Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#801

C. Randy Gallistel

C. Randy Gallistel

#38278

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Charles Ransom Gallistel is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. He is an expert in the cognitive processes of learning and memory, using animal models to carry out research on these topics. Gallistel is married to fellow psychologist Rochel Gelman. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty he held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of the psychology department and Bernard L. & Ida E. Grossman Term Professor, and at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#802

James F. Sallis

#49161

Overall Influence

#803

Claude Steele

#14666

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Claude Mason Steele is a social psychologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, where he is the I. James Quillen Endowed Dean, Emeritus at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, and Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus.

#804

Seth Roberts

#26461

Overall Influence

1953 - 2014 (61 years)

Seth Roberts was a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of the bestselling book The Shangri-La Diet, and a prolific blogger. He was well known for his work in self-experimentation which led to many discoveries, including his diet, multiple publications and a popular blog.

#805

John D. Bransford

#17456

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

John D. Bransford was an emeritus professor of education at the University of Washington College of Education in Seattle, Washington. He was the Founding Director of The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments Center, and a Centennial Professor and former director of the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Bransford was a member Emeritus of the National Academy of Education and the 2001 recipient of the E. L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award. He died on April 11, 2022, at the age of 78.

#806

Edith Ackermann

Edith Ackermann

#19808

Overall Influence

1946 - 2016 (70 years)

Edith K. Ackermann was a Swiss-born American psychologist who explored the interactions between developmental psychology, play, learning and design. A graduate of the University of Geneva, and a protege to Jean Piaget, she held permanent and visiting positions at several institutions in the United States and Europe, including the MIT Media Lab.

#807

Henry Felix Kaiser

#36791

Overall Influence

1927 - 1992 (65 years)

Henry Felix Kaiser was an American psychologist and educator who worked in the fields of psychometrics and statistical psychology. He developed the Varimax rotation method and the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test for factor analysis in the late 1950s.

#808

Lori White

#14634

Overall Influence

Lori White is an American academic and administrator. White currently serves as the President of DePauw University, a liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. She was previously the vice chancellor of student affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the first woman and first person of color to serve as president of the DePauw University, and the only person of color to serve as president of an Indiana university.

#809

Marta Kutas

#34930

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Marta Kutas is a Professor and Chair of cognitive science and an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. She also directs the Center for Research in Language at UCSD. Kutas is known for discovering the N400, an event-related potential component typically elicited by unexpected linguistic stimuli, with her colleague Steven Hillyard in one of the first studies in what is now the field of neurolinguistics.

#810

Marcia K. Johnson

#43927

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Marcia K. Johnson is a Sterling Professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University. She was born in 1943 in Alameda, California. Johnson attended public schools in Oakland and Ventura. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she received both her B.A. in psychology and Ph.D. in experimental psychology . In 1970 Johnson moved to Long Island, New York to take a faculty position at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she worked until 1985. She then accepted a position at Princeton University and was there from 1985 to 2000. Johnson is currently a Sterling ...

#811

Clark McCauley

#32157

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Clark Richard McCauley is an American social psychologist who is Research Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College.

#812

Daniel Stokols

#16009

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Daniel Stokols is Research Professor and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Social Ecology in the Departments of Psychology and Social Behavior and Planning, Policy, and Design, and founding dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds appointments in Public Health, Epidemiology, and Nursing Science at UCI. His recent research has examined factors that influence the success of transdisciplinary research and training programs. Additional areas of Stokols' research include the design and evaluation of community and work site health promotion pro...

#813

Tania Singer

#16553

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior and social emotions such as compassion and empathy. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource...

#814

Jeffrey Arnett

#18231

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts. His main research interest is in "emerging adulthood", a term he coined, which refers to the distinct phase between adolescence and young adulthood, occurring from the ages of 18 to 25.

#815

Gary Cziko

#16392

Overall Influence

Gary Cziko is an American researcher, and author in the field of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who has worked on the philosophical model known as perceptual control theory – a model whose original developer, William T. Powers, was his mentor. He has written two introductory books on the subject, and in 1995 he introduced the concept of "universal selectionism" into the PCT model.

#816

António R. Damásio

#50021

Overall Influence

#817

Loyd Auerbach

#58091

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Loyd Auerback is a parapsychologist, paranormal investigator, and mentalist. He has appeared on numerous television shows that profile ghost hunting and other paranormal topics. He develops and teaches online courses on parapsychology.

#818

Sophie Scott

#27720

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sophie Kerttu Scott is a British neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at University College London . Her research investigates the cognitive neuroscience of voices, speech and laughter particularly speech perception, speech production, vocal emotions and human communication. She also serves as director of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

#819

Robert L. Greene

#39323

Overall Influence

Robert L. Greene is an American psychologist known for his work on human learning and memory. He has conducted notable experiments on why some lists of words are more memorable. Career Greene earned a B.A. from University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984.

#820

Colwyn Trevarthen

#35408

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Colwyn Trevarthen is Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh. Background After training as a biologist in New Zealand at Auckland University College and Otago University, Trevarthen researched infancy at Harvard in 1967.

#821

Tom Pyszczynski

#27172

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Tom Pyszczynski is an American social psychologist. He is notable, together with Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon, for founding the field of Terror Management Theory . TMT is a theory that is based on the writings of Ernest Becker, along with other existential thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, and Heidegger. At the heart of TMT is the notion that human beings have a unique capacity for self-awareness, which makes them realize that death is inevitable. This realization, which conflicts with people's instinctive need for self-preservation, gives rise to a potential for existential anxiety, or terror, that is greater than that in other animals.

#822

Dominic Abrams

#23735

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

William Dominic Joshua Abrams, is a Professor of Social Psychology and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Group Processes in the School of Psychology at the University of Kent. His research examines social identity, social cohesion, inclusion and exclusion, prejudice, discrimination, social attitudes, social change and social influence in groups across the life course. It spans social and developmental psychology and gerontology and uses a wide range of methods, most frequently surveys and laboratory and field experiments.

#823

Vicki Bruce

#34449

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dame Victoria Geraldine Bruce, , known as Vicki Bruce, is an English psychologist, Professor of Psychology and former Head of the School of Psychology at Newcastle University. She is known for her work on human face perception and person memory, including face recognition and recall by eyewitnesses and gaze. and other aspects of social cognition. She is also interested in visual cognition more generally. She was made a Dame in the 2015 Birthday Honours list.

#824

Dietrich Dörner

#7177

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Dietrich Dörner is emeritus professor for General and Theoretical Psychology at the Institute of Theoretical Psychology at the Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Germany. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.

#825

Naomi Miyake

#35222

Overall Influence

1949 - 2015 (66 years)

was a Japanese cognitive psychologist. She was a professor at Chukyo University and the University of Tokyo. She is best known for her research on learning and collaboration, in the field of cognitive science.

#826

David F. Tolin

#25919

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

David F. Tolin is an American clinical psychologist. History Born in Washington state, Tolin graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1990. He earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Arkansas. Tolin is board-certified in clinical psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology.

#827

Raymond D. Fowler

#29801

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Raymond D. Fowler was an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of the University of Alabama. He was president of the American Psychological Association and served as APA's executive vice president and chief executive officer from 1989 to 2003.

#828

Jean-Claude Falmagne

Jean-Claude Falmagne

#31416

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Jean-Claude Falmagne is a mathematical psychologist whose scientific contributions deal with problems in reaction time theory, psychophysics, philosophy of science, measurement theory, decision theory, and educational technology. Together with Jean-Paul Doignon, he developed knowledge space theory, which is the mathematical foundation for the ALEKS software for the assessment of knowledge in various academic subjects, including K-12 mathematics, chemistry, and accounting.

#829

Scott Plous

#26603

Overall Influence

Scott Plous is an American academic social psychologist. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University and Executive Director of Social Psychology Network. Early life and education Scott Plous was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and earned his PhD in social psychology at Stanford University, where he also completed a MacArthur Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Peace and Cooperation. His doctoral advisor at Stanford was Philip Zimbardo.

#830

Robert R McCrae

#50916

Overall Influence

#831

Anne Dufourmantelle

#25309

Overall Influence

1964 - 2017 (53 years)

Anne Dufourmantelle was a French philosopher and psychoanalyst. Education and career Dufourmantelle was educated at Brown University and at Paris-Sorbonne University, where she earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1994. She practised psychoanalysis and was a professor at the European Graduate School and a contributor to the French daily newspaper Libération.

#832

Nancy Eisenberg

#42210

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nancy Eisenberg is a psychologist and professor at Arizona State University. She was the President of the Western Psychological Association in 2014-2015 and the Division 7 president of the American Psychological Association in 2010-2012. Her research focuses on areas of emotional and social development of children. She is also in charge of a research lab at Arizona State University where undergraduate researchers help in longitudinal studies of social and emotional development in children and young adolescents.

#833

Robert A. Baron

#29609

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Alan Baron is Professor of Management and the Spears Chair of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University's Spears School of Business. He studied psychology at City University of New York and received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1968. He is co-author of the textbook Social Psychology , published by Allyn & Bacon, as well as numerous other books and journal articles. Dr. Baron has held faculty appointments at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Purdue, the University of Minnesota, Texas, South Carolina, Washington, Princeton University, and Oxford University.

#834

Geraldine Dawson

#21920

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Geraldine Dawson is an American child clinical psychologist, specializing in autism. She has conducted research on early detection, brain development, and treatment of autism spectrum disorders and collaborated on studies of genetic risk factors in autism. Dawson is William Cleland Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and professor of psychology and neuroscience, former director, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development at Duke University Medical Center. Dawson was president of the International Society for Aut...

#835

Gay Hendricks

#39937

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, writer, and teacher in the field of personal growth, relationships, and body intelligence. He is best known for his work in relationship enhancement and in the development of conscious breathing exercises. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1974, Hendricks began teaching at the University of Colorado. He spent 21 years at the University of Colorado and became a full professor in the Counseling Psychology Department while founding The Hendricks Institute. He conducts workshops with his wife of nearly 40 years, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks.

#836

Ronald F. Levant

#20508

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ronald F. Levant is a psychologist, a professor, and a former president of the American Psychological Association . After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, Levant completed a Doctor of Education at Harvard University. He also holds a Master of Business Administration from Boston University.

#837

Stuart J. Ritchie

#17917

Overall Influence

Stuart James Ritchie is a Scottish psychologist and science communicator known for his research in human intelligence. He has served as a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London since the summer of 2018. He was previously active in researching intelligence as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, his book Science Fictions was nominated for the £25,000 Royal Society Prize for Science Books but lost out to Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life. Ritchie writes a newsletter titled Science Fictions for the newspaper i w...

#838

Alexander Haslam

#35209

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Stephen Alexander "Alex" Haslam is a professor of psychology and ARC Australian Laureate Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on areas of social psychology, organisational psychology and health psychology, exploring issues of stereotyping and prejudice, tyranny and resistance, leadership and power, stress and well-being. This work is informed by, and has contributed to the development of, theory and ideas relating to the social identity approach.

#839

David Tacey

#22574

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Tacey is an Australian public intellectual, writer and interdisciplinary scholar. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Research Professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra.

#840

Nadeen L. Kaufman

#35243

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Nadeen L. Kaufman is an American psychology professor known for her work on learning disability. Biography Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Education from Hofstra University in 1965; master's degree in Educational Psychology from Columbia University in 1972; Ed.M. in Learning and Reading Disabilities from Columbia University in 1975; and Ed.D. in Special Education—Neurosciences from Columbia University in 1978 . She completed a predoctoral internship and a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychology at Yale University.

#841

Adele Diamond

#19596

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors, especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they have impacted early education.

#842

Horst-Eberhard Richter

Horst-Eberhard Richter

#22234

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Horst-Eberhard Richter was a German psychoanalyst, psychosomatist and social philosopher. The author of numerous books was also regarded by many as the große alte Mann of the Federal German Peace movement.

#843

David Lubinski

#29645

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David J. Lubinski is an American psychology professor known for his work in applied research, psychometrics, and individual differences. His work has focussed on exceptionally able children: the nature of exceptional ability, the development of people with exceptional ability . He has published widely on the impact of extremely high ability on outputs such as publications, creative writing and art, patents etc. This work disconfirmed the "threshold hypothesis" which suggested that a certain minimum of IQ might be needed, but higher IQ did not translate into greater productivity or creativity....

#844

Patricia Alexander

#43823

Overall Influence

Patricia A. Alexander is an educational psychologist who has conducted notable research on the role of individual difference, strategic processing, and interest in students' learning. She is currently a university distinguished professor, Jean Mullan Professor of Literacy, and Distinguished Scholar/Teacher in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology in the College of Education at the University of Maryland and a visiting professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

#845

Jonathan Schooler

Jonathan Schooler

#37596

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jonathan Schooler, is an American psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches various topics that intersect aspects of both cognitive psychology and philosophy such as: Belief in free will, Meta-awareness, Mindfulness, Mind-Wandering, Memory, Creativity, and Emotion. Schooler is also known for his sometimes controversial research on topics such as Anomalous Cognition and the decline effect.

#846

Sidney W. Bijou

#14626

Overall Influence

1908 - 2009 (101 years)

Sidney William Bijou was an American developmental psychologist who developed an approach of treating childhood disorders using behavioral therapy, in which positive actions were rewarded and negative behaviors were largely ignored, rather than punished.

#847

Daryl Bem

#39864

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

#848

James D. Hollan

#20091

Overall Influence

James D. Hollan is professor of cognitive science and adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego. In collaboration with Professor Edwin Hutchins, he directs the Distributed Cognition and Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory at UCSD, and co-directs the Design Lab. Hollan has also spent time working at Xerox PARC and at Bellcore. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2003 and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2015.

#849

Brendan Maher

#38557

Overall Influence

1924 - 2009 (85 years)

Brendan Arnold Maher was a psychology professor at Harvard University who pioneered the scientific study of psychology in the laboratory, and laid the groundwork for the study of psychology and its relationship to genetics. Maher was most interested in human psychopathology, especially schizophrenia. One of his major contributions was to introduce laboratory experimentation strategies to research of this mental illness. Maher also mentored many students through their own research projects at Harvard, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, University of Wi...

#850

Alfredo Ardila

#38660

Overall Influence

1946 - 2021 (75 years)

Alfredo Ardila was a Colombian neuropsychologist. He graduated as a psychologist from the National University of Colombia and received a doctoral degree in neuropsychology from the Moscow State University where he worked with Alexander R. Luria. He published in cognitive and behavioral neurosciences, especially in neuropsychology. His research interests included brain organization of cognition, the historical origin of human cognition, aphasia, and bilingualism.

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