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,
#101
Paul Rozin
#4913
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Paul Rozin is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches two Benjamin Franklin Scholars honors courses and graduate level seminars. He is also a faculty member in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program started by Martin Seligman. He is described as the world's leading expert on disgust. His work focuses on the psychological, cultural, and biological determinants of human food choice.
Go to Profile#102
Geert Hofstede
#535
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Gerard Hendrik Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist, IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations.
Go to Profile#103
Daniel Schacter
#4193
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#104
Harold Kelley
#4917
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Harold Kelley was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major contributions have been the development of interdependence theory , the early work of attribution theory, and a lifelong interest in understanding close relationships processes. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Kelley as the 43rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#105
Stanley Krippner
#6697
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
#106
Roger Shepard
#3872
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Roger Newland Shepard was an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" . He was considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be comprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.
Go to Profile#107
Sonja Lyubomirsky
#4448
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Russian-born American professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.
Go to Profile#108
Nancy Chodorow
#2194
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
Go to Profile#109
Douglas Hofstadter
#102
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#110
John Bargh
#4979
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#111
Charles Honorton
#12086
Overall Influence
1946 - 1992 (46 years)
Charles Henry Honorton was an American parapsychologist and was one of the leaders of a collegial group of researchers who were determined to apply established scientific research methods to the examination of what they called "anomalous information transfer" and other phenomena associated with the "mind/body problem"—the idea that mind might, at least in some respects, have a physical existence independent of the body.
Go to Profile#112
Charles E. Osgood
#2807
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Charles Egerton Osgood was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois. He was known for his research on behaviourism versus cognitivism, semantics , cross-culturalism, psycholinguistic theory, and peace studies. He is credited with helping in the early development of psycholinguistics. Charles Osgood was recognized distinguished and highly honored psychologist throughout his career.
Go to Profile#113
Lisa Feldman Barrett
#3332
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#114
John Bissell Carroll
#3094
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
John Bissell Carroll was an American psychologist known for his contributions to psychology, linguistics and psychometrics. Early life and education Carroll was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Early in his life, Carroll became interested in music and language. His interest in language was further sparked by becoming friends with Benjamin Lee Whorf at the age of thirteen and discussing Whorf's ideas about a close connection between culture and language. Carroll also helped to edit and publish Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality in 1956.
Go to Profile#115
Félix Guattari
#219
Overall Influence
1930 - 1992 (62 years)
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Go to Profile#116
Zenon Pylyshyn
#2229
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He developed visual indexing theory which hypothesizes a pre-conceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. His very influential multiple object tracking experiment methodology emerged from this work.
Go to Profile#117
Daniel Wegner
#2612
Overall Influence
1948 - 2013 (65 years)
Daniel Merton Wegner was an American social psychologist. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was known for applying experimental psychology to the topics of mental control and conscious will, and for originating the study of transactive memory and action identification. In The Illusion of Conscious Will and other works, he argued that the human sense of free will is an illusion.
Go to Profile#118
John Grinder
#808
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Thomas Grinder Jr. is an American linguist, author, management consultant, trainer and speaker. Grinder is credited with co-creating neuro-linguistic programming with Richard Bandler. He is co-director of Quantum Leap Inc., a management consulting firm founded by his partner Carmen Bostic St. Clair in 1987 . Grinder and Bostic St. Clair also run workshops and seminars on NLP internationally.
Go to Profile#119
Margaret Singer
#2170
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Margaret Thaler Singer was an American clinical psychologist and researcher with her colleague Lyman Wynne on family communication. She was a prominent figure in the study of undue influence in social and religious contexts, and a proponent of the brainwashing theory of new religious movements.
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Hans Bender
#6849
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Hans Bender was a German lecturer on the subject of parapsychology, who was also responsible for establishing the parapsychological institute Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg. For many years his pipe smoking, contemplative figure was synonymous with German parapsychology. He was an investigator of 'unusual human experience', e.g. poltergeists and clairvoyants. One of his most famous cases was the Rosenheim Poltergeist.
Go to Profile#121
Eugene Gendlin
#3620
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Eugene Tovio Gendlin was an American philosopher who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, the bodily felt sense and the "philosophy of the implicit". Though he had no degree in the field of psychology, his advanced study with Carl Rogers, his longtime practice of psychotherapy and his extensive writings in the field of psychology have made him perhaps better known in that field than in philosophy. He studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in philosophy in 1958. Gendlin's theories impacted Rogers' own beliefs and played a role in Rogers' view of psychotherapy.
Go to Profile#122
Rainer Mausfeld
#5026
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Rainer Mausfeld is a retired German professor of psychology at Kiel University. He did research on the psychology of perception, cognitive science, and the history of psychology. Since 2015, he has published on manipulation in media and politics and the transformation of representative democracy to neoliberal elite democracy.
Go to Profile#123
Daisy L. Hung
#4369
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Daisy Lan Hung is a Taiwanese psychologist. She is the founding director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the National Central University in Taiwan. Her research areas are involved with cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and neurolinguistics. In addition to conducting research, Hung also translates scientific works, educates children on reading habits and lectures on her research topics.
Go to Profile#124
Donald Meichenbaum
#5085
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Donald H. Meichenbaum is an American psychologist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He is a research director of the Melissa Institute for Violence Prevention and Treatment at the University of Miami. Meichenbaum is known for his research and publications on psychotherapy, and contributed to the development of the technique of cognitive-behavioural therapy . In 1982, a survey of 800 members of the American Psychological Association voted Meichenbaum the tenth most influential psychotherapist of the 20th century. At the time of his retir...
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William Kaye Estes
#4988
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
William Kaye Estes was an American psychologist. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. In order to develop a statistical explanation for the learning phenomena, William Kaye Estes developed the Stimulus Sampling Theory in 1950 which suggested that a stimulus-response association is learned on a single trial; however, the learning process is continuous and consists of the accumulation of distinct stimulus-response pairings.
Go to Profile#126
Dan Sperber
#1863
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Depar...
Go to Profile#127
Michael Posner
#3789
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist who is a researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon , and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Posner as the 56th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#128
Rudolf Arnheim
#1950
Overall Influence
1904 - 2007 (103 years)
Rudolf Arnheim was a German-born writer, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art.
Go to Profile#129
Alan E. Kazdin
#5757
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alan Edward Kazdin is Sterling Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University. He is currently emeritus and was the director of the Yale Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. Kazdin's research has focused primarily on the treatment of aggressive and antisocial behavior in children.
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Charles Spielberger
#4453
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Charles Donald Spielberger, Ph.D. was a clinical community psychologist well-known for his development of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. In 1972, as incoming president of the Southeastern Psychological Association he appointed the organization's Task Force on the Status of Women, chaired by Ellen Kimmel.
Go to Profile#131
Jessica Benjamin
#3562
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jessica Benjamin is a psychoanalyst known for her contributions to psychoanalysis and social thought. She is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Jessica Benjamin is one of the original contributors to the fields of relational psychoanalysis, theories of intersubjectivity, and gender studies and feminism as it relates to psychoanalysis and society. She is known for her ideas about recognition in both...
Go to Profile#132
Anne Treisman
#4133
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Anne Marie Treisman was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology. Treisman researched visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with Garry Gelade in 1980. Treisman taught at the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Notable postdoctoral fellows she supervised included Nancy Kanwisher and Nilli Lavie.
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Robert A. Emmons
#7939
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robert A. Emmons is an American psychologist and professor at UC Davis . His research is in the field of personality psychology, emotion psychology, and psychology of religion. Background Emmons completed his undergraduate psychology degree in 1980 at the University of Southern Maine, Portland. He then obtained a M.A. in 1984 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in personality psychology, and a Ph.D., in the same subject from the same university in 1986, with a thesis "Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-Being". He was an assistant professor at Michigan State University from 1986 to 1988 and came to Davis at the same rank in 1988.
Go to Profile#134
Allan Paivio
#4305
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Allan Urho Paivio was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario and former bodybuilder. He earned his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1959 and taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1963 until his retirement.
Go to Profile#135
George Sperling
#5362
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
George Sperling is an American cognitive psychologist, researcher, and educator. Sperling documented the existence of iconic memory . Through several experiments, he showed support for his hypothesis that human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory. He was in the forefront in wanting to help the deaf population in terms of speech recognition. He argued that the telephone was created originally for the hearing impaired but it became popularized by the hearing community. He suggested with a sevenfold reduction in the bandwidth for video transmission, it can be useful for the improvement in American Sign Language communication.
Go to Profile#136
Andrew Samuels
#3590
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Andrew Samuels is a British psychotherapist and writer on political and social themes from a psychological viewpoint. He has worked with politicians, political organisations, activist groups and members of the public in Europe, US, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Russia and South Africa as a political and organisational consultant. Clinically, Samuels has developed a blend of Jungian and post-Jungian, relational psychoanalytic and humanistic approaches.
Go to Profile#137
Juliet Mitchell
#2042
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Juliet Mitchell, Lady Goody is a British psychoanalyst, socialist feminist, research professor and author. Early life and education Mitchell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1940, and then moved to England in 1944, where she stayed with her grandparents in the midlands. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English in 1962, as well as doing postgraduate work. She taught English literature from 1962 to 1970 at Leeds University and Reading University. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell was active in leftist politics, and was on the editorial committee of...
Go to Profile#138
Karl H. Pribram
#2557
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Karl H. Pribram was a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and distinguished professor at Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. He worked with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center of which he was to become director later. He...
Go to Profile#139
Benjamin Bloom
#2514
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Benjamin Samuel Bloom was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning. He is particularly noted for leading educational psychologists to develop the comprehensive system of describing and assessing educational outcomes in the mid-1950s. He has influenced the practices and philosophies of educators around the world from the latter part of the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#140
Larry Crabb
#7872
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr. was an American Christian counselor, author, Bible teacher, spiritual director, and seminar speaker. Crabb wrote several best-selling books and was the founder and director of New Way Ministries and co-founder of his legacy ministry, Larger Story. He served as a Spiritual Director for the American Association of Christian Counselors and taught at several different Christian colleges, including Colorado Christian University.
Go to Profile#141
Daniel Gilbert
#5630
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#142
Gordon H. Bower
#6187
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Gordon Howard Bower was a cognitive psychologist studying human memory, language comprehension, emotion, and behavior modification. He received his Ph.D. in learning theory from Yale University in 1959. He held the A. R. Lang Emeritus Professorship at Stanford University. In addition to his research, Bower also was a notable adviser to numerous students, including John R. Anderson, Lawrence W. Barsalou, Lera Boroditsky, Keith Holyoak, Stephen Kosslyn, Alan Lesgold, Mark A. Gluck, and Robert Sternberg, among others.
Go to Profile#143
Lyn Yvonne Abramson
#5644
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lyn Yvonne Abramson is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was born in Benson, Minnesota. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 before attaining her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1978.
Go to Profile#144
Anthony Greenwald
#4874
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#145
Paul Watzlawick
#1645
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Paul Watzlawick was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.
Go to Profile#146
Susan Fiske
#4435
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#147
John E. Douglas
#1712
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Edward Douglas is an American retired special agent and unit chief in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation . He was one of the first criminal profilers and has written and co-written books on criminal psychology, true crime novels, and his biography.
Go to Profile#148
Geoffrey Hinton
#140
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#149
Brenda Milner
#1626
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (106 years)
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. , she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development.
Go to Profile#150
Shalom H. Schwartz
#5256
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Shalom H. Schwartz is a social psychologist, cross-cultural researcher and creator of the Theory of Basic Human Values . He also contributed to the formulation of the values scale in the context of social learning theory and social cognitive theory.
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