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).
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#51
Marvin Minsky
#12
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence , co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
Go to Profile#52
Elizabeth Loftus
#1470
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#53
Donald Broadbent
#2526
Overall Influence
1926 - 1993 (67 years)
Donald Eric Broadbent CBE, FRS was an influential experimental psychologist from the United Kingdom. His career and research bridged the gap between the pre-World War II approach of Sir Frederic Bartlett and what became known as Cognitive Psychology in the late 1960s. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Broadbent as the 54th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#54
Joseph Wolpe
#1143
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
Joseph Wolpe was a South African psychiatrist and one of the most influential figures in behavior therapy. Wolpe grew up in South Africa, attending Parktown Boys' High School and obtaining his MD from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Go to Profile#55
Steven C. Hayes
#1468
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#56
Salvador Minuchin
#2951
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Salvador Minuchin was a family therapist born and raised in San Salvador, Entre Ríos, Argentina. He developed structural family therapy, which addresses problems within a family by charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family . These charts represent power dynamics as well as the boundaries between different subsystems. The therapist tries to disrupt dysfunctional relationships within the family, and cause them to settle back into a healthier pattern.
Go to Profile#57
Amos Tversky
#579
Overall Influence
1937 - 1996 (59 years)
Amos Nathan Tversky was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement. He was co-author of a three-volume treatise, Foundations of Measurement. His early work with Daniel Kahneman focused on the psychology of prediction and probability judgment; later they worked together to develop prospect theory, which aims to explain irrational human economic choices and is considered one of the seminal works of behavioral economics.
Go to Profile#58
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#59
Ram Dass
#725
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Ram Dass , also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and writer. His best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, which has been described by multiple reviewers as "seminal", helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill , How Can I Help? , and Polishing the Mirror .
Go to Profile#60
Don Norman
#1239
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Donald Arthur Norman is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science, and has shaped the development of the field of cognitive systems engineering. He is a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, along with Jakob Nielsen. He is also an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.
Go to Profile#61
Corey Keyes
#3233
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Corey Keyes is an American sociologist and psychologist. He is known for his work with positive psychology. Keyes currently teaches at Emory University in Georgia. Work Keyes works in the areas of complete mental health and methods for attaining positive social relationships. He also studies the psychology of aging. Keyes is known for coining the psychological terms "flourishing" and "Languishing" which describes mentally healthy adults and has published widely in this field. He is considered to be a pioneer in the field of positive psychology . Keyes is a member of advisory board for the World Happiness Forum and is a member of the Positive Psychology Network.
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Richard Herrnstein
#1333
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Richard Julius Herrnstein was an American psychologist at Harvard University. He was an active researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. Herrnstein was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology until his death, and previously chaired the Harvard Department of Psychology for five years. With political scientist Charles Murray, he co-wrote The Bell Curve, a controversial 1994 book on human intelligence. He was one of the founders of the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior.
Go to Profile#63
R. Duncan Luce
#1478
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Robert Duncan Luce was an American mathematician and social scientist, and one of the most preeminent figures in the field of mathematical psychology. At the end of his life, he held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#64
Jean Laplanche
#1431
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Jean Laplanche was a French author, psychoanalyst and winemaker. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development and Sigmund Freud's seduction theory, and wrote more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory. The journal Radical Philosophy described him as "the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day."
Go to Profile#65
Michael Gazzaniga
#1072
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#66
David McClelland
#1255
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
David Clarence McClelland was an American psychologist, noted for his work on motivation Need Theory. He published a number of works between the 1950s and the 1990s and developed new scoring systems for the Thematic Apperception Test and its descendants. McClelland is credited with developing Achievement Motivation Theory, commonly referred to as "need for achievement" or n-achievement theory. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002, ranked McClelland as the 15th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#67
David Marks
#3616
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
David Francis Marks is a psychologist, author and editor of numerous articles and books largely concerned with five areas of psychological research – judgement, health psychology, consciousness, parapsychology and intelligence. Marks is also the originator of the General Theory of Behaviour, and has curated exhibitions and books about artists and their works.
Go to Profile#68
Robert Zajonc
#2226
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis. He also made contributions to comparative psychology. He argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior.
Go to Profile#69
Robert Frager
#4775
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Frager is an American social psychologist responsible for establishing America's first educational institution dedicated to transpersonal psychology. Frager is known for founding the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now called Sofia University, in Palo Alto, California, where he currently holds the position of director of the low residency Master of Arts in Spiritual Guidance program and professor of psychology. Frager has previously acted as president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology as well as a consultant, educator and a spiritual teacher in the Sufi tradition.
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Chris French
#2797
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#71
Michael Tomasello
#1384
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University. Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition."
Go to Profile#72
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#73
John D. Mayer
#2271
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
John D. Mayer is an American psychologist at the University of New Hampshire, specializing in emotional intelligence and personality psychology. He co-developed a popular model of emotional intelligence with Peter Salovey. He is one of the authors of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test , and has developed a new, integrated framework for personality psychology, known as the Systems Framework for Personality Psychology. He is the author of Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives.
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John Robert Anderson
#1738
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Robert Anderson is a Canadian-born American psychologist. He is currently professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Biography Anderson obtained a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford in 1972. He became an assistant professor at Yale in 1972. He moved to the University of Michigan in 1973 as a Junior Fellow and returned to Yale in 1976 with tenure. He was promoted to full professor at Yale in 1977 but moved to Carnegie Mellon University in 1978. From 1988 to 1989, he served as president of the Cognitive Science Society.
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Jordan Peterson
#302
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author, and media commentator. Often described as conservative, he began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues. Peterson has described himself as a classic British liberal and a traditionalist.
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Jerome Kagan
#2200
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Jerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
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Fred Fiedler
#2263
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Fred Edward Fiedler was one of the leading researchers of industrial and organizational psychology in the 20th century. He helped shape psychology and was a leading psychologist. He was born in Vienna, Austria to Victor and Helga Schallinger Fiedler. His parents owned a textile and tailoring supply store prior to 1938. Fiedler immigrated to the United States shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 and became a US citizen in 1943. He served in the US Army from 1942 to 1945. He studied psychology at the University of Chicago where he obtained his undergraduate degree and later a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1949.
Go to Profile#78
Nevitt Sanford
#3650
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Nevitt Sanford was an American professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and later at Stanford University. A Harvard doctoral student of Gordon Allport, PhD in social psychology and Henry Murray, MD at the Harvard Clinic, as a young Cal professor Sanford studied ethnocentrism and antisemitism, and was the senior author along with Columbia University philosopher Theodor Adorno of The Authoritarian Personality, also known as "the Berkeley Study."
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John L. Holland
#818
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
John Lewis Holland was an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He was the creator of the career development model, Holland Occupational Themes, commonly known as the Holland Codes.
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Neal E. Miller
#2225
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Neal Elgar Miller was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.
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Arthur Janov
#1481
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Arthur Janov , also known as Art Janov, was an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and writer. He gained notability as the creator of primal therapy, a treatment for mental illness that involves repeatedly descending into, feeling, and experiencing long-repressed childhood pain. Janov first directed a psychotherapy institute called the Primal Institute on North Almont Dr. in West Hollywood, California and from 1980 at the Janov Primal Center at 1205 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, in Venice, Los Angeles and latterly on Ashland Avenue in Santa Monica, California.
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Endel Tulving
#2220
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Endel Tulving was an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. In his research on human memory he proposed the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Tulving was a professor at the University of Toronto. He joined the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in 1992 as the first Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and remained there until his retirement in 2010. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada , Canada's highest civilian honour.
Go to Profile#83
Richard Lazarus
#1947
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Richard S. Lazarus was an American psychologist who began rising to prominence in the 1960s. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lazarus as the 80th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He was well renowned for his theory of cognitive-mediational theory within emotion.
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David Canter
#2031
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Victor Canter is a psychologist. He began his career as an architectural psychologist studying the interactions between people and buildings, publishing and providing consultancy on the designs of offices, schools, prisons, housing and other building forms as well as exploring how people made sense of the large scale environment, notably cities. He set up the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980. His work in architecture led to studies of human reactions in fires and other emergencies. He wrote about investigative psychology in Britain. He helped police in 1985 on the Railway Rapist case.
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Arthur Jensen
#1517
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Arthur Robert Jensen was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen was known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, the study of how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.
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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.
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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#88
Daniel Batson
#3689
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
C. Daniel Batson is an American social psychologist. He has two doctoral degrees, in theology and psychology . Batson obtained his doctorate under John Darley and taught at the University of Kansas. He retired in 2006 and now is an emeritus professor in the psychology department of the University of Tennessee. He is best known for his contributions to the social psychology of altruism, empathic concern, and psychology of religion.
Go to Profile#89
Lewis Goldberg
#3453
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lewis R. Goldberg is an American personality psychologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon. He is closely associated with the lexical hypothesis that any culturally important personality characteristic will be represented in the language of that culture. This hypothesis led to a five factor structure of personality trait adjectives . When applied to personality items this structure is also known as the five-factor model of personality. He is the creator of the International Personality Item Pool, a website that provides public-domain personality measures.
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Edward L. Deci
#3719
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Edward L. Deci is a professor of Psychology and Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Rochester, and director of its Human Motivation Program. He is well known in psychology for his theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and basic psychological needs which he has been researching for 40 years. With Richard Ryan, he is the co-founder of self-determination theory , an influential contemporary motivational theory.
Go to Profile#91
Lee Ross
#4290
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Lee David Ross was a Canadian–American professor. He held the title of the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and was an influential social psychologist who studied attributional biases, shortcomings in judgment and decision making, and barriers to conflict resolution, often with longtime collaborator Mark Lepper. Ross was known for his identification and explication of the fundamental attribution error and for the demonstration and analysis of other phenomena and shortcomings that have become standard topics in textbooks and in some cases, even popular media.
Go to Profile#92
Richard Wiseman
#3265
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
#93
Karl E. Weick
#2144
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Karl Edward Weick is an American organizational theorist who introduced the concepts of "loose coupling", "mindfulness", and "sensemaking" into organizational studies. He is the Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#94
Theodore Millon
#1885
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Theodore Millon was an American psychologist known for his work on personality disorders. He founded the Journal of Personality Disorders and was the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. In 2008 he was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Foundation named the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology" after him. Millon developed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, worked on the diagnostic criteria for passive-agg...
Go to Profile#95
Daniel Goleman
#840
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was on The New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half, a bestseller in many countries, and is in print worldwide in 40 languages. Apart from his books on emotional intelligence, Goleman has written books on topics including self-deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the ecological crisis, and the Dalai Lama’s vision ...
Go to Profile#96
Stanislas Dehaene
#1445
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
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Richard Bandler
#684
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Wayne Bandler is an American consultant in the field of self-help. With John Grinder, he founded the neuro-linguistic programming approach to psychotherapy in the 1970s. Education and background Bandler was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and attended high school in Sunnyvale, California. He has stated that he was beaten as a child so badly that every bone in his body was broken. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother and stayed mostly in and around San Francisco. Bandler obtained a BA degree in philosophy and psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 19...
Go to Profile#98
Philip Johnson-Laird
#2533
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, FRS, FBA is a philosopher of language and reasoning and a developer of the mental model theory of reasoning. He was a professor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology, as well as the author of several notable books on human cognition and the psychology of reasoning.
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Sonu Shamdasani
#3349
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sonu Shamdasani is a London-based author, editor in chief, and professor at University College London. His research and writings focus on Carl Gustav Jung and cover the history of psychiatry and psychology from the mid-nineteenth century to current times.
Go to Profile#100
Serge Moscovici
#3784
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Serge Moscovici was a Romanian-born French social psychologist, director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale , which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. He was a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Officer of the Légion d'honneur, as well as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Moscovici's son, Pierre Moscovici, was European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs.
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