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.

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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,

#1051

Jonathan Young

#37163

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jonathan Young is a psychologist who became the founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archives. Background Young developed an interest in the teaching functions of stories through early exposure to folklore. He was one of six children in a much-traveled family. His parents read and discussed the lore of each place they visited, such as the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, the Pied Piper in Hamelin, the Arabian Nights in Baghdad, and the Buddha in India and Japan.

#1052

Jim Sidanius

#42290

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

James H. Sidanius, known as Jim Sidanius was an American psychologist and academic. He served as John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in memory of William James and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He won the 2006 Harold Lasswell Award for "Distinguished Scientific Contribution in the Field of Political Psychology" from the International Society of Political Psychology and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2013 Career Contribution Award. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. The Society of Experimental Social Psy...

#1053

Frederick M. Lord

#63984

Overall Influence

#1054

James O Prochaska

#64064

Overall Influence

#1055

Harry McGurk

#29016

Overall Influence

1936 - 1998 (62 years)

Harry McGurk was a British cognitive psychologist. He is known for his discovery of the McGurk effect, described in a 1976 paper with his research assistant John MacDonald, while he was a senior developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey.

#1056

Marc H Bornstein

#64091

Overall Influence

#1057

William J. McGuire

#30825

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

William James McGuire was an American social psychologist known for his work on the psychology of persuasion and for developing Inoculation theory. He was a faculty member at Yale University from 1970 until he retired in 1999, and chaired the psychology department there from 1971 to 1973. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from 1967 to 1970.

#1058

Eric Turkheimer

Eric Turkheimer

#17782

Overall Influence

Eric Nathan Turkheimer is an American psychologist and the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Early life and education Turkheimer is the son of Nathan Turkheimer, the former board chairman of the public relations law firm Turkheimer & Ryan, Inc., and his wife, Barbara Tack Turkheimer. He grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he graduated from Croton Harmon High School in 1971. He is Jewish. He received his B.A. in psychology from Haverford College in 1976. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986, ...

#1059

Emily A. Holmes

#37733

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Emily A. Holmes is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist known for her research on mental imagery in relation to psychological treatments for post traumatic stress disorder , bipolar disorder, and depression. Holmes is Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. She also holds an appointment as Honorary Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford.

#1060

Nicholas G. Martin

#61845

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nicholas Gordon Martin is an Australian behavior geneticist who has published over 1300 peer-reviewed articles on topics including the heritability of religion and intelligence and medical disorders such as endometriosis. Martin is among the most cited medical scientists in the Southern Hemisphere, with a number of citation classics including "Genes, culture and personality: An empirical approach" that he co-authored with Lindon Eaves and Hans Eysenck, "Analysis of the p16 gene as a candidate for the chromosome 9p melanoma susceptibility locus"

#1061

Michael Maccoby

Michael Maccoby

#27585

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Michael Maccoby was an American psychoanalyst and anthropologist globally recognized as an expert on leadership for his research, writing and projects to improve organizations and work. He authored or co-authored fourteen books and consulted to companies, governments, the World Bank, unions, research and development centers and laboratories, universities and orphanages or taught in 36 countries. Maccoby's article, Narcissistic Leaders: the Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons written in January 2000, was awarded a McKinsey Award from the Harvard Business Review.

#1062

Douglas K. Detterman

#44695

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Douglas K. Detterman is an American psychologist who researches intelligence and intellectual disability. Biography He earned his B.A. from Boston University in 1967, his M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Alabama in 1972 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in 1972.

#1063

Niels Birbaumer

Niels Birbaumer

#21933

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Niels Birbaumer is an Austrian academic who served as a professor at the University of Tübingen until 2019. Research career In 2017, Birbaumer's study claimed that a brain-computer interface device, applied via an electrode cap, enabled four ALS patients to communicate binary responses. This drew considerable attention due to its implications for quality of life. However, the study's replicability was questioned, leading to a German Research Foundation investigation, which found the research data incomplete and the results flawed. As a result, Birbaumer's work was retracted, his funding revoked, and he was dismissed from the university.

#1064

Carol Fowler

#31255

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Carol Ann Fowler is an American experimental psychologist. She was president and director of research at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut from 1992 to 2008. She is also a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and adjunct professor of linguistics and psychology at Yale University. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1971, her M.A University of Connecticut in 1973 and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1977.

#1065

Hadyn Ellis

#28255

Overall Influence

1945 - 2006 (61 years)

Hadyn Ellis CBE DSc was a Welsh psychologist who was influential in the field of face processing and who had some 160 publications to his name. For the largest part of his career he worked at Cardiff University, where he became pro-vice chancellor for research in 1994. He also made significant contributions to research strategy at the ESRC.

#1066

Mike Aamodt

#26897

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Michael G. Aamodt is an American industrial and organizational psychology professor at Radford University who has published more than 50 professional journal articles and presented more than 100 papers at professional conferences.

#1067

Sara Shettleworth

#45535

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Sara J. Shettleworth is an American-born, Canadian experimental psychologist and zoologist. Her research focuses on animal cognition. She is professor emerita of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.

#1068

James Maas

#11421

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

James Beryl Maas is an American social psychologist and retired professor. He is best known for his work in the field of sleep research, specifically the relationship between sleep and performance. He is best known for coining the term "power nap". He holds a B.A. from Williams College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Maas has also produced numerous film specials on sleep research for PBS, BBC, and others.

#1069

Charles Egerton Osgood

#64743

Overall Influence

#1070

Patrick Rabbitt

#55411

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Patrick Michael Anthony Rabbitt , also known as Pat, is an English psychologist who has specialised in researching the mental effects of aging — cognitive gerontology. Rabbitt was born on 23 September 1934, to Edna Maude, née Smith, and Joseph Bernard Rabbitt, and educated at Queens' College, Cambridge.

#1071

Ulf-Dietrich Reips

#5674

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Prof. Dr. Ulf-Dietrich Reips is a full professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Konstanz, where he holds the Chair for Psychological Methods, Assessment, and iScience. Between 2009 and 2013 he was a full-time tenured IKERBASQUE research professor at University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and remains affiliated with Ikerbasque. Until 2009 he was an assistant professor and lecturer at the Psychology Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He received his PhD in 1997 and his habilitation in 2004 from the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 1992, he received an M.A. in Psychology from Sonoma State University, California.

#1072

Sonia Livingstone

Sonia Livingstone

#33351

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sonia Livingstone is a leading British scholar on the subjects of children, media and the Internet. She is Professor of Social Psychology and former head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. While Livingstone’s research has evolved since the start of her career in the 1980s, her recent work explores media and communication in relation to society, children and technology. Livingstone has authored or edited twenty-four books and hundreds of academic articles and chapters. She is known for her continued public engagement about her...

#1073

Mark R Leary

#65118

Overall Influence

#1074

Nancy J. Nersessian

#34064

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Nancy J. Nersessian is the Regents' Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work tends to be in the areas of the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the psychology of science.

#1075

Michael Frese

#32489

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Michael Frese is a psychologist who teaches management and organizational behaviour at Asia School of Business, Malaysia and Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. He is a visiting professor at Makerere University Business School in Kampala, Uganda, and at National University of Singapore Business School. He was head of the department and Provost Chair at National University of Singapore Business School.

#1076

Nancy Cantor

#15460

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Nancy Ellen Cantor is an American academic administrator and the chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, in Newark, New Jersey. A social psychologist, Cantor is recognized for her scholarly contributions to the understanding of how individuals perceive and think about their social worlds, pursue personal goals, and how they regulate their behavior to adapt to life's most challenging social environments. Previously, Cantor was the first woman chancellor at Syracuse University. Prior to that she was the first woman chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Earlier, she had ...

#1077

Richard M. Lerner

#37628

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Richard M. Lerner is professor of Human Development at Tufts University, occupying the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science. Also at Tufts, he directs the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development.

#1078

Camilla Benbow

#33553

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Camilla Persson Benbow is a Swedish-born American educational psychologist and a university professor. She studies the education of intellectually gifted students. Biography Camilla Benbow is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College. She is an educational psychologist who has focused on education of intellectually gifted young people. Benbow is co-director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth , a longitudinal study that examines the development of over 5,000 individuals over their life-spans. Her interests focu...

#1079

Wolff-Michael Roth

#37383

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Wolff-Michael Roth is a learning scientist at the University of Victoria conducting research on how people across the life span know and learn mathematics and science. He has contributed to numerous fields of research: learning science in learning communities, coteaching, authentic school science education, cultural-historical activity theory, social studies of science, gesture studies, qualitative research methods, embodied cognition, situated cognition, and the role of language in learning science and mathematics.

#1080

Philip Winne

#65095

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Philip H. Winne is a professor of educational psychology and former Canada Research Chair in Self-Regulated Learning and Learning Technologies at Simon Fraser University. A Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Canadian Psychological Association, Winne has made significant contributions to research on self-regulated learning. He is the principal investigator of the Learning Kit Project, which has developed educational software, now called nStudy, founded on principles of self-regulated...

#1081

Molly J. Crockett

#51506

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Molly J. Crockett is an American neuroscientist who studies human morality, altruism and decision making. She received the 2019 Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

#1082

William J. McGill

William J. McGill

#38198

Overall Influence

1922 - 1997 (75 years)

William James McGill was an American psychologist, author, and academic administrator. He was the 16th president of Columbia University and the 3rd chancellor of the University of California San Diego.

#1083

Harold Leavitt

#14462

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Harold Jack Leavitt was an American psychologist of management. Life and career Leavitt was born on 14 January 1922. A native of Lynn, Massachusetts, he was the youngest of eleven siblings. Following the conclusion of his baccalaureate studies at Harvard University in 1943, Leavitt continued graduate study at Brown University in 1944. He then served as a United States Navy reservist for two years, and earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949. Leavitt taught at the University of Chicago and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute prior to joining the Carnegie Mellon University in 1958.

#1084

Edward E. Lawler

#65715

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

#1085

Michael Corballis

#35486

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Michael Charles Corballis was a New Zealand and Canadian psychologist and author. He was Emeritus Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland. His fields of research were cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, encompassing visual perception, visual imagery, attention, memory, and the evolution of language.

#1086

Randi Martin

#60580

Overall Influence

Randi Martin is the Elma Schneider Professor of Psychology at Rice University and Director of the T. L. L. Temple Foundation Neuroplasticity Research Laboratory. With Suparna Rajaram and Judith Kroll, Martin co-founded Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, an organization supported in part through the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Leadership program. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists .

#1087

Keith Oatley

#56833

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Keith Oatley FRSC, FBPsS is an Anglo-Canadian novelist, and professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. His novel The Case of Emily V won the 1994 Commonwealth Prize for first novel.

#1088

Lee Willerman

#45402

Overall Influence

1939 - 1997 (58 years)

Lee Willerman was an American psychologist known for his work on behavioral genetics using twin studies. Biography Willerman was born and grew up in Chicago. Willerman received BA and MA degrees from Roosevelt University in 1961 and 1964 respectively, and his Ph.D. from Wayne State University in 1967. After a three-year stint at the National Institutes of Health, Willerman completed a post-doctoral year at the University of Michigan in the Department of Human Genetics. In 1971 he took a position at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until his death.

#1089

Leona S. Aiken

#48504

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Leona Ruth Silver Aiken is an American President's Professor of psychology at Arizona State University. She is the co-author of two widely used statistics textbooks, Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavior Sciences and Multiple Regression: Testing and interpreting interactions.

#1090

James Cantor

#14841

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

James M. Cantor is an American-Canadian clinical psychologist and sexologist specializing in hypersexuality and paraphilias. A former senior scientist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Cantor was editor-in-chief of the journal Sexual Abuse from 2010 to 2014. His research on brain differences in pedophiles has been cited as evidence that pedophilia is something unchangeable and that people are probably born with it.

#1091

John M. Keller

#33145

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

John M. Keller is an American educational psychologist. He is best known for his work on motivation in educational settings and in particular the ARCS model of instructional design. The four elements of the acronym stand for Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction .

#1092

Joseph Paul Forgas

Joseph Paul Forgas

#61728

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Joseph Paul Forgas is an Australian social psychologist, currently Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He was born in Budapest, Hungary and emigrated to Australia at the age of 22. He is married with two children, and lives in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs.

#1093

Bruce K. Alexander

#22802

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Bruce K. Alexander is a psychologist and professor emeritus from Vancouver, BC, Canada. He has taught and conducted research on the psychology of addiction at Simon Fraser University since 1970. He retired from active teaching in 2005. Alexander and SFU colleagues conducted a series of experiments into drug addiction known as the Rat Park experiments. He has written two books about addiction: Peaceful Measures: Canada's Way Out of the War on Drugs and The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit .

#1094

John Robert Edwards

#50961

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John Robert Edwards received a PhD from McGill University in 1974. After working as a Research Fellow at the Educational Research Centre in Dublin , he moved to Nova Scotia and joined the Psychology Department at St Francis Xavier University, where he is now Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Professor. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He has been a Visiting Lecturer at many universities, and a Visiting Professor in England , Ireland and China . He is an Honorary Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Edwards is a fellow of the Brit...

#1095

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

#30784

Overall Influence

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff holds the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education at the University of Delaware and is also a member of the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

#1096

Arthur C. Graesser

#51237

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Arthur C. Graesser is a professor of psychology and intelligent systems at the University of Memphis and is an honorary research fellow in education at the University of Oxford. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology and Discourse Processes, has been president of four scientific societies, and has published over 600 scientific articles and three books, garnering over 30,000 citations.

#1097

Matthew Goldstein

#5336

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Matthew Goldstein is the former chancellor of the City University of New York . Goldstein was appointed CUNY chancellor on September 1, 1999. He was the first City University graduate to head the University, having received his undergraduate degree from City College. Previously, Goldstein served as president of Baruch College from 1991 to 1998, and president of Adelphi University, from 1998 to 1999.

#1098

Linda Argote

#12274

Overall Influence

Linda Argote is an American academic specializing in industrial and organizational psychology. She is Thomas Lord Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center of Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge.

#1099

Amit Abraham

#46784

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Amit Abraham is an Indian academician, author, and psychologist. He has worked as the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the Mount Zion International University of Rwanda , Kigali, Rwanda, East Africa, from 26th September 2018 to 31st July 2020. Prior to this he was the Registrar at Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal, India . He has been the former principal of Scottish Church College, Kolkata, India . He has served as the head of the postgraduate department of psychology at St. John's College, Agra . He was teaching graduate and postgraduate classes along with supervision of research work.

#1100

Glenn D. Walters

#21511

Overall Influence

Glenn Walters is an American forensic psychologist and associate professor of Criminal Justice at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. He worked for three decades in federal government as a clinical psychologist and drug program coordinator for military and federal prison inmates. He has published widely in criminology, including addiction.

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