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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

Carl Hovland

1912 - 1961 (49 years)

Carl Iver Hovland was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra's propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on yo...

#5052

Lewis Terman

1877 - 1956 (79 years)

Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, academic, and proponent of eugenics. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford School of Education. Terman is best known for his revision of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius. As a prominent eugenicist, he was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association.

#5053

Kenneth Spence

1907 - 1967 (60 years)

Kenneth Wartinbee Spence was a prominent American psychologist known for both his theoretical and experimental contributions to learning theory and motivation. As one of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#5054

Arnold Gesell

1880 - 1961 (81 years)

Arnold Lucius Gesell was an American psychologist, pediatrician and professor at Yale University known for his research and contributions to the fields of child hygiene and child development. Early life Gesell was born in Alma, Wisconsin, and later wrote an article analyzing his experiences there entitled "The Village of a Thousand Souls". The eldest of five children, Arnold and his siblings were born to photographer Gerhard Gesell and schoolteacher Christine Giesen. His first experience in observing child development involved watching his younger siblings learn and grow until he graduated fr...

#5055

Wayne D. Gray

Wayne D. Gray is a professor of cognitive science and director of the cognitive science doctoral program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Research Gray seeks to understand how goal-directed cognition is shaped by the accommodation of basic cognitive, perceptual, and motor operations to the cost-benefit structure of the designed task environment. These basic elements of integrated behavior, interactive routines, occur over a time span of 1/3 to 3 seconds and are typically beneath the level of our conscious awareness and deliberate control. Hence, non-deliberate forces that dynamically react...

#5056

Norman Maier

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Norman Raymond Frederick Maier was an American experimental psychologist who worked primarily at the University of Michigan. He invented the two-cords problem and co-authored Principles of Animal Psychology.

#5057

Philip E. Vernon

1905 - 1987 (82 years)

Philip Ewart Vernon was a British-born Canadian psychologist and author. He studied intellectual ability with a focus on race and intelligence. Life Philip Vernon was born in Oxford, England on 6 June 1905. His father was H. M. Vernon who was a lecturer in physiology at the University of Oxford, and was Great Britain's foremost figure in industrial psychology. His mother Dorothea Ewart was author of several works on Italian history. Philip worked with his wife, Dorothy, in the study of gifted children. They had one son, Philip Anthony Vernon, who also researched intellectual abilities. When Vernon joined the University of Calgary, he became a Canadian citizen.

#5058

Clark L. Hull

1884 - 1952 (68 years)

Clark Leonard Hull was an American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Hull is known for his debates with Edward C. Tolman. He is also known for his work in drive theory.

#5059

Fritz Heider

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception . It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.

#5060

Winthrop Kellogg

1898 - 1972 (74 years)

Winthrop Niles Kellogg was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species. Kellogg received his undergraduate degree at Indiana University after serving for two years in World War I. He went on to receive his Master's and PhD from Columbia University. He held academic positions at both Indiana and Florida State Universities where he would undertake two of the most pioneering studies. During his time at Indiana his research focused on conditioning in learning and comparative studies. His time at Florida State was dedicated to bottlenose ...

#5061

David Wechsler

1896 - 1981 (85 years)

David Wechsler was a Romanian-American psychologist. He developed well-known intelligence scales, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children to get to know his patients at Bellevue Hospital. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Wechsler as the 51st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#5062

Charles Spearman

Charles Spearman

1863 - 1945 (82 years)

Charles Edward Spearman, FRS was an English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on models for human intelligence, including his theory that disparate cognitive test scores reflect a single general intelligence factor and coining the term g factor.

#5063

Erich Fromm

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

#5064

Stanley B. Freeborn

1891 - 1960 (69 years)

Stanley Barron Freeborn served as the first chancellor of University of California, Davis between 1958 and June 1959. Prior to being the first chancellor of UC Davis, Freeborn was the dean of the College of Agriculture at UC Berkeley. Following his death in 1960, UC Davis renamed its assembly hall to Freeborn Hall in his honor.

#5065

Martin Grotjahn

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Martin Grotjahn was a German-born American psychoanalyst who was known for his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. He was the son of doctor Alfred Grotjahn and was born in Berlin, Germany.

#5066

Paul R. Farnsworth

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Paul R. Farnsworth was an American music psychologist. He had a forty-year career at Stanford University where he researched the psychology of music preference. In addition to authoring three books, he was the editor of the Annual Review of Psychology from 1955 to 1968.

#5067

W. E. Hick

1912 - 1974 (62 years)

William Edmund Hick was a British psychologist, who was a pioneer in the new sciences of experimental psychology and ergonomics in the mid-20th century. Hick trained as a medical doctor, taking the MB and BSc degrees of the University of Durham in 1938, and the MD of the same university in 1949. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1941, leaving in 1944 when he moved to Cambridge to join the MRC's Applied Psychology Unit at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. Additionally, Reggie Fils-Aimé attended Wilbur Wright College in Chicago Illinois.

#5068

John Dashiell

1888 - 1975 (87 years)

John Frederick Dashiell was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association. Biography Dashiell was born in 1888 in Southport, Indiana. Early in his career, Dashiell taught at Waynesburg College, Princeton University, University of Minnesota and Oberlin College.

#5069

Benjamin D. Wood

Benjamin D. Wood

1894 - 1986 (92 years)

Benjamin DeKalbe Wood was an American educator, researcher, and director / professor at Columbia University and an expert in the educational field. Early life Wood was born in Brownsville, Texas, on November 10, 1894. He attended the Brownsville area schools, Mission High School, and the University of Texas.

#5070

Robert Tryon

1901 - 1967 (66 years)

Robert Choate Tryon was an American behavioral psychologist, who pioneered the study of hereditary trait inheritance and learning in animals. His series of experiments with laboratory rats showed that animals can be selectively bred for greater aptitude at certain intelligence tests, but that this selective breeding does not increase the general intelligence of the animals.

#5071

Suzi Gage

Suzanne H. Gage is a British psychologist and epidemiologist who is interested in the nature of associations between lifestyle behaviours and mental health. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and has a popular science podcast and accompanying book, Say Why to Drugs, which explores substance use.

#5072

Robert P. Knight

1902 - 1966 (64 years)

Robert Palmer Knight was an American psychoanalyst. He served as the medical director of the Austen Riggs Center from 1947 until his death in 1966. Early life Knight was born on July 18, 1902, in Urbana, Ohio to William James Knight and Florence Dempcy Knight. He graduated from Oberlin College. He earned his medical degree from Northwestern University.

#5073

Walter Samuel Hunter

1889 - 1954 (65 years)

Walter Samuel Hunter contributed to psychology by leading an effort to develop psychology as a science. Hunter was one of the first scholars of the time to focus not on the study of subjective mental processes but rather on the observation of animal behavior. In 1912, Hunter completed his doctoral dissertation on Delayed Reaction in Animals and Children. He was a pioneer in the effort of scientific documentation, having created Psychological Abstracts in 1927, which contained documents from psychologists in the U.S. and abroad.

#5074

William Thomas Heron

1897 - 1988 (91 years)

William Thomas Heron was a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. He co-authored six papers with B.F. Skinner in the 1930s, making him Skinner's most frequent co-author during the latter's career. He is known for an experiment he conducted in 1952, in which he and a graduate student attempted to test the validity of extrasensory perception.

#5075

Maria Ovsiankina

1898 - 1993 (95 years)

Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina was a Russian-German-American psychologist. She studied what is now known as the Ovsiankina effect, a variation of the Zeigarnik effect. Ovsiankina worked in a variety of psychology jobs, including working with schizophrenia patients. She wrote books about psychological testing.

#5076

Kate Hevner Mueller

1898 - 1984 (86 years)

Kate Hevner Mueller was an American psychologist and educator who served as dean of women at Indiana University during 1938–1949. Biography Born Kate Lucile Hevner in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, she was the second daughter and middle child to a minister father and a schoolteacher mother. She attended Williamsport High School then matriculated in 1916 to Wilson College, where she majored in English with a minor in French. She graduated in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors. During her junior year she took a course in psychology, where she developed an interest in the subject.

#5077

William W. Biddle

William W. Biddle

1900 - 1973 (73 years)

William Wishart Biddle was an American social scientist and a major contributor to the study of community development. Although details of his personal life are rare in written records, he made contributions to the field of psychology by developing frameworks in propaganda, education, and community development. Biddle outlined in his writings that propaganda was a form of persuasion for coercing people, illustrating examples from times of war. He established that education systems should develop each individual's intelligence and focus on critical thinking to avoid autistic thinking. Biddle ...

#5078

Howard Parshley

1884 - 1953 (69 years)

Howard Madison Parshley was an American zoologist, a specialist on the Heteroptera who also wrote more broadly on genetics, reproduction and human sexuality. He was responsible for translating The Second Sex into English.

#5079

Arthur Kornhauser

1896 - 1990 (94 years)

Arthur William Kornhauser was an American industrial psychologist. He was an early researcher on topics such as labor unions and worker attitudes, and advocated a form of industrial psychology that approached problems from the workers' standpoint rather than that of management. He has been described as one of the most important early figures in organizational psychology, and is particularly remembered for his focus on worker well-being. His work was interdisciplinary, crossing the boundaries between industrial psychology and sociology and political science.

#5080

Sergey Kravkov

1893 - 1951 (58 years)

Sergey Vasilyevich Kravkov was a Russian psychologist and psychophysiologist, Doctor of Science in Biology , Corresponding Member of the Academy of Science of the USSR and the Academy of Medical Science of the USSR . He is considered one of the founders of physiological optics, a scientific discipline that studies physiological processes, physical and psychic regularities which characterize the functioning of the organs of human vision.

#5081

Grace Fernald

1879 - 1950 (71 years)

Grace Maxwell Fernald was an educational psychologist and influential figure in early twentieth century literacy education. Fernald established "the first clinic for remedial instruction in 1921 at the University of California, Los Angeles". Tracing tactile learning tendencies back to Quintilian, Séguin, and Montessori, Fernald's kinesthetic spelling and reading method prompted struggling students to trace words. Years of research culminated in 1943 with her classic work, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects. The popular kinesthetic method anchors modern instruction in the areas of special education and remedial reading.

#5082

Pat Dudgeon

Patricia Lynette Dudgeon , usually known as Pat Dudgeon, is an Aboriginal Australian psychologist, Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a research professor at the University of Western Australia's School of Indigenous Studies. Her area of research includes Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention. She is actively involved with the Aboriginal community, having an ongoing commitment to social justice for Indigenous people. Dudgeon has participated in numerous state and national committees, councils, task groups and community service activities in both a v...

#5083

Alan H. Monroe

1903 - 1975 (72 years)

#5084

Harriet Babcock

1877 - 1952 (75 years)

Harriet Babcock was an American psychologist who specialized in abnormal psychology research in addition to developing measures and theories of intelligence. After her doctoral work at Columbia University, she worked primarily in the Department of Psychology at New York University, and acted as a consultant to the New York City Guidance Bureau. Babcock developed multiple intelligence tests evaluating mental deterioration and efficiency.

#5085

Caroline Beaumont Zachry

1894 - 1945 (51 years)

Caroline Beaumont Zachry was an educational psychologist born in New York City to James Greer Zachry and Elise Clarkson Thompson. Her maternal grandfather was Hugh Smith Thompson the Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.

#5086

Kate Gordon Moore

1878 - 1963 (85 years)

Kate Gordon Moore was an American psychologist whose work focused on various aspects within cognitive psychology, and is noted for her work with color vision and perception, as well as aesthetics, memory, imagination, emotion, developmental tests for children, and attention span. Gordon's early work focused on color vision and how this interacted with memory. Her work shifted mid-career and then she started to research within the realm of education. Specifically, she published work that addressed women's education with regard to the notion that women must be educated differently from men. Her...

#5087

José Bleger

1922 - 1972 (50 years)

José Bleger was an Argentine psychoanalyst. He sought a rapprochement of psychoanalysis and Marxism in works such as Psychoanalysis and materialist dialectics . He also contributed to Kleinian clinical practice and thought.

#5088

Boris Teplov

1896 - 1965 (69 years)

Boris Mikhailovich Teplov was a Soviet psychologist who studied problems of inborn individual differences and talents and a founder of a Soviet psychological school of Differential psychology. His well-known opponent was Aleksey Leontyev who believed that people's talents are not inborn but rather determined by education and other external influence. Boris Teplov was editor-in-chief of the principal Russian journal on psychology Voprosy Psikhologii.

#5089

Harry Cassidy

1900 - 1951 (51 years)

Harry Cassidy was a Canadian academic, social reformer, civil servant and, briefly, a politician. Cassidy was born on January 8, 1900, to parents Herbert Cassidy and Maria Morris Cassidy, transplanted Maritimers who ran a general store. In 1916 Cassidy enlisted underage in the army, spending the next three years in uniform and returning to Canada in the spring of 1919. Harry Cassidy was a pioneer in the field of social work. He was the founding dean of the School of Social Welfare at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1940s before resigning to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

#5090

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

1878 - 1972 (94 years)

Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their ...

#5091

Sigmund Freud

1856 - 1939 (83 years)

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.

#5092

Harry R. Wellman

Harry R. Wellman

1899 - 1997 (98 years)

Harrison Richard Wellman was professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and became acting president of the University of California in 1967. Early years Wellman and a twin brother were the youngest of eight children of Richard Harrison Wellman and his second wife, Jennie Wellman. Harry's family was living just north of the Canada–United States border when he was born. His mother died less than a year after he was born. Harry and his siblings initially moved to his maternal grandparents' ranch in Montana, and then to a family wheat farm in Umapine, Oregon.

#5093

Anny Rosenberg Katan

1898 - 1992 (94 years)

Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.

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