stanford University faculty in 2004. She was named an Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Fellow in 2013, an APS Mentor Awardee in 2019, and an APS William James Fellow in 2020, and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2012.
Go to Profile#30
Dedre Gentner
#4326
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Go to Profile#31
Betty Friedan
#177
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women , which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
Go to Profile#32
Elizabeth Spelke
#5383
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Elizabeth Shilin Spelke FBA is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She has suggested that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she has made important contributions to the debate on cognitive differences between men and women. She defends the position that there is no scientific evidence of any significant disparity in the intellec...
Go to Profile#33
Jane Loevinger
#7776
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Jane Loevinger Weissman was an American developmental psychologist who developed a theory of personality which emphasized the gradual internalization of social rules and the maturing conscience for the origin of personal decisions. She also contributed to the theory of measurements by introducing the coefficient of test homogeneity. In the tradition of developmental stage models, Loevinger integrated several "frameworks of meaning-making" into a model of humans' constructive potentials that she called ego development . The essence of the ego is the striving to master, to integrate, and make sense of experience.
Go to Profile#34
Sherry Turkle
#1184
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#35
Barbara S. Held
#10257
Overall Influence
Barbara S. Held is the Barry N. Wish Research Professor of Psychology and Social Studies Emerita at Bowdoin College in the fields of clinical psychology and theoretical/philosophical psychology. She served as President of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology from 2008 to 2009, and was recipient of the 2012 Joseph B. Glitter Award from the American Psychological Association recognizing her "scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge."
Go to Profile#36
Patricia McKinsey Crittenden
#4013
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Patricia McKinsey Crittenden is an American psychologist known for her work in the development of attachment theory and science, her work in the field of developmental psychopathology, and for creation of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation .
Go to Profile#37
Shelley E. Taylor
#10189
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Shelley Elizabeth Taylor is an American psychologist. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of social psychology: social cognition and health psychology. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor.
Go to Profile#38
Alice Miller
#4475
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Alice Miller , was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.
Go to Profile#39
Maritza Montero
#13620
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Maritza Montero is a Venezuelan social psychologist and political scientist. She is a Professor and Program Director at the Central University of Venezuela. Her research focuses on community psychology, political psychology, and liberation psychology, with a particular focus on Latin America. She has been the President of the International Society of Political Psychology.
Go to Profile#40
Christina Maslach
#3706
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Christina Maslach is an American social psychologist and professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, known for her research on occupational burnout. She is a co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory and Areas of Worklife Survey. Early in her professional career, Maslach was instrumental in stopping the Stanford prison experiment. In 1997, she was awarded the U.S. Professor of the Year.
Go to Profile#41
Gabriele Oettingen
#10354
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Princess Gabriele of Oettingen-Oettingen and Oettingen-Spielberg, known professionally as Gabriele Oettingen, is a German academic and psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on how people think about the future, and how this impacts cognition, emotion, and behavior.
Go to Profile#42
Hanna Segal
#8107
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Hanna Segal was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London in 1987. The American psychoanalyst James Grotstein considered that "received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of "classical" Kleinian thinking and technique." The BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley introduced her as "one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time,"
Go to Profile#43
Alison Gopnik
#5395
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal article...
Go to Profile#44
Elke U. Weber
#8603
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Elke U. Weber is a Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University where she holds the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professorship in Energy & the Environment. Prior to moving to Princeton in 2016, she spent 19 years at Columbia University, where she founded and co-directed the Earth Institute's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and the Columbia Business School's Center for Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#45
Uta Frith
#4670
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist and Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London . She pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. Her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduced the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.
Go to Profile#46
Ellen Markman
#11088
Overall Influence
Ellen Markman is Lewis M. Terman Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She specializes in word learning and language development in children, focusing specifically on how children come to associate words with their meanings. Markman contends that in order to learn the meaning of a word, children make use of three basic principles: the whole object assumption , the taxonomic assumption , and the mutual exclusivity assumption . Related topics that Markman has studied include categorization and inductive reasoning in children and infants. Markman subscribes to the innatist school of de...
Go to Profile#47
Susan Carey
#12037
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood and The Origin of Concepts .
Go to Profile#48
Diana Deutsch
#6788
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Diana Deutsch is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She's a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitcheses in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch , which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages.
Go to Profile#49
Barbara Tversky
#9085
Overall Influence
Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Tversky specializes in cognitive psychology.
Go to Profile#50
Christine Blasey Ford
#2510
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Christine Margaret Blasey Ford is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects. During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.
Go to Profile