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,
#201
Joseph E. LeDoux
#2173
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joseph E. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, and director of the Emotional Brain Institute, a collaboration between NYU and New York State with research sites at NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the band The Amygdaloids.
Go to Profile#202
Icek Ajzen
#5580
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Icek Ajzen is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and is best known for his work, with Martin Fishbein, on the theory of planned behavior. Ajzen has been ranked the most influential individual scientist within social psychology in terms of cumulative research impact and, in 2013, received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has been influential across diverse fields such as advertising, health psychol...
Go to Profile#203
Robert W. White
#8878
Overall Influence
1904 - 2001 (97 years)
Robert W. White was an American psychologist whose professional interests centered on the study of personality, both normal and abnormal. His book The Abnormal Personality, published in 1948, became the standard textbook on Abnormal Psychology.
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Jacob Cohen
#7878
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Jacob Cohen was an American psychologist and statistician best known for his work on statistical power and effect size, which helped to lay foundations for current statistical meta-analysis and the methods of estimation statistics. He gave his name to such measures as Cohen's kappa, Cohen's d, and Cohen's h.
Go to Profile#205
James Marcia
#6962
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
James E. Marcia is a clinical and developmental psychologist. He taught at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada and the State University of New York at Buffalo in Upstate New York. He is also active in clinical private practice, clinical psychology supervision, community consultation, and international clinical-developmental research and teaching.
Go to Profile#206
Robert Jay Lifton
#1197
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Robert Jay Lifton is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.
Go to Profile#207
Elizabeth Spelke
#5383
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Elizabeth Shilin Spelke FBA is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She has suggested that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she has made important contributions to the debate on cognitive differences between men and women. She defends the position that there is no scientific evidence of any significant disparity in the intellec...
Go to Profile#208
Stevan Harnad
#1892
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Stevan Robert Harnad is a Canadian cognitive scientist based in Montreal. Early life and education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. Harnad completed his Master of Arts degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1969, his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University in 1992. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by University of Liège in 2013.
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Joshua Tenenbaum
#5479
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Joshua Brett Tenenbaum is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to mathematical psychology and Bayesian cognitive science. According to the MacArthur Foundation, which named him a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, "Tenenbaum is one of the first to develop and apply probabilistic and statistical modeling to the study of human learning, reasoning, and perception, and to show how these models can explain a fundamental challenge of cognition: how our minds understand so much from so little, so quickly."
Go to Profile#210
Jane Loevinger
#7776
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Jane Loevinger Weissman was an American developmental psychologist who developed a theory of personality which emphasized the gradual internalization of social rules and the maturing conscience for the origin of personal decisions. She also contributed to the theory of measurements by introducing the coefficient of test homogeneity. In the tradition of developmental stage models, Loevinger integrated several "frameworks of meaning-making" into a model of humans' constructive potentials that she called ego development . The essence of the ego is the striving to master, to integrate, and make sense of experience.
Go to Profile#211
Sherry Turkle
#1184
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#212
Gregory J. Feist
#8564
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Gregory John Feist is an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology at San Jose State University. He has published in the psychology of creativity, personality, psychology of science, motivated reasoning, the psychology of science, and the development of scientific talent.
Go to Profile#213
John Gottman
#3857
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Mordechai Gottman is an American psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. His work focuses on divorce prediction and marital stability through relationship analyses. The lessons derived from this work represent a partial basis for the relationship counseling movement that aims to improve relationship functioning and the avoidance of those behaviors shown by Gottman and other researchers to harm human relationships. His work has also had a major impact on the development of important concepts on social sequence analysis. He and his wife, psychologist...
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Charles Brenner
#7328
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Charles Brenner was an American psychoanalyst who served as president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and is perhaps best known for his contributions to drive theory, the structure of the mind, and conflict theory.
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Richard M. Ryan
#12046
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Richard M. Ryan is a professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University and a research professor at the University of Rochester. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University for Rochester and his B.A. from the University of Connecticut. Ryan is a clinical psychologist and co-developer with Edward L. Deci, of Self-Determination Theory , one of the most influential theories of human motivation. SDT is a macrotheory of motivation, psychological development and wellness. The theory has spawned basic research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the facilitation and undermining of volitional motivation.
Go to Profile#216
Bernard Baars
#3270
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a theory of human cognitive architecture and consciousness. He previously served as a professor of psychology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where he conducted research into the causation of human errors and the Freudian slip, and as a faculty member at the Wright Institute.
Go to Profile#217
Christopher Peterson
#6827
Overall Influence
1950 - 2012 (62 years)
Christopher Peterson was the Arthur F. Thurnau professor of psychology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the former chair of the clinical psychology area. He was science director of the VIA Institute on Character, and co-author of Character Strengths and Virtues for the classification of character strengths. He was a member of the Positive Psychology Steering Committee and the International Positive Psychology Association board of directors, a senior fellow at the Positive Psychology Center and a lecturer for the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Gary Schwartz
#6152
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gary E. Schwartz is an American psychologist, author, parapsychologist and professor at the University of Arizona and the director of its Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. Schwartz researches the veracity of mediums and energy healing.
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Barbara S. Held
#10257
Overall Influence
Barbara S. Held is the Barry N. Wish Research Professor of Psychology and Social Studies Emerita at Bowdoin College in the fields of clinical psychology and theoretical/philosophical psychology. She served as President of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology from 2008 to 2009, and was recipient of the 2012 Joseph B. Glitter Award from the American Psychological Association recognizing her "scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge."
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Robyn Dawes
#6979
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Robyn Mason Dawes was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of human judgment. His research interests included human irrationality, human cooperation, intuitive expertise, and the United States AIDS policy. He applied linear models to human decision making, including models with equal weights, a method known as unit-weighted regression. He co-wrote an early textbook on mathematical psychology .
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Ralph W. Hood
#8020
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ralph Wilbur Hood Jr. is an American psychologist. He serves as Leroy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he specializes in the psychology of religion.
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Patricia McKinsey Crittenden
#4013
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Patricia McKinsey Crittenden is an American psychologist known for her work in the development of attachment theory and science, her work in the field of developmental psychopathology, and for creation of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation .
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Morton Deutsch
#6603
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Morton Deutsch was an American social psychologist and researcher in conflict resolution. Deutsch was one of the founding fathers of the field of conflict resolution. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Deutsch as the 63rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Shelley E. Taylor
#10189
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Shelley Elizabeth Taylor is an American psychologist. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of social psychology: social cognition and health psychology. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor.
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David Chalmers
#652
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
#226
Anatol Rapoport
#659
Overall Influence
1911 - 2007 (96 years)
Anatol Rapoport was an American mathematical psychologist. He contributed to general systems theory, to mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion.
Go to Profile#227
Victor Vroom
#3379
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Victor Harold Vroom was a Canadian psychologist and business school professor at the Yale School of Management. Life and career Vroom was born in Montreal, Quebec on August 9, 1932. He held a PhD from University of Michigan and an MS and BS from McGill University.
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Adrian Furnham
#7126
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Adrian Frank Furnham is a South African-born British BPS chartered occupational psychologist and chartered health psychologist. He is currently an adjunct professor at BI Norwegian Business School and professor at University College London. Throughout his career, he has lectured in the following post-secondary institutions: Pembroke College, Oxford, University of New South Wales, University of West Indies, Hong Kong University Business School, and the Henley Management College.
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Diederik Stapel
#7442
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Diederik Alexander Stapel is a Dutch former professor of social psychology at Tilburg University. In 2011 Tilburg University suspended Stapel for fabricating and manipulating data for his research publications. This scientific misconduct took place over a number of years and affected dozens of his publications. By 2015, fifty-eight of Stapel's publications had been retracted. He has been described in coverage by the New York Times as "the biggest con man in academic science".
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K. Anders Ericsson
#5645
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
K. Anders Ericsson was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who was internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.
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Allan M. Collins
#4315
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Allan M. Collins is an American cognitive scientist, Professor Emeritus of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. His research is recognized as having broad impact on the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and education.
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Theodore R. Sarbin
#5633
Overall Influence
1911 - 2005 (94 years)
Theodore Roy Sarbin was an American psychologist and professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was known as "Mr. Role Theory" because of his contributions to the social psychology of role-taking.
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J. Philippe Rushton
#1647
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
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Klaus Scherer
#6617
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Klaus Rainer Scherer is former Professor of Psychology and director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva. He is a specialist in the psychology of emotion. He is known for editing the Handbook of Affective Sciences and several other influential articles on emotions, expression, personality and music.
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Daniel Levitin
#3387
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. He is the author of four New York Times best-selling books, including This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, which has sold more than 1 million copies.
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Richard Lynn
#2738
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal. Lynn was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
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Thomas Gilovich
#8616
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Dashiff Gilovich an American psychologist who is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He has conducted research in social psychology, decision making, behavioral economics, and has written popular books on these subjects. Gilovich has collaborated with Daniel Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross and Amos Tversky. His articles in peer-reviewed journals on subjects such as cognitive biases have been widely cited. In addition, Gilovich has been quoted in the media on subjects ranging from the effect of purchases on happiness to perception of judgment in social situations.
Go to Profile#238
Michael Commons
#4862
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Lamport Commons is a theoretical behavioral scientist and a complex systems scientist. He developed the model of hierarchical complexity. Life and work Michael Lamport Commons was born in 1939 in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood. Commons holds two B.A.s from University of California at Los Angeles , one in mathematics, the other in psychology. He earned his M.A., and M.Phil. and in 1973 received his Ph.D., in psychology from Columbia University. Currently, he is Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center , and Director of the Dar...
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Timothy Wilson
#8353
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Timothy DeCamp Wilson is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and teaches public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is known for his research on self-knowledge and the influence of the unconscious mind on decision-making, preferences and behavior. He is the author of two popular books on psychology, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious and Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change.
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Dante Cicchetti
#8516
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dante Cicchetti is a developmental psychology and developmental psychopathology scientist specializing in high-risk and disenfranchised populations, including maltreated children and offspring of depressed parents. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School and in the Institute of Child Development. He is the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair and the William Harris Endowed Chair.
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David H. Barlow
#4131
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David H. Barlow is an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry at Boston University. He is board certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology. Barlow is known for his research and publications on the etiology, nature, and treatment of anxiety disorders. The models and treatment methods that he developed for anxiety and related disorders are widely used in clinical training and practice. Barlow is one of the most frequently cited psychologists in the world.
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Les Greenberg
#7944
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Leslie Samuel Greenberg is a Canadian psychologist born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is one of the originators and primary developers of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, and also director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. His research has addressed questions regarding empathy, psychotherapy process, the therapeutic alliance, and emotion in human functioning.
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John T. Cacioppo
#6610
Overall Influence
1951 - 2018 (67 years)
John Terrence Cacioppo was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and was the director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. He co-founded the field of social neuroscience and was member of the department of psychology, department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and the college until his death in March 2018.
Go to Profile#244
Didier Anzieu
#7481
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Didier Anzieu was a distinguished French psychoanalyst. Life Anzieu studied philosophy and was a pupil of Daniel Lagache, before undertaking his first psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan. Then, after discovering that Lacan had also treated his mother , he began a second analysis with Georges Favez. He retained a deep grudge against Lacan's lack of candor and later also condemned the excesses and arbitrary practices of the Lacanians — highlighting the latter's 'unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language', as well as the pervasively tantalizing element in Lacan's approach, with 'funda...
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Peter M. Bentler
#14846
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Peter M. Bentler is an American psychologist, statistician, and distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In multivariate analysis and psychometrics, Bentler is the developer of the structural equation modeling software EQS. Bentler received a doctorate in clinical psychology from Stanford University in 1964. His publications have over 300,000 citations . In 2014, he was awarded the Psychometric Society Career Award. In 2015, he was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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Alice Miller
#4475
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Alice Miller , was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.
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Gerd Gigerenzer
#1891
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making. Gigerenzer is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, both in Berlin.
Go to Profile#248
Herbert Kelman
#7513
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Herbert Chanoch Kelman was an Austrian-born American psychologist who was the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. He is known for his work on conflict resolution in the Middle East.
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Donald T. Campbell
#2105
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
Donald Thomas Campbell was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term evolutionary epistemology and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Campbell as the 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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John L. Horn
#7186
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
John Leonard Horn was a scholar, cognitive psychologist and a pioneer in developing theories of intelligence. The Cattell-Horn- Carroll theory is the basis for many modern IQ tests. Horn's parallel analysis, a method for determining the number of factors to keep in an exploratory factor analysis, is also named after him.
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