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,
#1151
William H. Starbuck
#20976
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
William Haynes Starbuck graduated from Harvard University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology . He is an organizational scientist who has held professorships in social relations , sociology , business administration , and management .
Go to Profile#1152
Cordelia Fine
#11358
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Fine has written three popular science books on the topics of social cognition, neuroscience, and the popular myths of sex differences. Her latest book, Testosterone Rex, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize, 2017. She has authored several academic book chapters and numerous academic publications. Fine is also noted for coining the term 'neurosexism'.
Go to Profile#1153
Matina Horner
#26838
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Matina Souretis Horner is an American psychologist who was the sixth president of Radcliffe College. Her research interests included intelligence, motivation, and achievement of women. She is known for pioneering the concept of "fear of success".
Go to Profile#1154
Isabelle Peretz
#51373
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Isabelle Peretz is a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, holding a Canada Research Chair and Casavant Chair in neurocognition of music. She specializes in music cognition, focusing on congenital and acquired musical disorders and on the cognitive and biological foundations of music processing in general.
Go to Profile#1155
Susan Gelman
#31230
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Go to Profile#1156
Philip David Zelazo
#34569
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Philip David Zelazo is a developmental psychologist and neuroscientist. His research has helped shape the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience regarding the development of executive function .
Go to Profile#1157
Girishwar Misra
#57815
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#1158
Nigel Barber
#23447
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Nigel William Thomas Barber is an Irish-born American biopsychologist and author. Biography Barber emigrated from his native Ireland to the United States in 1982. He received his Ph.D. in biopsychology from Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1989, after which he taught at Bemidji State University as an instructor for one year, and then at Birmingham-Southern College as an assistant professor.
Go to Profile#1159
Andrea diSessa
#16148
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Andrea A. diSessa is an education researcher and author of the book Turtle Geometry about Logo. He has also written highly cited research papers on the epistemology of physics, educational experimentation, and constructivist analysis of knowledge. He also created, with Hal Abelson, the Boxer Programming Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1160
Donn Erwin Byrne
#69266
Overall Influence
#1161
David R. Olson
#39571
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David Richard Olson is a Canadian cognitive developmental psychologist who has studied the development of language, literacy, and cognition, particularly the mental lives of children, their understanding of language and mind and the psychology of teaching. Olson is University Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 1966.
Go to Profile#1162
Neil O'Connor
#49974
Overall Influence
1917 - 1997 (80 years)
Neil O'Connor was an experimental psychologist, born in Geraldton, Western Australia. He died in 1997 after a traffic incident. Education He studied Philosophy and Experimental Psychology in Oxford and served in India in the Second World War. He became interested in studying the extent to with learning disabled individuals could still learn when studying for a PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry . With Jack Tizard he conducted groundbreaking experiments that showed that these individuals could indeed learn and be employed. This work led to greater awareness of the barriers created by resident...
Go to Profile#1163
Russell Poldrack
#45543
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Russell "Russ" Alan Poldrack is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, associate director of Stanford Data Science, member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the SDS Center for Open and Reproducible Science.
Go to Profile#1164
Donald Edwin Super
#69471
Overall Influence
#1165
Tony Toneatto
#49002
Overall Influence
Tony Toneatto is the director of the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health undergraduate program at the University of Toronto. This program offers a number of courses exploring Buddhism, psychology, psychotherapy, mindfulness meditation, applied Buddhism, research methods in Buddhist research and cognitive science.
Go to Profile#1166
Jaap van Ginneken
#38002
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jaap van Ginneken is a Dutch psychologist and communication scholar. Education Van Ginneken completed a bachelor's degree at the Radboud University Nijmegen, a master’s at the University of Amsterdam, followed by a brief stint at the École pratique des Hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and finally a Ph. D. with distinction on mass psychology and crowd psychology. He taught at various universities, ultimately as a long-time associate professor at the International School and Communication Science Department of the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#1167
Carol Diane Ryff
#69553
Overall Influence
#1168
Linda Steg
#50391
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Linda Steg is a Dutch psychologist who is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. She studies the interaction between people and their environment and how people influence their local ecosystems. She was awarded the 2020 Dutch Research Council Stevin Prize.
Go to Profile#1169
Michele J. Gelfand
#42916
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Michele J. Gelfand is an American cultural psychologist. She is both a professor of organizational behavior and the John H. Scully professor of cross-cultural management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and – by courtesy – a professor of psychology at the School of Humanities and Sciences of Stanford University. She has published research on tightness–looseness theory.
Go to Profile#1170
Arthur P. Shimamura
#54566
Overall Influence
1954 - 2020 (66 years)
Arthur Paul Shimamura was a professor of psychology and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the neural basis of human memory and cognition. He received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Larry Squire, where he studied amnesic patients. In 1989, Shimamura began his professorship at UC Berkeley. He has published over 100 scie...
Go to Profile#1171
Jacques Schotte
#38275
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Jacques Schotte was a Belgian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, co-founder, in 1969, with Antoine Vergote and Alphonse De Waelhens of the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis. Biography Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven since 1964, Jacques Schotte was an atypical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In addition to his classes, he gave many conferences throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America .
Go to Profile#1172
Donald Shankweiler
#42179
Overall Influence
Donald P. Shankweiler is an eminent psychologist and cognitive scientist who has done pioneering work on the representation and processing of language in the brain. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Board of Directors at Haskins. He is married to well-known American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language Ruth Millikan.
Go to Profile#1173
Douglas Medin
#45873
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Douglas L. "Doug" Medin is the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Early life and education Medin first became interested in psychology when he was an eighth-grader in Algona, Iowa. During this time, he and his classmates were sorted into two groups depending on their singing abilities; Medin was assigned to the non-singers' group. He attended Moorhead State College, graduating in 1965 with a B.A. in psychology, and went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of South Dakota in 1966 and 1968, respectively. His Ph.D.
Go to Profile#1174
Marianne Simmel
#35289
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Marianne Leonore Simmel was a German-American psychologist with a special interest in cognitive neuropsychology. The granddaughter of famed sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, she was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Jena, Thuringia, Germany, to doctors Hans Eugen Simmel, a professor, and his wife, Else Rose, a pediatrician. She had younger siblings Eva Barbara, Arnold Georg and Gerhard Friedrich. She immigrated to the United States in March 1940 with her family as a stateless refugee and applied for citizenship later that year. The family was initially divided across New York City; the parents stayed at a lodging house while their children lived at various friends' homes.
Go to Profile#1175
Roger E. Kirk
#44864
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Roger E. Kirk is a professor of psychology and statistics at Baylor University. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Before joining the faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University he was the Senior Psychoacoustical Engineer at the Baldwin Piano and Organ Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. Professor Kirk is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the American Educational Research Association.
Go to Profile#1176
David Matsumoto
#26665
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
David Matsumoto is an author, psychologist and judoka. His areas of expertise include culture, emotion, facial expressions, nonverbal behavior and microexpressions. He has published over 400 articles, manuscripts, book chapters and books on these subjects. Matsumoto is a professor at San Francisco State University and also the director of Humintell - a company that provides "unique training in the fields of facial expression of emotion, nonverbal behavior, detecting deception and cultural adaptation." In addition, he is an 8th degree black belt in judo and the founder and program advisor of the East Bay Judo Institute in El Cerrito, California.
Go to Profile#1177
John Sloboda
#48439
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Anthony Sloboda OBE FBA is Research Professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he currently leads research on the Social Impact of Making Music. He is also one of the founders of the Iraq Body Count project.
Go to Profile#1178
Richard J. Crisp
#52863
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Richard J. Crisp is an author, blogger, scientist and Professor of Psychology at Durham University. He is co-originator of the imagined contact hypothesis and a major contributor to the field of social psychology.
Go to Profile#1179
Marc H. Bornstein
#30701
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Marc H. Bornstein is an Affiliate with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, International Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, and senior advisor for research for ECD Parenting Programmes at UNICEF in New York City.
Go to Profile#1180
William Forde Thompson
#44277
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
William Forde "Bill" Thompson is an academic who has worked in Canada, Sweden and Australia. He is a distinguished professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he was chair of the psychology department between 2009 and 2013. His research focuses on music, emotion, expertise, and performance.
Go to Profile#1181
Jeffrey Young
#30133
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jeffrey E. Young is an American psychologist best known for having developed schema therapy. He is the founder of the Schema Therapy Institute. After earning an undergraduate degree at Yale University, he obtained a higher education degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where he then pursued postdoctoral studies with Aaron Beck.
Go to Profile#1182
Chris Moulin
#21844
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Chris Moulin is professor at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition , Université Grenoble Alpes, and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Moulin is a cognitive neuropsychologist known for his work in the field of déjà vu which he conducts with his former PhD student Akira O’Connor . Both psychologists have appeared in BBC radio broadcasts and featured heavily in the popular media in Britain and elsewhere, such as The Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, New Scientist, The Independent and Der Spiegel.
Go to Profile#1183
Ronald K. Siegel
#30725
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Ronald Keith Siegel was an American psychopharmacologist who was an associate research professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Siegel was the author of several noted studies and books on psychopharmacology, hallucination, and paranoia. A native of Herkimer, New York, he received his B.A. in sociology from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in psychology from Dalhousie University. He was affiliated with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University before joining the research faculty of UCLA in 1972, where he remained until his retirement in 2008.
Go to Profile#1184
Erika Fromm
#55311
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
Erika Fromm was a German-American psychologist and co-founder of hypnoanalysis. Life Erika Fromm was born Erika Oppenheimer in Frankfurt, the daughter of physician, Siegfried Oppenheimer, and Clementine Oppenheimer who died weeks after giving birth. She developed an early interest in psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud. She decided on an academic career and graduated in 1933 with a PhD from the University of Frankfurt, where she studied with Max Wertheimer, the father of Gestalt theory.
Go to Profile#1185
Valery Leibin
#39699
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Valery Moiseevich Leibin is a Russian psychoanalyst, Ph.D., head of the department of history and theory of psychoanalysis in Institute of Psychoanalysis, Professor of Moscow State Medical Stomatological University, an honorary Doctor of East European Institute of Psychoanalysis, an honorary member of the interregional public organization Russian Psychoanalytical Society, a member of the Academy of Pedagogical and Social Sciences, a chief scientist of Institute for Systems Analysis of Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the editorial boards of the "Russian Psychoanalytic Bulletin" , the ...
Go to Profile#1186
Dorothy Espelage
#62667
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dorothy Espelage is an American psychologist. She is the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina , and an international expert in bullying, youth aggression, and teen dating violence. She has authored several books including Bullying in North American Schools, Bullying Prevention and Intervention: Realistic Strategies for Schools, and Handbook of Bullying in Schools: an International Perspective.
Go to Profile#1187
Herbert H. Clark
#63793
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Herbert Herb Clark is a psycholinguist currently serving as Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His focuses include cognitive and social processes in language use; interactive processes in conversation, from low-level disfluencies through acts of speaking and understanding to the emergence of discourse; and word meaning and word use. Clark is known for his theory of "common ground": individuals engaged in conversation must share knowledge in order to be understood and have a meaningful conversation . Together with Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs , he also developed the collaborative model, a ...
Go to Profile#1188
Carl Hart
#16304
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Carl L. Hart is an American psychologist and neuroscientist, working as the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. Hart is known for his research on drug abuse and drug addiction, his advocacy for the legalization of recreational drugs, and his recreational use of drugs. Hart became the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of two books for the general public, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society and Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chas...
Go to Profile#1189
Nick Ellis
#46796
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nick C. Ellis is a Welsh psycholinguist, professor of psychology, and a research scientist at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan. As a researcher, Ellis' focus is on applied linguistics with interest in second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, emergentism, complex dynamic systems approaches to language, reading and spelling acquisition in different languages, computational modeling and cognitive linguistics.
Go to Profile#1190
Karen A. Matthews
#69822
Overall Influence
Karen A. Matthews is an American health psychologist known for her research on the epidemiology and risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, early signs of coronary heart disease risk in children, women's health and menopause, and connections between socioeconomic status and health. She is Professor Emerita of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#1191
Lynn Hasher
#50864
Overall Influence
Lynn Hasher is a cognitive scientist known for research on attention, working memory, and inhibitory control. Hasher is Professor Emerita in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto and Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.
Go to Profile#1192
Toshinori Ishikuma
#55439
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Toshinori Ishikuma is a Japanese psychologist. He is known for his work on introducing and establishing the system of school psychology services in Japan, and his expert guidance and training in chosen students for psychology He was among key psychologists who started certifying school psychologists in Japan in 1997. He is also famous for development of individual intelligence tests such as the Japanese versions of Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children-Second Edition, and Japanese versions of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children -III and IV, as well as Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale,- IV.
Go to Profile#1193
David B. Feldman
#44061
Overall Influence
David B. Feldman is an American psychologist who is an associate professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. His research focuses on hope, meaning, and growth in the face of life's difficulties, and he has been instrumental in developing Hope Therapy and applying it to various populations.
Go to Profile#1194
Daniel A. Helminiak
#18310
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Daniel A. Helminiak is a Catholic priest, theologian and author in the United States. He is most widely known for his international best-seller What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. He was a professor in the Department of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology at the University of West Georgia, near Atlanta. There from 1995 to 1997 and 2000 until early 2018, he regularly taught Human Sexuality, Statistics for the Social Sciences, Foundations of Neuroscience, and Animal Mind. On the graduate level he has taught courses related to the psychology of spirituality, which is his specia...
Go to Profile#1195
Peer Hultberg
#21797
Overall Influence
1935 - 2007 (72 years)
Peer Hultberg was a Danish author and psychoanalyst. Peer Hultberg was born in Vangede northwest of Copenhagen and lived in Horsens and Viborg during his child and teenage years. From 1953 he studied at the University of Copenhagen . He lived for some years in Skopje and Warsaw and then moved to London in 1959. He continued his studies of Slavic languages at the University of London and achieved a B.A. in 1963.
Go to Profile#1196
Jennifer Lerner
#21993
Overall Influence
Jennifer S. Lerner is an American experimental social psychologist known for her research in emotion and decision theory. She is the first psychologist at the Harvard Kennedy School to receive tenure. At Harvard, her titles include Professor of Public Policy and Management, Professor of Psychology , Faculty Director in the Graduate Commons Program, co-founder of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory and co-director of the Harvard Faculty Group on Emotion, Decision Making, and Health. Her research interests include the effects of accountability on judgment and choice. She founded and directs...
Go to Profile#1197
Nicholas Christenfeld
#42392
Overall Influence
Nicholas Christenfeld is a former professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego until his dismissal in 2019. He first joined the department in 1991 and was a full professor from 2003 to 2019. Among other research, he has promulgated the Theory of Deadly Initials and the theory that infants resemble their fathers more closely than they do their mothers. More recently, he studied the tendency of people to choose purebred dogs which resembled them.
Go to Profile#1198
Barry Everitt
#30192
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barry John Everitt, is a British neuroscientist and academic. He was Master of Downing College, Cambridge , and Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge . He is now emeritus professor and Director of Research. From 2013 to 2022, he was provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust at Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#1199
Jean Piaget
#71201
Overall Influence
#1200
Joshua Aronson
#36842
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joshua Michael Aronson is an American social psychologist and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is known for his pioneering work on stereotype threat, which he conducted in the 1990s along with Claude Steele and Steven Spencer. This work has shown that female, minority, and low-income children are stereotyped as performing worse on standardized tests, and that when they are taught to overcome these stereotypes, their standardized test scores improve. He also co-authored a study in 2009 in which ...
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