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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.

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List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#5051

Leonard Carmichael

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 ...

#5052

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.

#5053

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.

#5054

Ashley Montagu

#5055

George M. Stratton

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.

#5056

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.

#5057

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.

#5058

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".

#5059

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.

#5060

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 .

#5061

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.

#5062

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.

#5063

Walter Bowers Pillsbury

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....

#5064

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.

#5065

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.

#5066

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.

#5067

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

#5068

Mary Cover Jones

Mary Cover Jones

1897 - 1987 (90 years)

Mary Cover Jones was an American developmental psychologist and a pioneer of behavior therapy, despite the field being heavily dominated by males throughout much of the 20th century. Joseph Wolpe dubbed her "the mother of behavior therapy" due to her famous study of Peter and development of desensitization.

#5069

John Dennis Carthy

1923 - 1972 (49 years)

John Dennis Carthy was a British zoologist and ethologist whose primary study subjects were the sensory systems and behaviour of invertebrates. He published 11 books and numerous scientific articles.

#5070

Henry C. Morrison

1871 - 1945 (74 years)

Henry Clinton Morrison was the New Hampshire state superintendent of public instruction from 1904 to 1917, superintendent of University of Chicago Laboratory Schools from 1919 to 1928, professor of education, and an author.

#5071

George Kelly

1905 - 1967 (62 years)

George Alexander Kelly was an American psychologist, therapist, educator and personality theorist. He is considered the father of cognitive clinical psychology and is best known for his theory of personality, personal construct psychology.

#5072

George Gallup

1901 - 1984 (83 years)

George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. Life and career Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, George Jr., known then as "Ted", would deliver milk and used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where he also played football. His higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Si...

#5073

Paul Dressel

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Paul Dressel was an American educational psychologist. He was the founding director of the Counseling Center at Michigan State University, and the author of several books. Early life Dressel was born on November 29, 1910. He graduated from Wittenberg University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1931. He earned a master's degree from Michigan State University in 1934, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1939.

#5074

Harold H. Schlosberg

1904 - 1964 (60 years)

Harold Schlosberg was an American psychologist who was professor of psychology at Brown University from 1928 until the end of his life. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y, Schlosberg earned his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. An experimental psychologist, Schlosberg made notable contributions on subjects ranging from conditioned reflexes to the expression of human emotions. He co-authored the 1954 2nd edition of Experimental Psychology, an influential textbook used by a generation of graduate students. Schlosberg served as chairman of Brown's Department of Psychology from 1954 until his death in 1964.

#5075

Milton Rokeach

1918 - 1988 (70 years)

Milton Rokeach was a Polish-American social psychologist. He taught at Michigan State University, the University of Western Ontario, Washington State University, and the University of Southern California. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rokeach as the 85th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#5076

Theodore Newcomb

Theodore Newcomb

1903 - 1984 (81 years)

Theodore Mead Newcomb was an American social psychologist, professor and author. Newcomb led the Bennington College Study, which looked at the influence of the college experience on social and political beliefs. He was also the first to document the effects of proximity on acquaintance and attraction. Newcomb founded and directed the doctoral program in social psychology at the University of Michigan. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Newcomb as the 57th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#5077

Daniel Berlyne

1924 - 1976 (52 years)

Daniel Ellis Berlyne was a British and Canadian psychologist. Berlyne worked at several universities both in Canada and the United States. His work was in the field of experimental and exploratory psychology. Specifically, his research focused on how objects and experiences are influenced by and have an influence on curiosity and arousal.

#5078

Lawrence Kohlberg

1927 - 1987 (60 years)

Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from 25 years earlier. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin.

#5079

Hadley Cantril

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Albert Hadley Cantril, Jr. was an American psychologist from the Princeton University, who expanded the scope of the field. Cantril made "major contributions in psychology of propaganda; public opinion research; applications of psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding, and communication; developmental psychology; psychology of social movements; measurement and scaling; humanistic psychology; the psychology of perception; and, basic to all of them, the analysis of human behavior from the transactional point of view." His influence is felt in educati...

#5080

Dana R. Carney

Dana R. Carney is an American psychologist. She is associate professor of business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow, an affiliate of the Department of Psychology and the director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

#5081

Carl Brigham

1890 - 1943 (53 years)

Carl Campbell Brigham was an American eugenicist and professor of psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology and a pioneer in the field of psychometrics. He sat on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society and his early writings heavily influenced the eugenics movement and anti-immigration legislation in the United States. He created the SAT for The College Board.

#5082

Louis Leon Thurstone

1887 - 1955 (68 years)

Louis Leon Thurstone was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

#5083

David P. Boder

1886 - 1961 (75 years)

David Pablo Boder was a Latvian-American professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with Holocaust survivors. During that trip, he collected over a hundred interviews totaling 120 hours on a wire recorder developed by fellow professor Dr Marvin Camras. He was the first to record the experiences of the survivors and is a highly noted primary source reference.

#5084

Gordon Allport

1897 - 1967 (70 years)

Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. Instead of these popular approaches, he developed an eclectic theory based on traits. He emphasized the uniquene...

#5085

Harry Stack Sullivan

1892 - 1949 (57 years)

Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives" and that "[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist". Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.

#5086

Ben J. Winer

1917 - 1984 (67 years)

Ben James Winer was an American research psychologist and academic. He served as a psychology professor at Purdue University and was president of the Psychometric Society. He has been listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists in the United States, having authored a well-known textbook on statistical analysis.

#5087

Bruno Bettelheim

1903 - 1990 (87 years)

Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.

#5088

Jacob Robert Kantor

1888 - 1984 (96 years)

Jacob Robert Kantor was a prominent American psychologist who pioneered a naturalistic system in psychology called interbehavioral psychology or interbehaviorism. He was the first to use the term "psycholinguistics" in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar in 1936.

#5089

Rensis Likert

1903 - 1981 (78 years)

Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.

#5090

Michael W. Otto

1900 - Present (126 years)

#5091

E. Thayer Gaston

1901 - 1970 (69 years)

Everett Thayer Gaston was a psychologist active in the 1940s–1960s who helped develop music therapy in the United States, describing the qualities of musical expression that could be therapeutic. He worked at the University of Kansas, as Professor of Music Education and Director of Music Therapy. He was named to the Music Educators Hall of Fame in 1986.

#5092

Grete L. Bibring

Grete L. Bibring

1899 - 1977 (78 years)

Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.

#5093

Myrtle Byram McGraw

1899 - 1988 (89 years)

Myrtle Byram McGraw was an American psychologist, neurobiologist, and child development researcher. Education Myrtle was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the fifth of seven children of the farmer Riley McGraw and his seamstress wife Mary Byram. She grew up in an area that was still recovering from the aftermath of the American Civil War. After completing a sixth grade level of education, she took a course in a local business school to learn shorthand and typing. Afterward, she was hired by a law office, where she worked for the next two years at a salary of $3 per hour. While there, the lawyer for whom she worked had the foresight to encourage her to continue her education.

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