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,
#151
Robert Cialdini
#2944
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Beno Cialdini is an American psychologist. He is the Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and was a visiting professor of marketing, business and psychology at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#152
Edwin Hutchins
#2899
Overall Influence
Edwin Hutchins is a professor and former department head of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Hutchins is one of the main developers of distributed cognition. Hutchins was a student of the cognitive anthropologist Roy D'Andrade and has been a strong advocate of the use of anthropological methods in cognitive science. He is considered the father of modern cognitive ethnography. His early work involved studies of logic in legal discourse among people of the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea.
Go to Profile#153
Mark Solms
#4907
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who is known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. He holds the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital and is the President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association .
Go to Profile#154
Eugene Galanter
#7488
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Eugene Galanter was one of the modern founders of cognitive psychology. He was an academic in the field of experimental psychology and an author. Dr. Galanter was Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Quondam Director of the Psychophysics Laboratory at Columbia University. He was also the co-founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Scientific Officer of Children’s Progress, an award-winning New York City-based company that specializes in the use of computer technology in early education. The company's assessments and reports have been used in 40 states and 9 countries.
Go to Profile#155
Paul T. P. Wong
#5248
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#156
Leo Postman
#7528
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Leo Joseph Postman was a Russian-born American psychologist known for his research on human memory. Career He taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1950 to his retirement in 1987. In 1961, he founded Berkeley's Institute of Human Learning, which later became the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, as well as the president of the Western Psychological Association in 1968.
Go to Profile#157
Hideto Tomabechi
#610
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Hideto Tomabechi is a Japanese cognitive scientist computer scientist . He developed models for cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, cognitive psychology, mindcontroll , cognitive warfare and mathematical models for human brain information processing.
Go to Profile#158
Ernest Hilgard
#3973
Overall Influence
1904 - 2001 (97 years)
Ernest Ropiequet "Jack" Hilgard was an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University. He became famous in the 1950s for his research on hypnosis, especially with regard to pain control. Along with André Muller Weitzenhoffer, Hilgard developed the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hilgard as the 29th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#159
Robert M. Gagné
#2254
Overall Influence
1999 - 2022 (23 years)
Robert Mills Gagné was an American educational psychologist best known for his Conditions of Learning. He pioneered the science of instruction during World War II when he worked with the Army Air Corps training pilots. He went on to develop a series of studies and works that simplified and explained what he and others believed to be "good instruction." Gagné was also involved in applying concepts of instructional theory to the design of computer-based training and multimedia-based learning. His work is sometimes summarized as the Gagné assumption: that different types of learning exist, and t...
Go to Profile#160
Richard Shiffrin
#7315
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard Shiffrin is an American psychologist, professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Shiffrin has contributed a number of theories of attention and memory to the field of psychology. He co-authored the Atkinson–Shiffrin model of memory in 1968 with Richard Atkinson, who was his academic adviser at the time. In 1977, he published a theory of attention with Walter Schneider. With Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers in 1980, Shiffrin published the Search of Associative Memory model, which has served as the standard model of recall for cognitive psychologists well into the 2000s.
Go to Profile#161
Justin L. Barrett
#5595
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Justin L. Barrett is an American experimental psychologist, Founder and President of Blueprint 1543, a nonprofit organization. He formerly was the Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development in Pasadena, California, Thrive Professor of Developmental Science, and Professor of Psychology at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. He previously was a senior researcher and director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#162
Linda Gottfredson
#3532
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve .
Go to Profile#163
Kenneth Pargament
#7229
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kenneth I. Pargament is an emeritus professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University . Biography Born in 1950 in Washington, D.C., Pargament received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1977. He currently studies various relationships between religion, psychological well-being and stress, as well as other closely related subjects. He is also licensed in Clinical Psychology and has a private practice.
Go to Profile#164
Robert D. Hare
#1692
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Robert D. Hare is a Canadian forensic psychologist, known for his research in the field of criminal psychology. He is a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia where he specializes in psychopathology and psychophysiology.
Go to Profile#165
Barbara Fredrickson
#3483
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#166
Edward E. Jones
#6048
Overall Influence
1927 - 1993 (66 years)
For the Louisiana civil rights pioneer, see E. Edward Jones. Edward Ellsworth "Ned" Jones was an influential American social psychologist, he is known as father of Ingratiation due to his major works in the area. He worked at Duke University and from 1977 at Princeton University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Jones as the 39th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#167
Tim Shallice
#5741
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Timothy Shallice is a professor of neuropsychology and the founding director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, part of University College London. He has been a professor at Cognitive Neuroscience Sector of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy since 1994.
Go to Profile#168
Steve de Shazer
#3156
Overall Influence
1940 - 2005 (65 years)
Steve de Shazer was a psychotherapist, author, and developer and pioneer of solution focused brief therapy. In 1978, he founded the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife Insoo Kim Berg.
Go to Profile#169
Jane Goodall
#149
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dame Jane Morris Goodall , formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzeess, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.
Go to Profile#170
Lera Boroditsky
#4793
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford.
Go to Profile#171
Simon Baron-Cohen
#2313
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.
Go to Profile#172
Dylan Evans
#4012
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Dylan Evans is a British former academic and author who has written books on emotion and the placebo effect as well as the theories of Jacques Lacan. Life and career Early life and education Evans was born in Bristol on 29 September 1966 and went to private school at Sevenoaks School and the state-funded West Kent College of Further Education. His father is an aircraft engineer, his mother is a teacher.
Go to Profile#173
Paul Slovic
#2799
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the president of Decision Research. Decision Research is a collection of scientists from all over the nation and in other countries that study decision-making in times when risks are involved. He was also the president for the Society of Risk Analysis until 1984. He earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford University in 1959 and his PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan in 1964 and has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics and the University of East Anglia. He is past president of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award.
Go to Profile#174
Julian Jaynes
#2798
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Julian Jaynes was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years, best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, "...the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. ... Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began." Jaynes' solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and ...
Go to Profile#175
Leon Kamin
#4139
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Leon J. Kamin was an American psychologist known for his contributions to learning theory and his critique of estimates of the heritability of IQ. He studied under Richard Solomon at Harvard and contributed several important ideas about conditioning, including the "blocking effect".
Go to Profile#176
Marie Jahoda
#2977
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Marie Jahoda was an Austrian-British social psychologist. Biography Jahoda was born in Vienna to a Jewish merchant's family, and like many other psychologists of her time, grew up in Austria where political oppression against socialists was rampant henceforward Engelbert Dollfuss claimed power. Starting in her adolescent years she became engaged in the Austrian Social Democratic Party in ″Red Vienna.″ This was a major influence on her life. She is considered as Grande Dame of European socialism. In 1928, she earned her teaching diploma from the Pedagogical Academy of Vienna, and in 1933 earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#177
Irwin Altman
#7166
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Irwin Altman , is a social psychologist who earned his B.A. degree from New York University in 1951, his M.A. degree from the University of Maryland in 1954 and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1957. He is active in many groups and associations including the International Association of Applied Psychology, American Psychological Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association of University Professors, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Society of Experimental Social Psychology, Society of Personality and Social Psychology, A...
Go to Profile#178
Margaret Boden
#1206
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
Go to Profile#179
Edna B. Foa
#5101
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Edna Foa is an Israeli professor of clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as the director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. Foa is an internationally renowned authority in the field of psychopathology and treatment of anxiety. She approaches the understanding and treatment of mental disorders from a cognitive-behavioral perspective.
Go to Profile#180
André Green
#5494
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
André Green was a French psychoanalyst. Life and career André Green was born in Cairo, Egypt, to non-observant Jewish parents. He studied medicine at Paris Medical School and worked at several hospitals. Then, in 1965, after having finished his training as a psychoanalyst, he became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society , of which he was the president from 1986 to 1989. From 1975 to 1977 he was a vice president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and from 1979 to 1980 a professor at University College London. He died, aged 84, in Paris.
Go to Profile#181
Richard E. Mayer
#3409
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard E. Mayer is an American educational psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he has served since 1975. He received a PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan , and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Indiana University .
Go to Profile#182
Carol Dweck
#3302
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Carol Susan Dweck is an American psychologist. She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on motivation and mindset. She was on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Harvard, and Columbia before joining the Stanford University faculty in 2004. She was named an Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Fellow in 2013, an APS Mentor Awardee in 2019, and an APS William James Fellow in 2020, and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2012.
Go to Profile#183
Keith Stanovich
#4647
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Keith E. Stanovich is a Canadian psychologist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto and former Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science. His research areas are the psychology of reasoning and the psychology of reading. His research in the field of reading was fundamental to the emergence of today's scientific consensus about what reading is, how it works, and what it does for the mind. His research on the cognitive basis of rationality has been featured in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and in recent books by Yale University Press and University of Chicago Press.
Go to Profile#184
Daniel Levinson
#6520
Overall Influence
1920 - 1994 (74 years)
Daniel J. Levinson , a psychologist, was one of the founders of the field of positive adult development. Levinson is most well known for his theory of stage-crisis view, however he also made major contributions to the fields of behavioral, social, and developmental psychology. His interest in the social sciences began with studies on personality and authoritarianism, and eventually progressed to studies on development. Greatly influenced by the work of Erik Erikson, Elliott Jaques, and Bernice Neugarten, his stage-crisis view sought to incorporate all aspects of adult development in order to establish a more holistic approach to understanding the life cycle.
Go to Profile#185
Dedre Gentner
#4326
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Go to Profile#186
Frank Sulloway
#4616
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Frank Jones Sulloway is an American psychologist. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology. After finishing secondary school at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, Sulloway studied at Harvard College and later earned a PhD in the history of science at Harvard. He was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#187
Leonard Berkowitz
#8656
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Leonard Berkowitz was an American social psychologist best known for his research on altruism and human aggression. He originated the cognitive neoassociation model of aggressive behavior, which was created to help explain instances of aggression for which the frustration-aggression hypothesis could not account.
Go to Profile#188
Raymond Moody
#4073
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Raymond A. Moody Jr. is an American philosopher, psychiatrist, physician and author, most widely known for his books about afterlife and near-death experiences , a term that he coined in 1975 in his best-selling book Life After Life. His research explores personal accounts of subjective phenomena encountered in near-death experiences, particularly those of people who have apparently died but been resuscitated. He has widely published his views on what he terms near-death-experience psychology.
Go to Profile#189
John M. Darley
#6508
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
John M. Darley was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. Darley is best known, in collaboration with Bibb Latané, for developing theories that aim to explain why people might not intervene at the scene of an emergency when others are present; this phenomenon is known as the bystander effect and the accompanying diffusion of responsibility effect. This work stemmed from the tragic case of Kitty Genovese, a New Yorker who was murdered in March 1964 while 38 people either witnessed or heard her struggling with the assailant. Darl...
Go to Profile#190
Arnold Lazarus
#2710
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Arnold Allan Lazarus was a South African-born clinical psychologist and researcher who specialized in cognitive therapy and is best known for developing multimodal therapy . A 1955 graduate of South Africa's CHIPS University of the Witwatersrand, Lazarus' accomplishments include authoring the first text on cognitive behavioral therapy called Behaviour Therapy and Beyond and 17 other books, over 300 clinical articles, and presidencies of psychological associations; he received numerous awards including the Distinguished Psychologist Award of the Division of Psychotherapy from the American Psy...
Go to Profile#191
Richard E. Petty
#8889
Overall Influence
Richard E. Petty is university professor of psychology at Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Ohio State in 1977. After graduation Richard E. Petty went on to start his academic career as the assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and in 1985 he was named the Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of Psychology. In 1987 he returned to Ohio State University for an appointment as a professor of psychology and director of the Social Psychology Doctoral Program and has been a distinguished university professor since 1998. He served as chai...
Go to Profile#192
Saul Sternberg
#7139
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Saul Sternberg is a professor emeritus of psychology and former Paul C. Williams Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology in the development of experimental techniques to study human information processing. Sternberg received a B.A. in mathematics in 1954 from Swarthmore College and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University in 1959. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in mathematical statistics at the University of Cambridge in 1960, and he subsequently worked as a research scientist in the linguistics and artificial ...
Go to Profile#193
Willem Levelt
#8292
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Willem Johannes Maria Levelt is a Dutch psycholinguist. He is a researcher of human language acquisition and speech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of the cognitive processes involved in the act of speaking, including the significance of the "mental lexicon". Levelt was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences between 2002 and 2005, of which he has been a member since 1978.
Go to Profile#194
Peter Fonagy
#7185
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Fonagy, is a Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. He studied clinical psychology at University College London. He is a Professor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Developmental Science Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre, and a training and supervising analyst in the British Psycho-Analytical Society in child and adult analysis. His clinical interests center on issues of borderline psychopathology, violence, and early attachment relationships. His work attempts to integrate empirical research with psychoanalytic theory.
Go to Profile#195
Betty Friedan
#177
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women , which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
Go to Profile#196
Richard C. Atkinson
#2687
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Richard Chatham Atkinson is an American professor of psychology and cognitive science and an academic administrator. He is president emeritus of the University of California system, former chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, and former director of the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#197
Charles R. Snyder
#6382
Overall Influence
1944 - 2006 (62 years)
Charles Richard "Rick" Snyder was an American psychologist who specialized in positive psychology. He was a Wright Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Kansas and editor of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
Go to Profile#198
Robert O. Pihl
#3278
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert O. Pihl is an American psychology researcher, professor and clinician. Since 1966, he has worked at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association, as well as a member of many other academic organizations.
Go to Profile#199
Bibb Latané
#5985
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Bibb Latané is an American social psychologist. He worked with John M. Darley on bystander intervention in emergencies. He has also published many articles on social attraction in animals, social loafing in groups, and the spread of social influence in populations.
Go to Profile#200
Jean Decety
#3887
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
