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,
#851
Steven Neuberg
#25446
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Steven L. Neuberg is an experimental social psychologist whose research has contributed to topics pertaining to person perception, impression formation, stereotyping, prejudice, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotype threat, and prosocial behavior. His research can be broadly characterized as exploring the ways motives and goals shape social thought processes; extending this approach, his later work employs the adaptationist logic of evolutionary psychology to inform the study of social cognition and social behavior. Neuberg has published over sixty scholarly articles and chapters, and has co...
Go to Profile#852
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
#34342
Overall Influence
Morton Ann Gernsbacher is Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a specialist in autism and psycholinguistics and has written and edited professional and lay books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. She is currently on the advisory board of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest and associate editor for Cognitive Psychology, and she has previously held editorial positions for Memory & Cognition and Language and Cognitive Processes. She was also president of...
Go to Profile#853
Lee A. Thompson
#36488
Overall Influence
Lee Anne Thompson is an American psychology professor known for her work in behavior genetics and the biological processes involved in intelligence. Career Thompson earned her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University in 1982, then attended University of Colorado at Boulder, earning an M.A. in 1985 and her Ph.D. in 1987. She currently teaches at Case Western and is on the editorial board of Intelligence.
Go to Profile#854
Wolfgang Tschacher
#32769
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Wolfgang Tschacher is a Swiss psychologist and university lecturer. He is professor at the University of Bern.., Switzerland. He has conducted theoretical and empirical research in the fields of psychotherapy and psychopathology, especially from a systems-theoretical perspective that includes self-organization and complexity theory. He is active in the development of time series methods for the modeling of psychotherapeutic processes and generally social systems.
Go to Profile#855
Edmund Fantino
#22022
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Edmund Fantino was an American experimental psychologist. He was raised in Queens, New York before continuing on to earn his bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1961, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1964. His doctoral adviser was Dick Herrnstein.
Go to Profile#856
Felicia Pratto
#17396
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Felicia Pratto is a social psychologist known for her work on intergroup relations, dynamics of power, and social cognition. She is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Pratto is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Go to Profile#857
Jordan Grafman
#24046
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jordan Henry Grafman is an American neuropsychologist who serves as Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Brain Injury Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Before joining Northwestern and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Grafman served as the director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research at the Kessler Foundation. He also served as Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. His research primarily focuses on investigating the funct...
Go to Profile#858
David Bakan
#37794
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
David Bakan was an American psychologist. Career David Bakan was a major influence in how the field of psychology implemented the use of statistics in research, particularly the statistical test of significance. Bakan was one of the earliest psychologists to promote the use of Bayesian statistics as an alternative to conventional statistical approaches, first publishing on the topic in 1953. He was one of the founders of the American Psychological Association's Division 26, the History of Psychology, and served as the president of the division in 1970–71.
Go to Profile#859
Charles E. Schaefer
#28671
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Charles E. Schaefer was an American psychologist considered by many to be the "Father of Play Therapy" who has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show and Good Morning America. He was Professor of Psychology and was Director of both the Center for Psychological Services and the Crying Baby Clinic at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#860
Dorret Boomsma
#21887
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Dorret I. Boomsma is a Dutch biological psychologist specializing in genetics and twin studies. Education Secondary education: Willem de Zwijgerlyceum, BussumBachelor's: Vrije Universiteit in Psychology, cum laude, 1979Master's: Vrije Universiteit in Psychophysiology, cum laude, 1983Master's: University of Colorado at Boulder in Biological Psychology/Behavior Genetics, 1983Ph.D.: Vrije Universiteit , cum laude, 1992
Go to Profile#861
Wolfgang Wagner
#29024
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Wolfgang Wagner is an Austrian social psychologist, currently professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Formerly he was at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and affiliated with the Department of Social Psychology and Methodology at the University of San Sebastián, Spain. He is renowned for his contributions to the Theory of Social Representations.
Go to Profile#862
David W. Johnson
#37009
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
David W. Johnson is a social psychologist whose research has focused on four overlapping areas: cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts; constructive controversy; conflict resolution and peer mediation and experiential learning to teach interpersonal and small group skills. Johnson has developed and applied psychological knowledge in effort to improve practices within educational systems. Johnson's books have been translated into 20 different languages and his work has been applied in many countries.
Go to Profile#863
Susan E. Jackson
#14177
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Susan E. Jackson is an American researcher in the fields of managing for environmental sustainability, strategic human resource management, occupational burnout, and work team diversity. She was the co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory in 1981, the primary diagnostic instrument for the condition of occupational burnout.
Go to Profile#864
Charles Mace
#18312
Overall Influence
F. Charles Mace is a behavioral psychologist. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and received his doctorate at the University of Arizona. He is well known for his research on the functional analysis of severe behavior disorders, behavioral momentum, and the matching law. He has published over one hundred articles and chapters.
Go to Profile#865
Albert Ellis
#53231
Overall Influence
#866
Daniel Nettle
#24131
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Daniel Nettle is a British behavioural scientist, biologist and social scientist. He is notable for his research that integrates psychology with evolutionary and comparative biology. After obtaining a BA in Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford University, Nettle went on to complete a PhD in Biological Anthropology at University College London. He is a CNRS senior researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod, an interdisciplinary research institute associated with the Ecole Normale Superieure and EHESS in Paris.
Go to Profile#867
Carlo Strenger
#18350
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Carlo Strenger was a Swiss and Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst and public intellectual who served as professor of psychology and philosophy at Tel Aviv University . He was a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Terrorism at John Jay College, on the scientific advisory board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna, and a member of the Seminar for Existential Psychoanalysis in Zurich. His research focused on the impact of globalization on meaning, personal and group identity.
Go to Profile#868
Michael J. Garanzini
#40511
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael J. Garanzini, S.J. is an American priest in the Society of Jesus of the Roman Catholic Church. He currently serves as President of both the International Association of Jesuit Universities and the US-based Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. From 2001 until 2015, Garanzini served as the twenty-third President of Loyola University Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, a member of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.
Go to Profile#869
Yuri Mikhailovich Orlov
#24980
Overall Influence
1928 - 2000 (72 years)
Yuri Mikhailovich Orlov - Russian scientist, professor of pedagogy, psychology and philosophy, practicing psychologist, creator of the theory and practices of SanoGene Thinking , author of books on personality psychology .
Go to Profile#870
David Andrich
#28504
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Andrich is an Australian academic and assessment specialist. He has made substantial contributions to quantitative social science including seminal work on the Polytomous Rasch model for measurement, which is used in the social sciences, in health and other areas.
Go to Profile#871
Tim van Gelder
#13892
Overall Influence
Tim van Gelder is the co-founder of Austhink Software, an Australian software development company, and the Managing Director of Austhink Consulting. He was born in Australia, and was educated at the University of Melbourne . He went on to receive his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh . He has held academic positions at Indiana University and the Australian National University before returning to Melbourne as an Australian Research Council QEII Research Fellow. In 1998, he transitioned to part-time academic work allowing him to pursue private training and consulting, and in 2005 began working full-time at Austhink Software.
Go to Profile#872
Arne Öhman
#27638
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Arne Öhman was a Swedish psychologist who served as professor of psychology at the Karolinska Institutet from 1993 to 2010, where he was the head of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience from 2001 to 2004. He previously served as a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Uppsala from 1982 to 1993. He was noted for his research in the fields of experimental psychology and psychophysiology, and on the psychology of emotion. He was president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research from 1984 to 1985, and received its award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychophysiology in 2001.
Go to Profile#873
Judith Dunn
#18249
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Judith Frances Dunn, is a British psychologist and academic, who specialises in social developmental psychology. Early life and education Dunn was the daughter of James Pace and Jean Stewart. She studied at New Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1962; as per tradition, her BA was promoted to a Master of Arts degree in 1968. While a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, she undertook postgraduate research and she completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1982.
Go to Profile#874
C. Sue Carter
#22290
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
C. Sue Carter is an American biologist and behavioral neurobiologist. She is an internationally recognized expert in behavioral neuroendocrinology. In 2014 she was appointed Director of The Kinsey Institute and Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana University. Carter was the first person to identify the physiological mechanisms responsible for social monogamy.
Go to Profile#875
Jacobo Grinberg
#27213
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum , known as Jacobo Grinberg was a Mexican pseudoscientist, neurophysiologist and psychologist. He studied Mexican shamanism, Eastern disciplines, meditation, astrology and telepathy, using his own interpretation of a scientific method. He wrote more than 50 books about these subjects. Grinberg disappeared in December 1994.
Go to Profile#876
Harlan Lane
#7744
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Harlan Lawson Lane was an American psychologist. Lane was the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and founder of the Center for Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language . His research was focused on speech, Deaf culture, and sign language.
Go to Profile#877
Chris Argyris
#47027
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Chris Argyris was an American business theorist and professor at Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School. Argyris, like Richard Beckhard, Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, is known as a co-founder of organization development, and known for seminal work on learning organizations.
Go to Profile#878
Leslie Ungerleider
#36567
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Leslie G. Ungerleider was an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, previously Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ungerleider was known for introducing the concepts of the dorsal and ventral streams, two pathways of information processing in the brain that specialize in visuospatial processing and object recognition, respectively.
Go to Profile#879
David Halpern
#9296
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David Solomon Halpern is a British civil servant, heading the Behavioural Insights Team spun out from the Cabinet Office. Education Halpern attended King's School, Rochester, before attending Christ's College, University of Cambridge achieving a 1st in natural Sciences specialising in experimental psychology. He then went on to complete a PhD in social and political sciences, also at St John's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#880
Mary K. Rothbart
#39378
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Mary Klevjord Rothbart is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. She is known for her research in the fields of temperament and social development, emotional development, and development of attention. She was a co-founder of Birth to Three, a parent support and education program. She has written over 159 articles related to educational psychology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology. Rothbart has also authored and co-authored many books, including Becoming Who We Are, for which she received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association.
Go to Profile#881
Joel Greenspoon
#35109
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Joel Greenspoon was an American psychology researcher, professor, and clinician. Greenspoon made notable contributions to the field of behaviorism in psychology through pioneering work on verbal operant conditioning and counterconditioning in the treatment of anxiety.
Go to Profile#882
Robert A. Bjork
#37453
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#883
John Weinman
#32777
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Alfred Weinman is a British psychologist who has been prominent in the development of the field of health psychology. Career In 1974, Weinman was appointed as a lecturer in psychology at Guy's Hospital Medical School, London and was subsequently promoted to Professor of Psychology as Applied to Medicine. His unit was integrated into the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience of King's College London with which the medical school merged. He retired in 2015 and was granted the title of emeritus professor. He also held a position in the School of Cancer & Pharmaceutical Scienc...
Go to Profile#884
Koen Lamberts
#10570
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Koenraad Lamberts is a British/Belgian psychologist and academic. Since 2018, he has served as President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. From 2014 to 2018, he was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of York. Previously, he had taught at the University of Chicago, University of Birmingham, and the University of Warwick. Lamberts was chair of UCAS between 2019 and 2020. During his time at Sheffield, Lamberts oversaw the closure of its "world-renowned archaeology department".
Go to Profile#885
Gerald S. Lesser
#12996
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Gerald Samuel Lesser was an American psychologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. Lesser was one of the chief advisers to the Children's Television Workshop in the development and content of the educational programming included in the children's television program Sesame Street. At Harvard, he was chair of the university's Human Development Program for 20 years, which focused on cross-cultural studies of child rearing, and studied the effects of media on young children. In 1974, he wrote Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street, which chronicled how Sesame Street was developed and put on the air.
Go to Profile#886
Ana Cristina Silva
#44859
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ana Cristina Silva is a Portuguese psychologist and university lecturer, specialising in early childhood reading and writing development. She is also a prize-winning novelist. Early training Ana Cristina Conceição da Silva was born in 1964 in Vila Franca de Xira, just north of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. She studied psychology at the University of Lisbon, where she obtained an undergraduate degree in psychotherapy and counselling in 1987. She then did a master's in educational psychology at the Instituto Universitário de Ciências Psicológicas, Sociais e da Vida in Alfama, Lisbon, now known as ISPA .
Go to Profile#887
Robert L. Moore
#22832
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Robert Louis Moore was an American Jungian analyst and consultant in private practice in Chicago, Illinois. He was the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary; a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago; and director of research for the Institute for the Science of Psychoanalysis. Author and editor of numerous books in psychology and spirituality, he lectured internationally on his formulation of a Neo-Jungian paradigm for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was working on Structural Psychoanalysis and I...
Go to Profile#888
Gregg Henriques
#37113
Overall Influence
Gregg Henriques is an American psychologist. He is a professor for the Combined-Integrated Doctoral Program, at James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, US. He developed the Unified Theory Of Knowledge , which consists of eight key ideas that Henriques claims results in a much more unified vision of science, psychology and philosophy.
Go to Profile#889
Risto Näätänen
#17027
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Risto Kalervo Näätänen was a Finnish psychological scientist, pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and known worldwide as one of the discoverers of the electrophysiological mismatch negativity. He was a much-cited social scientist and one of the few individuals appointed permanent Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland. He retired in 2007 and retained a title of Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland. He was a professor at the University of Tartu starting in 2007.
Go to Profile#890
William Crano
#19004
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
William Dean Crano is an American psychologist. He is the Oskamp Distinguished Professor of Psychology in the Division of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences , Claremont Graduate University. He has also written almost 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, in journals including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Psychological Inquiry, Journal of Social Psychology, and AIDS Education and Prevention, and is the co-author of an article in Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 57, 2006. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and Associati...
Go to Profile#891
Gerhard Andersson
#29526
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Gerhard Andersson is a Swedish psychologist, psychotherapist and Professor of clinical psychology at Linköping University. He was previously affiliated researcher at Karolinska Institutet. He was a co-recipient of the Nordic Medical Prize in 2014.
Go to Profile#892
Jesse Bering
#34450
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jesse Michael Bering is an American psychologist, writer, and academic. He is a professor in Science Communication at the University of Otago , as well as a frequent contributor to Scientific American, Slate, and Das Magazin . His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic, and has been featured on NPR, the BBC, Playboy Radio and elsewhere.
Go to Profile#893
Yaakov Stern
#49133
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yaakov Stern is an American cognitive neuroscientist, professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University. Early life Stern has an undergraduate degree in psychology from Touro College, and a doctorate in psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He joined the faculty at Columbia University after completing his doctorate. He now is a Florence Irving professor of neuropsychology and chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Neurology department.
Go to Profile#894
Sandra Jovchelovitch
#50031
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sandra Jovchelovitch, from Porto Alegre, Brazil, is a social psychologist, currently Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the MSc program in Social and Cultural Psychology at the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics , of which she serves as head since August 2007. Dr. Jovchelovitch is co-editor of the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology and directs a book series on Contemporary Social Psychology for the Brazilian publishing house Vozes. She also serves on the editorial boards of the European Journal of Social Psychology and Psicologia e Sociedade.
Go to Profile#895
David Watson
#49918
Overall Influence
David Watson is an American personality psychologist who has been the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame since 2010. He previously served as a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa beginning in 1993, and taught at Southern Methodist University before then. He was the founding president of the Association for Research in Personality in 2001 and served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology from 2006 to 2011. He is known for his research on personality assessment and psychopathology, including working with his wife Lee Anna Clark and Auke Tellegen to develop the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule in 1988.
Go to Profile#896
Jonathan St B. T. Evans
#26772
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jonathan St B. T. Evans is a British cognitive psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth. In 1975, with Peter Wason, Evans proposed one of the first dual-process theories of reasoning, an idea later developed and popularized by Daniel Kahneman. In a 2011 Festschrift, Evans' peers described him as "one of the most influential figures in the psychology of human reasoning".
Go to Profile#897
Peter Howell
#55016
Overall Influence
Peter Howell is a British psychologist and Professor of Experimental Psychology at University College London . His research is focused on speech and hearing, particularly stuttering, speech perception and speech production.
Go to Profile#898
Peter R. Hofstätter
#42731
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Peter R. Hofstätter was an Austrian social psychologist whose books on group dynamics, social psychology and general psychology were widely read in the German-speaking countries during the 1960s-1980s.
Go to Profile#899
Deborah Prentice
#33915
Overall Influence
Deborah A. Prentice is an American scholar of psychology and university administrator. She serves as the vice-chancellor at Cambridge University. She previously served as provost at Princeton University and Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs.
Go to Profile#900
Malcolm Jeeves
#28212
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Malcolm Alexander Jeeves is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, and was formerly President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He established the Department of Psychology at St Andrews and his research interests centre on cognitive psychology and neuropsychology.
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