The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#5001
Carveth Read
1848 - 1931 (83 years)
Carveth Read was a 19th- and 20th-century British philosopher and logician. Life He was born 16 March 1848 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. He was the third son of Edward Read and Elizabeth Truscott. He attended the University of Cambridge . He received a B.A. in 1873 and an M.A. in 1877. He was the Hilbert travelling scholar, studying at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities in 1874-1877. In 1877 he married Evelyn Thompson. From 1878 he lectured at Wren's 'Coaching' establishment . He was Grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the University College London from 1903 to 1911. From 1911 to 1921 he was Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at UCL.
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Jean Macfarlane
1894 - 1989 (95 years)
Jean Walker Macfarlane was an American psychologist. She was born in Selma, California. In 1922 she earned a doctoral degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the second person ever to do so, the first being Olga Bridgman in 1915. In 1927 Macfarlane founded the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, originally called the Institute of Child Welfare.
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Howard C. Warren
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Howard Crosby Warren was an American psychologist and the first chairman of the Princeton University Psychology department. He was also president of the American Psychological Association in 1913. The Society of Experimental Psychologists awards the Howard Crosby Warren Medal each year in his honor.
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Beatrice Edgell
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Beatrice Edgell was a British psychologist, researcher and university teacher. She taught at Bedford College in the University of London from 1897 to 1933. She was the first British woman to earn a PhD in psychology and the first British woman to be named a professor of psychology. She was also the first female president of the British Psychological Society, the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association and the Psychological Division of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Graham Reed
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Graham F. Reed was a Canadian psychologist. He is best known for his major work on anomalistic psychology entitled The Psychology of Anomalous Experience , which seeks to better understand the psychology behind seemingly bizarre experiences. He was also a CSI Fellow.
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Livingston Farrand
1867 - 1939 (72 years)
Livingston Farrand was an American physician, anthropologist, psychologist, public health advocate and academic administrator. Early life and education Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Dr. Samuel Ashbel Farrand, headmaster of the historic Newark Academy, and Rachel Louise Farrand, Farrand received an undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1888, and went on to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he earned his M.D. in 1891.
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Frey Svenson
1866 - 1927 (61 years)
Frey Svenson was a Swedish medical doctor and professor of psychology, born in Vetlanda, Sweden. In the year of 1899 he worked at Upsala Hospital, which at that time was a psychiatric hospital rather than a medical hospital. Here he met the Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding. Svenson tried to help Fröding deal with his mental illness and also became his friend. This was the basis of a book called Gustaf Frödings diktning. Bidrag till dess psykologi
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Karin Stephen
1889 - 1953 (64 years)
Karin Stephen was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist. Early life and education Karin Stephen was born Catherine Elizabeth Costelloe. Her mother, Mary Costelloe had been a Philadelphia Quaker, and her father, Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe a Northern Irish convert to Roman Catholicism. The relationship between her parents was difficult, and her mother left her husband when Karin and her sister Rachel were very young. Her father died in 1899 when she was ten years old, so the sisters were then looked after by their grandmother. While at boarding school she won a scholarship for Newnh...
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Hans-Lukas Teuber
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Hans-Lukas Teuber was a professor of psychology and head of the psychology department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was one of the founders of neuropsychology and studied perception. He coined the term double dissociation. He also introduced the "Corollary Discharge" hypothesis. He gave the classic definition of agnosia as "a normal percept stripped of its meaning".
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Havelock Ellis
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Henry Havelock Ellis was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He developed the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.
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Thomas Cogswell Upham
1799 - 1872 (73 years)
Thomas Upham was an American philosopher, psychologist, pacifist, poet, author, and educator. He was an important figure in the holiness movement. He became influential within psychology literature and served as the Bowdoin College professor of mental and moral philosophy from 1825-1868. His most popular work, Mental Philosophy received 57 editions over a 73-year period. Additionally, he produced a volume of 16 other books and the first treatise on abnormal psychology, as well as several other works on religious themes and figures. Specific teachings included a conception of mental faculties...
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Leonard Carmichael
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Leonard Carmichael was an American educator and psychologist. In addition, he became the seventh secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1953. Education and academic career Carmichael, the son of a physician and a teacher, was born in 1898, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. degree from Tufts University in 1921, and his PhD from Harvard University in 1924. He was a brother in the Theta Delta Chi fraternity during his time at Tufts. He became an instructor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1924 and was appointed to assistant professor in 1926. In 1927 he ...
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Kit Pedler
1927 - 1981 (54 years)
Christopher Magnus Howard "Kit" Pedler was a British medical scientist, parapsychologist and science fiction author. Biography He was the head of the electron microscopy department at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University of London, where he published a number of papers. Pedler's first television contribution was for the BBC programme Tomorrow's World.
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Franziska Baumgarten
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Franziska Baumgarten-Tramèr was an industrial psychologist, professor, and researcher. She is known for her work on the effects of war and trauma, aptitude testing, and gifted schoolchildren. Early life Baumgarten was born in Łódź, Poland in 1886 or 1883. She graduated from gymnasium in 1901 and then in 1905 went to study literature and philosophy at the University of Krakow. There her interest in understanding human emotion led her to the field of psychology. In 1908 she moved to the University of Zurich where she worked with Gustav Störring, before moving to the University of Bonn and then to Berlin.
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Ashley Montagu
#5016
George M. Stratton
1865 - 1957 (92 years)
George Malcolm Stratton was an American psychologist who pioneered the study of perception in vision by wearing special glasses which inverted images up and down and left and right. He studied under one of the founders of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, and started one of the first experimental psychology labs in America, at the University of California, Berkeley. Stratton's studies on binocular vision inspired many later studies on the subject. He was one of the initial members of the philosophy department at Berkeley, and the first chair of its psychology department. He also worked on sociology, focusing on international relations and peace.
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Everett Franklin Lindquist
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Everett Franklin Lindquist was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today.
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George E. Partridge
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
George Everett Partridge was an American psychologist credited with popularizing the term sociopath in 1930 that Karl Brinbaum had suggested in 1909. He worked with the influential G. Stanley Hall at Clark University. One year after his death, the George Everett Partridge Memorial Foundation was incorporated in 1954 by the Partridge family to memorialize his life's work in the study and treatment of mental and personality disorders. The Foundation focused on developing programs to promote treatment centers for mentally disabled children, often referred to as the "forgotten children." Partridge schools were established.
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Henry J. Watt
1879 - 1925 (46 years)
Henry Jackson Watt was a Scottish experimental psychologist. He was student of Oswald Külpe and a member of the Würzburg School. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on mental set in problem solving, what he referred to as "Einstellung" or "task mental set".
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Catharine Cox Miles
1890 - 1984 (94 years)
Catharine Morris Cox Miles was an American psychologist known for her work on intelligence and genius. Born in San Jose, CA, to Lydia Shipley Bean and Charles Elwood Cox. In 1927 married psychologist Walter Richard Miles. Her sister was classics scholar and Quaker administrator Anna Cox Brinton.
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Susan Speer
1900 - Present (126 years)
Susan "Sue" Speer C.Psychol, FHEA is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester. From 2005 to 2006 Speer was an ESRC-SSRC collaborative visiting fellow in the department of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles .
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Herman George Canady
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Herman George Canady was an American social psychologist. Canady, who was black, was the first psychologist to examine the role of the race of the examiner as a bias factor in IQ testing. Early life Canady was born in 1901 in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to Rev. Howard T and Mrs. Anna Canady. He attended Douglass Elementary School and Favor High School in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He graduated from the high school at George R. Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1922. In 1923, Canady enrolled in the Northwestern University Theological School as a Charles F. Grey scholarship student, where he developed an interest in the behavioral sciences and majored in sociology.
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Klaus F. Riegel
1925 - 1977 (52 years)
Klaus F. Riegel was professor of psychology at the University of Michigan from 1959 to 1977. His research and theory contributions encompassed psycholinguistics, gerontology, developmental psychology, and dialectical psychology. Riegel edited the international journal Human Development from 1970 to 1977. In 1975, the Gerontological Society of America presented Riegel with the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for outstanding research in the field of gerontology.
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Walter Bowers Pillsbury
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Walter Bowers Pillsbury was an American psychologist, born at Burlington, Iowa. He studied for two years at Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, graduated from the University of Nebraska , and subsequently completed a Ph.D. at Cornell University . Pillsbury taught at the University of Michigan after 1897, in 1905–1910 as junior professor of philosophy and director of the psychological laboratory and afterward as professor of psychology. In 1908–1909 he lectured at Columbia. He served as president of the Western Philosophical Association in 1907 and of the American Psychological Association in 1910....
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Kristine Mann
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Kristine Mann was an American educator and physician, with a particular interest in working women's health. She was an early practitioner of psychoanalysis in North America. Early life and education Kristine Mann was born August 29, 1873, in Orange, New Jersey. In 1885 Kristine and her family began spending summers at Bailey Island , a location that was reminiscent of her mother's native Denmark. Summering at Bailey Island would prove to be a lifelong ritual for Kristine.
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Inez Beverly Prosser
1895 - 1934 (39 years)
Inez Beverly Prosser was a psychologist, teacher and school administrator. She is often regarded as the first African-American female to receive a Ph.D in psychology. Her work was very influential in the hallmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. After growing up in Texas, Prosser was educated at Prairie View Normal College, the University of Colorado and the University of Cincinnati. She was killed in a car accident a short time after earning her doctorate.
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Adolph Stöhr
1855 - 1921 (66 years)
Adolph Stöhr was professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. His lectures and publications covered subjects such as logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, experimental psychology, psychology of perception, and psychology of association.
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Wilhelm Wirth
1876 - 1952 (76 years)
Wilhelm Wirth was a German psychologist. He was taught by Wilhelm Wundt. External links http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~psycho/hist2.html
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Edwin Diller Starbuck
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Edwin Diller Starbuck born Edwin Eli Starbuck was an American educational psychologist who took a special interest in the teaching of morals and character in children independent of religious instruction. His idea was to imbue morals through indirect means where students would learn by inference.
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Nicholas Hobbs
1915 - 1983 (68 years)
Nicholas Hobbs was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Biography Hobbs graduated from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina in 1936. He then moved to Ohio State University where he studied under Carl Rogers and Sidney Pressey. He received his master's in educational psychology in 1938. During World War II, he served in the Air Force and directed the Aviation Psychology Program, helping to establish the selection process for that branch of the military. He would then return to Ohio State University and receive his PhD in educational psychology in 1946.
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William Moulton Marston
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
William Moulton Marston , also known by the pen name Charles Moulton , was an American psychologist who, with his wife Elizabeth Holloway, invented an early prototype of the polygraph. He was also known as a self-help author and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.
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Henri Wallon
1879 - 1962 (83 years)
Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon was a French philosopher, psychologist , neuropsychiatrist, teacher, and politician. He was the grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon. Career Henri Wallon conducted two parallel careers. As a convinced Marxist, he took up political duties while carrying out scientific work in the field of developmental psychology.
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Sabri Esat Siyavuşgil
1907 - 1968 (61 years)
Sabri Esat Siyavuşgil, was a Turkish poet, writer, psychologist, translator, encyclopedist. Biography He was born in Istanbul. His father is Ahmet Esat, a descendant of Siyavuş Pasha, one of the Ottoman grand viziers. He completed primary school in Antalya. He continued his secondary education at Kadıköy Sultani, Istanbul Male Teacher's School, and Istiklal High School. He went to France when he was in the last year of Istiklal High School. He studied philosophy and psychology at the Universities of Dijon and Lyon and earned his doctorate.
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Delos Wickens
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Delos Donald "Wick" Wickens was an American experimental research psychologist, behaviorist, and author. He taught at Ohio State University from 1946 until his retirement in 1980. Wickens discovered the release from proactive inhibition through his research on proactive interference buildup. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work “Encoding Categories of Words; an Empirical Approach to Meaning,” which was published in Psychological Review and remains one of the most widely cited articles in the history of recent psychology. Over the years, Wickens published his research findin...
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Richard Crutchfield
1912 - 1977 (65 years)
Richard Stanley Crutchfield was an American experimental, personality and social psychologist who, in the 1930s, was instrumental in moving psychology from a tradition of single-factor experiments to an experimental design based on analysis of variance and covariance.
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Eleanor Gamble
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Eleanor Acheson McCulloch Gamble was an influential American psychologist from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. Gamble published most of her work on audition and memory influenced by Georg Elias Müller, Edward B. Titchener, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Ernst Heinrich Weber. Despite her chronic eye conditions she was successful in editing volumes of textbooks, her own papers, and directing many master's degree students. She earned her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1889. She went on to obtain her doctorate from Cornell University in 1898. She held several teac...
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Lorine Pruette
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Lorine Livingston Pruette was an American feminist, psychologist, and writer. Early life Lorine Pruette was born in Millersburg, Tennessee, to college-educated parents. Her mother and her maternal grandmother were among the first generation of college-educated women in the United States. Pruette's mother's dreams of a career in writing were never fulfilled; she placed enormous pressure on Pruette to fulfill the life she always wanted.
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Peter Hagoort
#5039
Claude Emerson Welch
#5040
Herbert Langfeld
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Herbert Sidney Langfeld was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Biography Herbert Langfeld was born in Philadelphia on July 24, 1879. He grew up in Philadelphia and was initially drawn to a diplomatic career. He was working for the American Embassy in Berlin when he was attracted to psychology. He earned a PhD in 1909 at the University of Berlin. He took a faculty position at Harvard University and ultimately went to Princeton University, where he became the psychological laboratory director and later the department chair for psychology. While at Princeton he also directly influenced the ecological psychology approach of J.
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Richard Baerwald
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Richard Baerwald was a German academic psychologist, in Berlin. Towards the end of his life he became interested in parapsychology and occultism . He edited the Zeitschrift für Kritischen Okkultismus from 1926 to 1928.
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Ralph Piddington
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Ralph O'Reilly Piddington was a New Zealand psychologist, anthropologist and university professor. Biography He was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1906, the son of Albert and Marion O'Reilly. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics under Bronisław Malinowski. He gained a Ph.D. for his study of the Karajarri people of Pilbara, North western Australia. However, when he raised the issue of racial discrimination towards indigenous peoples he was censured by the Australian National Research Council. In 1946, he was appointed Reader in anthropology at the Department of Mental Philosophy, University of Edinburgh.
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I. Madison Bentley
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
I. Madison Bentley, also known as Isaac Madison Bentley and later as Madison Bentley was an American psychologist. His first publication in 1897 was under the name "I. Madison Bentley." Bentley was one of the first to write about gender in his 1945 publication Sanity and Hazard in Childhood.
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Albert Poffenberger
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Albert T. Poffenberger was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Growing up in Pennsylvania, Poffenberger graduated from Harrisburg High School and Bucknell University. He was on the faculty of Columbia University. He authored textbooks titled Psychology in Advertising and Applied Psychology: Its Principles and Methods. He was APA president in 1934.
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Coleman Griffith
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
Coleman Roberts Griffith was an American sport psychologist. Born in Iowa, he is considered the founder of American sport psychology. Griffith studied at Greenville College until 1915, and then studied psychology at the University of Illinois. While at the University of Illinois, Griffith established what he claimed to be the first sports psychology laboratory in the United States. At this time Griffith worked closely with the University of Illinois football team, studying how factors such as psychomotor skills and personality variables related to performance and learning of athletic skills. ...
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Elias Porter
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Elias Hull Porter was an American psychologist. While at the University of Chicago Porter was a peer of other notable American psychologists, including Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Will Schutz. His work at Ohio State University and later at the University of Chicago contributed to Rogers’ development of client-centered therapy. Porter's primary contributions to the field of psychology were in the areas of non-directive approaches, relationship awareness theory and psychometric tests. His career included military, government, business and clinical settings.
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James Arthur Bayton
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
James Arthur Bayton was an American psychologist. He conducted research in areas of personality, race, social issues, and consumer psychology. Early life and education James Arthur Bayton was born on April 5, 1912, in White stone, Virginia to George and Helen Bayton. His father, a physician, had graduated from the medical school at Howard University. Bayton graduated from Temple University's high school in 1931 and subsequently matriculated at Howard University as a Chemistry major. Bayton began his undergraduate career planning to go into medicine, however, taking psychology courses taug...
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Luther L. Bernard
1881 - 1951 (70 years)
Luther Lee Bernard was an American sociologist and psychologist. He was the 22nd President of the American Sociological Association . He has been described as "among the best known U.S. sociologist in the country... between the 1920 and the 1940,".
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Harold Clyde Bingham
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
Harold Clyde Bingham was an American psychologist and primatologist. He spent his early career as a psychology professor, interrupting this to join the United States Army during World War I. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 1925 and studied under the supervision of Robert Yerkes. Yerkes, a psychology professor, had an interest in primates, and Bingham also entered this field. He led a 1929-30 expedition to the Belgian Congo to study gorillas in the wild. Though hampered by the size of the expedition, Bingham managed to get close to several troops of the animals and record details of their behavior.
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Carolyn Sherif
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Carolyn Wood Sherif was an American social psychologist who helped to develop social judgment theory and contributed pioneering research in the areas of the self-system, group conflict, cooperation, and gender identity. She also assumed a leading role in psychology both nationally as well as internationally. In addition to performing seminal social psychology research, Wood Sherif devoted herself to teaching her students and was recognized for her efforts with an American Psychological Association award named in her honor that is presented annually.
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