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,
#751
Anke Ehlers
#27127
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Anke Ehlers is a German psychologist and expert in post-traumatic stress disorder . She is a Fellow of the major science academies of the UK and Germany. She currently works at the University of Oxford as Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Experimental Psychopathology.
Go to Profile#752
Wallace Clift
#13820
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Wallace Bruce Clift, Jr. was an American priest and academic. He was the author of several books and articles in the field of the psychology of religion and a professor emeritus at the University of Denver, where he chaired the Department of Religion for many years. He lectured and gave workshops extensively in the United States, Australia, Europe, and Asia on such topics as Jungian psychology, Christian theology, pilgrimage, spiritual growth, dream interpretation, journaling, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Clift published six books, three of which were co-authored with his wife, the Re...
Go to Profile#753
George Albee
#28047
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
George Wilson Albee was an American academic who was a pioneer in clinical psychology, who believed societal factors such as unemployment, racism, sexism, and all the myriad forms of exploitation of people by people were the major cause of mental illness. He was one of the leading figures in the development of community psychology. Albee was an advocate for coping with adversity, strengthening individual resources, and social change.
Go to Profile#754
Marian Sigman
#38405
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Marian Diamond Sigman was a developmental and child clinical psychologist known for her research on autism spectrum disorder . At the time of her death, she was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles .
Go to Profile#755
Andreas Zick
#30740
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Andreas Zick is a professor of Socialization and Conflict Research at Faculty of Education Science, Bielefeld University. Academia Zick is a professor for Socialization and Conflict Research at the Faculty of Education Science at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Concurrent with that, he is also the associate member of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, head of the research training group on Group-Focused Enmity , and associated member of the Faculty of Sociology.
Go to Profile#756
Keith Laws
#32373
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Keith R. Laws is a professor of neuropsychology at the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Professor Laws' research centres on how cognitive functions and processes relate to brain structure and function; notably for research on cognitive functioning in people suffering from neurological and psychiatric disorders. Laws, with his colleagues, created one of the first research groups to investigate impairment of everyday knowledge in patients with schizophrenia and to demonstrate worse cognitive outcomes in women suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Laws' work on the link betw...
Go to Profile#757
Piero Scaruffi
#9905
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Piero Scaruffi is an Italian-American writer who maintains a website on which his reviews of music, film, and art are published. He has created his own publishing entity called Omnipublishing, which exclusively releases his books about music and science.
Go to Profile#758
Andrew Steptoe
#46987
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#759
Gerald Koocher
#22053
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gerald Paul Koocher is an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association . His interests include ethics, clinical child psychology and the study of scientific misconduct. He is Dean Emeritus Simmons University and also holds an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School. Koocher has over 300 publications including 16 books and has edited three scholarly journals including Ethics & Behavior which he founded. Koocher was implicated as an author of the so-called "torture memos" that allowed psychologists to participate in torture during interrogations in t...
Go to Profile#760
Linda Siegel
#19802
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Linda S. Siegel is an American-born psychologist and academic known for her research into the cognitive aspects of learning disabilities. She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada where she held the Dorothy C. Lam Chair in Special Education.
Go to Profile#761
Samuel Messick
#31361
Overall Influence
1931 - 1998 (67 years)
Samuel J. Messick III was an American psychologist who worked for the Educational Testing Service , known for his contributions to validity theory. Early life Messick was born on April 3, 1931, in Philadelphia. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree, and he earned a PhD from Princeton University.
Go to Profile#762
Kenneth A. Dodge
#35735
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kenneth Dodge is the William McDougall Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also the founding and past director of the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy and founder of Family Connects International.
Go to Profile#763
Cecilia Heyes
#27564
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Cecilia Heyes is a British psychologist who studies the evolution of the human mind. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy , and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.
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Donald M. Baer
#13692
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Donald M. Baer was an American psychologist who contributed to the science of applied behavior analysis and pioneered the development of behavior analysis at the University of Kansas and the University of Washington. Baer is best known for his contributions at the University of Kansas. Throughout his career, he published over two hundred articles, books, and chapters on various psychological issues. Some of his most noteworthy contributions include literature on behavior-analytic theory, experimental design, and early childhood interventions. Baer received numerous awards during his lifetime...
Go to Profile#765
Andreas Maercker
#31482
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andreas Maercker is a German clinical psychologist and international expert in traumatic stress-related mental disorders who works in Switzerland. He also contributed to lifespan and sociocultural aspects of trauma sequelae, e.g. the Janus-Face model of posttraumatic growth. Recently, he has been increasingly engaged in cultural clinical psychology.
Go to Profile#766
Arnaldo Rascovsky
#38460
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Arnaldo Rascovsky was an Argentine pediatrician and psychoanalyst. He graduated from University of Buenos Aires. Rascovsky was instrumental in establishing Buenos Aires as an important center for psychoanalysis in Latin America and made significant contribution to the analysis of filicide.
Go to Profile#767
John Money
#9847
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
John William Money was a New Zealand American psychologist, sexologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University known for his research on human sexual behavior and gender. Believing that gender identity was malleable within the first two years of life, Money advocated for the surgical "normalization" of the genitalia of intersex infants.
Go to Profile#768
Na'im Akbar
#22565
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Na'im Akbar is a clinical psychologist well known for his Afrocentric approach to psychology. He is a distinguished scholar, public speaker, and author. Akbar entered the world of Black psychology in the 1960s, as the Black Power Movement was gaining momentum. In the 1970s, Akbar published his first critiques of the Eurocentric psychological tradition, asserting that this model maintained the intellectual oppression of African Americans. Akbar criticized the pathology perspectives that had taken over as the dominant literature on African Americans. Many of his major works involved mental healt...
Go to Profile#769
Richard F. Thompson
#32017
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Richard Frederick Thompson was an American behavioral neuroscientist. He was the William M. Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California, with a parallel appointment as professor of neurology. Thompson was known for his work on learning and memory. His graduate student, David A. McCormick discovered that the cerebellum was critical in learning and performance in classical conditioning. During his career, he served as editor-in-chief of the scientific journals Physiological Psychology, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, and Be...
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Scott Barry Kaufman
#16362
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Scott Barry Kaufman is an American cognitive scientist, author, podcaster, coach, and popular science writer. His writing and research focuses on intelligence, creativity, and human potential. Most media attention has focused on Kaufman's attempt to redefine intelligence. Kaufman is founder and director of the Center for Human Potential and has taught courses at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He is one of the top 20 most cited scientists studying intelligence, and is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world. In 2015, he was named one of "50 groundbreak...
Go to Profile#771
Bruce Wampold
#30326
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Bruce E. Wampold is Emeritus Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. and Director of the Research Institute at Modum Bad Psychiatric Center, Vikersund, Norway. Education Wampold received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Washington, his M.Ed. in educational psychology from the University of Hawaiʻi, and his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a licensed psychologist and Board Certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology and has an Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University.
Go to Profile#772
Anu Realo
#37972
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Anu Realo is an Estonian personality and cross-cultural psychologist. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, the United Kingdom, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Go to Profile#773
Lee Jussim
#36729
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lee J. Jussim is an American social psychologist. He leads the Social Perception Laboratory at Rutgers University. Early life and education When Jussim was 5 years old, his family moved into a Brooklyn-area public housing where they lived until he was 12. When he was 13, his family moved to Levittown, Long Island, and his mother died of cancer shortly after.
Go to Profile#774
Daniel M. Oppenheimer
#18866
Overall Influence
Daniel M. Oppenheimer is a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. Previously, he was a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. From 2004 to 2012, he worked at Princeton University's Department of Psychology.
Go to Profile#775
Lloyd Humphreys
#21782
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Lloyd Girton Humphreys was an American differential psychologist and methodologist who focused on assessing individual differences in human behavior. His work is among the most widely cited in intelligence research, and he received awards in this field.
Go to Profile#776
Douglas T. Kenrick
#29746
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Douglas T. Kenrick is professor of psychology at Arizona State University. His research and writing integrate three scientific syntheses of the last few decades: evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory. He is author of over 170 scientific articles, books, and book chapters, the majority applying evolutionary ideas to human cognition and behavior.
Go to Profile#777
Denny Borsboom
#29281
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Denny Borsboom is a Dutch psychologist and psychometrician. He has been a professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam since 2013. His work has included applying network theory to the study of mental disorders and their symptoms. In 2018 he presented the Paul B. Baltes Lecture at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Go to Profile#778
Anne Roe
#21890
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Anne Roe was an American clinical psychologist and researcher who studied creativity and occupational psychology. Her publications included The Making of a Scientist and the Psychology of Occupations .
Go to Profile#779
Jonathan Smith
#38114
Overall Influence
Jonathan Alan Smith is a psychologist who has been very prominent in promoting qualitative research within social psychology and health psychology. In particular, he has developed and promoted a particular approach known as interpretative phenomenological analysis .
Go to Profile#780
Naomi Eisenberger
#30547
Overall Influence
Naomi I. Eisenberger is a social psychologist known for her research on the neural basis of social pain and social connection. She is professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she directs the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and co-directs the Social Cognitive Science laboratory.
Go to Profile#781
Michael Hendricks
#29406
Overall Influence
Michael Lawrence Hendricks is an American psychologist, suicidologist, and an advocate for the LGBT community. He has worked in private practice as a partner at the Washington Psychological Center, P.C. in northwest Washington, D.C., since 1999. Hendricks is an adjunct professor of clinical psychopharmacology and has taught at Argosy University, Howard University, and Catholic University of America. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association .
Go to Profile#782
Charles Figley
#19842
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Charles Figley is an American university professor in the fields of psychology, family therapy, psychoneuroimmunology family studies, social work, traumatology, and mental health. He is the Paul Henry Kurzweg, MD Distinguished Chair in Disaster Mental Health and Graduate School of Social Work Professor at Tulane University . He was a full professor and Traumatology Institute Director at the Florida State University College of Social Work. Figley became a Purdue University Full Professor in 1983 with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Psychological Sciences.
Go to Profile#783
Keith Rayner
#45050
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Keith Rayner was a cognitive psychologist best known for pioneering modern eye-tracking methodology in reading and visual perception. Career Rayner obtained his B.S. and M.S. in psychology at the University of Utah and subsequently obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University with thesis titled The Perceptual Span and Peripheral Cues in Reading. In 1973, he was appointed as an assistant professor of education, psychology, and visual science at University of Rochester. From there, he moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1978. In 2008, Rayner moved to University of California, San Diego, where he held the position of Atkinson Family Professor of Psychology.
Go to Profile#784
Lauren Resnick
#26827
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Lauren B. Resnick is an educational psychologist who has made notable contributions to the cognitive science of learning and instruction. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and was previously director of the University's Learning Research and Development Center. In 1986-1987, Resnick was the president of the American Educational Research Association. She received the 1998 E. L. Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association.
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John C. DeFries
#19277
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
John C. DeFries is one of the world's leading behavior geneticists. His achievements include being President of the Behavior Genetics Association and cofounder of the journal Behavior Genetics, as well as its co-editor . His awards include The Dobzhansky Award for Outstanding Research in Behavior Genetics , Consulting Editor of the Journal of Learning Disabilities , Fellowships in the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section J .
Go to Profile#786
Brian Iwata
#14804
Overall Influence
Brian Anthony Iwata was an American psychologist. He was a Distinguished Professor at University of Florida. Research Iwata was best known for his article, "Toward a Functional Analysis of Self-Injury" which was originally published in 1982 and was republished in 1994 in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. The significance of this article on the field of Applied Behavior Analysis was monumental. Iwata and his coauthors developed an approach to determining why self-injury was happening on an individual basis, which involved empirically measuring the role of environmental events on self-i...
Go to Profile#787
Thomas Joiner
#30377
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Thomas Joiner is an American academic psychologist and leading expert on suicide. He is the Robert O. Lawton Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, where he operates his Laboratory for the Study of the Psychology and Neurobiology of Mood Disorders, Suicide, and Related Conditions. He is author of Why People Die by Suicide and Myths about Suicide , and the current editor-in-chief of Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior.
Go to Profile#788
Richard Solomon
#42003
Overall Influence
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
Richard Lester Solomon was a psychologist well known for his work with in comparative psychology, as well as his opponent-process theory of emotion. Solomon attended Brown University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1940, a master's degree in 1942, and a doctorate in 1947.
Go to Profile#789
Roger Fouts
#15081
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Roger S. Fouts is a retired American primate researcher. He was co-founder and co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Washington, and a professor of psychology at the Central Washington University. He is best known for his role in teaching Washoe the chimpanzee to communicate using a set of signs taken from American sign language.
Go to Profile#790
Adam Grant
#7492
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Adam M. Grant is an American popular science author, and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania specializing in organizational psychology. Early life and education Grant was born in the township of West Bloomfield, Michigan, on August 13, 1981, to a lawyer father and a teacher mother. He grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Grant participated in springboard diving and aspired to be a professional basketball player growing up. During high school, he was named an All-American in 1999 in diving.
Go to Profile#791
Clyde Hendrick
#38207
Overall Influence
Clyde Hendrick was a Horn Professor of Psychology at Texas Tech University. He received his doctorate degree from University of Missouri in 1967 in Psychology. His main research interests included close relationships. During the past decade his primary focus was around love and sex attitudes. In collaboration with doctoral students. Hendrick studied various aspects related to love and sex attitudes. These two research areas are connected to close relations, such as relationship satisfaction, communication modalities, personality variables, conflict styles, and self-disclosure. He worked very closely with Susan Hendrick on many of his research studies.
Go to Profile#792
Jay Belsky
#36598
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jay Belsky is an American child psychologist and the Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor of Human Development at the University of California, Davis. He is noted for his research in the fields of child development and family studies. He was a founding investigator of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development in the United States, and of the National Evaluation of Sure Start in the United Kingdom. He has been an ISI Highly Cited Researcher since 2002.
Go to Profile#793
Steven Reiss
#27135
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
Steven Reiss was an American psychologist who contributed original ideas, new assessment methods, and influential research studies to four topics in psychology: anxiety disorders, developmental disabilities, intrinsic motivation, and the psychology of religion.
Go to Profile#794
C. George Boeree
#23095
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Cornelis George Boeree was an American psychologist and professor emeritus at Shippensburg University, specializing in personality theory and the history of psychology. Life Boeree was born in Badhoevedorp, near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. He moved with his parents and brother to the United States in 1956 and grew up on Long Island, New York. He married Judy Kovarik in 1972 and had three daughters. He received his doctoral degree in 1980 from Oklahoma State University. He died on January 5, 2021, at his home in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#795
Bruce Hood
#10649
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bruce MacFarlane Hood is a Canadian-born British experimental psychologist and philosopher who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience. He is currently based at the University of Bristol and his major research interests include intuitive theories, self identity, essentialism and the cognitive processes behind adult magical thinking.
Go to Profile#796
Andy Field
#27520
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Andy Field is an English academic currently serving as Professor of Quantitative Methods at the University of Sussex. Field is noted as the author of several textbooks about statistics, which typically deal with software application of statistical theory in SPSS and the R programming language. His books are characterised by an irreverent, sometimes outrageous, writing style that is atypical of academic texts. His student-friendly approach to writing led to The Times Higher Education Supplement dubbing him 'the Harry Potter of the social sciences'.
Go to Profile#797
Martin Bauer
#21851
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Martin W. Bauer is a Professor of social psychology. He directs the MSc in Social and Public Communication at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. Martin Bauer was a Research Fellow in 'Public Understanding of Science' at the Science Museum in London, an academic visitor to the Maison des Sciences de l'homme in Paris, and he teaches regularly in Brazil at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.
Go to Profile#798
John Antonakis
#14933
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
John Antonakis is a professor of organizational behavior at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne and former editor-in-chief of The Leadership Quarterly. Life He was born and raised in South Africa of Greek parents and is Swiss naturalized. He received his Ph.D. in applied management and decision sciences with a focus on leadership measurement and psychometrics, and was a post-doc in cognitive psychology ; he did undergraduate work at the University of the Witwatersrand in business and economics, and received his Bachelor and master's degrees at Johnson and Wa...
Go to Profile#799
Jennifer Skeem
#25425
Overall Influence
Jennifer Lynne Skeem is an American psychologist and the Mack Distinguished Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare, where she is also the Associate Dean of Research. She is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on criminal justice and behavioral science, including how to improve the ways that the criminal justice system treats people with mental illness. From 2013 to 2014, she was the president of the American Psychology-Law Society. Since 2013, she has been a fellow of the Association for Psychological...
Go to Profile#800
Marie Anaut
#39742
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Marie Anaut is a professor of clinical psychology and educational sciences at the Lumière University Lyon 2. She is a specialist in psychological resilience. Life and work In 1990, Marie Anaut defended her doctoral thesis entitled Child placement behaviors: analysis of intergenerational repetition at the University of Lyon 2 under the direction of Robert Martin. She was named a lecturer there and became director of the Institute of Psychology at that university from 1999 to 2004. She was a university vice-president from 2008 to 2012. After completing her post-doctoral habilitation in clinical...
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