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.

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,

#251

James Gross

#11948

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

James J. Gross is a psychologist best known for his research in emotion and emotion regulation. He is a professor at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory.

#252

Maritza Montero

#13620

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Maritza Montero is a Venezuelan social psychologist and political scientist. She is a Professor and Program Director at the Central University of Venezuela. Her research focuses on community psychology, political psychology, and liberation psychology, with a particular focus on Latin America. She has been the President of the International Society of Political Psychology.

#253

Eric Trist

#3890

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Eric Lansdown Trist was an English scientist and leading figure in the field of organizational development . He was one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute for Social Research in London. Biography Trist was born in 1909 in Dover, Kent, England of a Cornish father, Frederick Trist, and a Scottish mother, Alexina Trist nee Middleton. He grew up in Dover experiencing dramatic air raids in the first world war. He went to Cambridge University - Pembroke College in 1928, where he read English Literature, graduating with first-class honours. Influenced heavily by his don I. A. Richards he bec...

#254

David Dunning

#5681

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David Alan Dunning is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He is a retired professor of psychology at Cornell University. Education He received his BA from Michigan State University in 1982 and PhD from Stanford University in 1986, both in psychology.

#255

Paul Bloom

#6504

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

#256

Edwin S. Shneidman

Edwin S. Shneidman

#9121

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

Edwin S. Shneidman was an American clinical psychologist, suicidologist and thanatologist. Together with Norman Farberow and Robert Litman, in 1958, he founded the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center where the men were instrumental in researching suicide and developing a crisis center and treatments to prevent deaths.

#257

Martin Hoffman

#9546

Overall Influence

1950 - 2022 (72 years)

Martin L. Hoffman was an American psychologist and a professor emeritus of clinical and developmental psychology at New York University. In his career, Hoffman is primarily focused on development of empathy and its relationship with moral development, which he defines as "people's consideration for others." His research also touches on areas such as empathic anger, sympathy, guilt and feelings of injustice.

#258

Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

#9144

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Eric-Jan Wagenmakers is a Dutch mathematical psychologist. He is a professor at the Methodology Unit in the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam . Since 2012, he has also been Professor of Neurocognitive Modeling: Interdisciplinary Integration at UvA's Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. A noted expert on research methods in psychology, he has been highly critical of some dubious practices by his fellow psychologists, including Daryl Bem's research purporting to find support for the parapsychological concept of extrasensory perception, and the tendency for psychologists in general to favor the publication of studies with surprising, eye-catching results.

#259

Christina Maslach

#3706

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Christina Maslach is an American social psychologist and professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, known for her research on occupational burnout. She is a co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory and Areas of Worklife Survey. Early in her professional career, Maslach was instrumental in stopping the Stanford prison experiment. In 1997, she was awarded the U.S. Professor of the Year.

#260

Lewis Aron

#14738

Overall Influence

1952 - 2019 (67 years)

Lewis Aron was an American psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, teacher and lecturer on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis who made contributions particularly within the specialty known as relational psychoanalysis. Aron was the Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in New York City. He was the founding president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and was formerly President of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. He was board certified in psychoanalysis by the American Board of Professional Psychology and a Fellow of the American Board of Psychoanalysis .

#261

Gabriele Oettingen

#10354

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Princess Gabriele of Oettingen-Oettingen and Oettingen-Spielberg, known professionally as Gabriele Oettingen, is a German academic and psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on how people think about the future, and how this impacts cognition, emotion, and behavior.

#262

Hanna Segal

#8107

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

Hanna Segal was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London in 1987. The American psychoanalyst James Grotstein considered that "received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of "classical" Kleinian thinking and technique." The BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley introduced her as "one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time,"

#263

Saul Rosenzweig

#7531

Overall Influence

1907 - 2004 (97 years)

Saul Rosenzweig was an American psychologist and therapist who studied subjects such as repression, psychotherapy, and aggression. Rosenzweig, who, with a co-author, has been credited with being the first to attempt to "elicit repression" in a laboratory setting, became well known after publishing a paper discussing "common factors" underlying competing approaches to psychotherapy.

#264

Alison Gopnik

#5395

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal article...

#265

Trevor Robbins

#10116

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Trevor William Robbins CBE FRS FMedSci is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and the former Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Robbins interests are in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural neuroscience and psychopharmacology.

#266

Otto F. Kernberg

Otto F. Kernberg

#6368

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Otto Friedmann Kernberg is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives . His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a school within modern psychoanalysis.

#267

Richard Davidson

#4640

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

#268

Jaak Panksepp

#3142

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Jaak Panksepp was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.

#269

Elke U. Weber

#8603

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Elke U. Weber is a Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University where she holds the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professorship in Energy & the Environment. Prior to moving to Princeton in 2016, she spent 19 years at Columbia University, where she founded and co-directed the Earth Institute's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and the Columbia Business School's Center for Decision Sciences.

#270

John McCarthy

#68

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" , developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.

#271

Uta Frith

#4670

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist and Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London . She pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. Her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduced the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.

#272

Edwin Locke

#6854

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Edwin A. Locke is an American psychologist and a pioneer in goal-setting theory. He is a retired Dean's Professor of Motivation and Leadership at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was also affiliated with the Department of Psychology. As stated by the Association for Psychological Science, "Locke is the most published organizational psychologist in the history of the field. His pioneering research has advanced and enriched our understanding of work motivation and job satisfaction. The theory that is synonymous with his name—goal-setting theory—is perhaps the most widely-respected theory in industrial-organizational psychology.

#273

Edvard Moser

#2296

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Edvard Ingjald Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In 2005, he and his then-wife May-Britt Moser discovered grid cells in the brain's medial entorhinal cortex. Grid cells are specialized neurons that provide the brain with a coordinate system and a metric for space. In 2018, he discovered a neural network that expresses a person's sense of time in experiences and memories located in the brain's lateral entorhinal cortex.

#274

Claudio Naranjo

Claudio Naranjo

#4439

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen was a Chilean-born psychiatrist who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions. He was one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls , a principal developer of Enneagram of Personality theories and a founder of the Seekers After Truth Institute. He was also an elder statesman of the US and global human potential movement and the spiritual renaissance of the late 20th century. Naranjo authored several books.

#275

Chris Frith

#9104

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Christopher Donald Frith FRS, FMedSci, FBA, FAAAS is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. He is also an affiliated research worker at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford since 2013.

#276

J. E. R. Staddon

#5227

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

John Eric Rayner Staddon is a British-born American psychologist. He has been a critic of Skinnerian behaviorism and proposed a theoretically-based "New Behaviorism". John Staddon conducted theoretical behaviorism research in adaptive function, mechanisms of learning, and optimality theories. He completed his graduate work at the Skinner Lab in Harvard in the 1960s, with Richard Herrnstein.

#277

Peter Cathcart Wason

#6092

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

Peter Cathcart Wason was a cognitive psychologist at University College, London, who pioneered the psychology of reasoning. He sought to explain why people consistently commit logical errors. He designed problems and tests to demonstrate these behaviours, such as the Wason selection task, the THOG problem and the 2-4-6 problem. He also coined the term "confirmation bias" to describe the tendency for people to immediately favor information that validates their preconceptions, hypotheses and personal beliefs regardless of whether they are true or not.

#278

Frederick Herzberg

#2278

Overall Influence

1923 - 2000 (77 years)

Frederick Irving Herzberg was an American psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management. He is most famous for introducing job enrichment and the Motivator-Hygiene theory. His 1968 publication "One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?" had sold 1.2 million reprints by 1987 and was the most requested article from the Harvard Business Review.

#279

David Epston

#7080

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

David Epston is a New Zealand social worker and therapist, co-director of the Family Therapy Centre in Auckland, New Zealand, visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy University, an honorary clinical lecturer in the Department of Social Work, University of Melbourne, and an affiliate faculty member in the Ph.D program in Couple and Family Therapy at North Dakota State University. Epston and his late friend and colleague Michael White are known as originators of narrative therapy.

#280

Nico Frijda

#4351

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Nico Henri Frijda was a Dutch psychologist and professor of the University of Amsterdam. Life Frijda was born in Amsterdam. He studied psychology at the Gemeenteuniversiteit Amsterdam, where he received his PhD in 1956 on the thesis title Understanding Facial Expressions with Géza Révész as advisor. In 1965 he was appointed full professor. Frijda retired in 1992 to become emeritus professor. In 2007 he received a laurea honoris causa in psychology from University of Padova.

#281

Arnold Mindell

#9562

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Arnold Mindell is an American author, therapist, and teacher in the fields of transpersonal psychology, body psychotherapy, social change, and spirituality. He is known for extending Jungian dream analysis to body symptoms, promoting ideas of 'deep democracy,' and interpreting concepts from physics and mathematics in psychological terms. Mindell is the founder of process oriented psychology, or process work, a development of Jungian psychology influenced by Taoism, shamanism, and physics.

#282

Robert Plomin

#5536

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert Joseph Plomin is an American/British psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology.

#283

Henry Riecken

#13942

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

Henry William Riecken was an American psychologist. Biography Riecken was born on November 11, 1917, and was raised in Brooklyn. He obtained a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1939, and completed a master's degree in psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1941. Following his service in the United States Army Air Forces in the midst of World War II, Riecken earned a doctorate from the Harvard University Department of Social Relations in 1949. He began teaching at Harvard upon finishing his doctoral studies and later joined the University of Minnesota faculty. Riecken left Minnesota for Washington, D.

#284

Gary Marcus

#774

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Gary Fred Marcus is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence . Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 Marcus founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.

#285

Russell Barkley

#10054

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Russell Alan Barkley is an American retired clinical neuropsychologist who was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the VCU Medical Center until 2022 and an author of books on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder . Involved in research since 1973 and a licensed psychologist since 1977, he is an expert on ADHD and has devoted much of his scientific career to studying ADHD and related fields like childhood defiance. He proposed to change the name of sluggish cognitive tempo to concentration deficit disorder and later cognitive disengagement syndrome .

#286

Ellen Markman

#11088

Overall Influence

Ellen Markman is Lewis M. Terman Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She specializes in word learning and language development in children, focusing specifically on how children come to associate words with their meanings. Markman contends that in order to learn the meaning of a word, children make use of three basic principles: the whole object assumption , the taxonomic assumption , and the mutual exclusivity assumption . Related topics that Markman has studied include categorization and inductive reasoning in children and infants. Markman subscribes to the innatist school of de...

#287

J. Mark G. Williams

#8845

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

J. Mark G. Williams, is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry. He held previous posts at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge and the University of Wales Bangor, where he founded the Institute for Medical and Social Care Research and the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the British Academy. He was educated at Stockton Grammar School, Stockton-on-Tees, and at St Peter's College, Oxford.

#288

Steve Reicher

#9940

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Stephen David Reicher is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Social Psychology at the University of St Andrews. His research is in the area of social psychology, focusing on social identity, collective behaviour, intergroup conflict, leadership and mobilisation. He is broadly interested in the issues of group behaviour and the individual-social relationship.

#289

Richard Boyatzis

#6800

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis is a Greek-American organizational theorist and Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, Adjunct Professor in People/Organizations at ESADE, as well as HR Horvitz Professor of Family Business. He is considered an expert in the field of emotional intelligence, behavior change, and competence.

#290

Jerome Busemeyer

#9365

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jerome Robert Busemeyer is a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science Program. Busemeyer completed his undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Cincinnati in 1973, which he followed with both a masters and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina in 1976 and 1979 respectively. He was a NIMH post doctoral fellow in the Quantitative program at University of Illinois until 1980. Afterwards, he became a faculty member at Purdue University until 1997, and then he joined the faculty at Indiana University-Bloomington.

#291

Stanley Rachman

#7148

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Stanley Jack Rachman was a South African-born psychologist who worked primarily with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders. He spent much of his career based in the UK and Canada.

#292

Susan Carey

#12037

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood and The Origin of Concepts .

#293

Lynn Nadel

#10206

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Lynn Nadel is an American psychologist who is the Regents' Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Nadel specializes in memory, and has investigated the role of the hippocampus in memory formation. Together with John O'Keefe, he coauthored the influential 1978 book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, which defended the theory that the hippocampus learns and stores cognitive maps of portions of space. With Morris Moscovitch, he advanced the multiple trace theory that the hippocampus is always involved in storage and retrieval of episodic memory, but that semantic memory can be es...

#294

E. Tory Higgins

E. Tory Higgins

#11747

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Edward Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Higgins' research areas include motivation and cognition, judgment and decision-making, and social cognition. Most of his works focus on priming, self-discrepancy theory, and regulatory focus theory. He is also the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works, and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence .

#295

Paul Fraisse

#10655

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Paul Fraisse was a French psychologist known his work in the field of perception of time. Biography Fraisse did not go directly into psychology but initially planned to become a Jesuit priest. These plans were abandoned owing to poor health. Nevertheless, Fraisse resumed philosophical studies at the Catholic University of Lyon, still hoping to prepare for the priesthood. A faculty member suggested that he go to the Catholic University of Louvain where experimental psychology had an important place in the Institute of Philosophy. There he spent 1935-37 as laboratory assistant to Professor Albert Michotte, doing experiments on visual perception and preparing for examinations in philosophy.

#296

Peter Gollwitzer

#13667

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Max Gollwitzer is a German professor of psychology in the Psychology Department at New York University. His research centers on how goals and plans affect cognition, emotion, and behavior. Gollwitzer has developed several models of action control: the symbolic self-completion theory ; the Rubicon Model of Action Phases ; the Auto-Motive Model of Automatic Goal Striving ; the Mindset Theory of Action Phases ; and the distinction between action control by Goal Intentions vs. Implementation Intentions .

#297

Melvin J. Lerner

#11580

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Melvin J. Lerner, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Waterloo between 1970 and 1994 and now a visiting scholar at Florida Atlantic University, has been called "a pioneer in the psychological study of justice."

#298

Gordon G. Gallup

#9565

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Gordon G. Gallup Jr. is an American psychologist in the University at Albany's psychology department, researching biopsychology. Early life and education Gallup received his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of the psychology department at Tulane University.

#299

Diana Deutsch

#6788

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Diana Deutsch is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She's a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitcheses in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch , which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages.

#300

Arthur Aron

#12034

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Arthur Aron is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is best known for his work on intimacy in interpersonal relationships, and development of the self-expansion model of motivation in close relationships.

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