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,
#301
Jerome E. Singer
#9250
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Jerome Everett Singer was the founding chair of the Medical and Clinical Psychology Department at Uniformed Services University. He is best known for his contributions to the two-factor theory of emotion. He also served as one of the fourteen members on the National Research Council committee on human performance in 1985. Singer played a role in the cognitive revival of modern psychology. His main area of expertise was the psychological and physiological effects of various types of stress.
Go to Profile#302
Paul Vitz
#8215
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Paul Clayton Vitz is an American psychologist who is a Senior Scholar at Divine Mercy University in Sterling, Virginia. He is emeritus professor of psychology at New York University. His work focuses primarily on the relationship between psychology and Christianity.
Go to Profile#303
Philip Rubin
#8200
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Philip E. Rubin is an American cognitive scientist, technologist, and science administrator known for raising the visibility of behavioral and cognitive science, neuroscience, and ethical issues related to science, technology, and medicine, at a national level. His research career is noted for his theoretical contributions and pioneering technological developments, starting in the 1970s, related to speech synthesis and speech production, including articulatory synthesis and sinewave synthesis, and their use in studying complex temporal events, particularly understanding the biological bas...
Go to Profile#304
Stanley Coren
#5705
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stanley Coren is a psychology professor, neuropsychological researcher and writer on the intelligence, mental abilities and history of dogs. He works in research and instructs in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. He writes for Psychology Today in the feature series Canine Corner.
Go to Profile#305
Richard E. Nisbett
#8996
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Richard Eugene Nisbett is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in social cognition, culture, social class, and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.
Go to Profile#306
Graham Hitch
#9951
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Graham Hitch is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of York, best known for his work with Alan Baddeley in developing a Working Memory Model. Education He gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from the University of Cambridge, before gaining a Master of Science degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex. He then returned to Cambridge to complete his PhD in 1972.
Go to Profile#307
Barbara Tversky
#9085
Overall Influence
Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Tversky specializes in cognitive psychology.
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Christine Blasey Ford
#2510
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Christine Margaret Blasey Ford is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects. During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.
Go to Profile#309
Nathaniel Gage
#12167
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Nathaniel Lees Gage was an American educational psychologist who made significant contributions to a scientific understanding of teaching. He conceived and edited the first Handbook of Research on Teaching , led the Stanford Center for Research and Development of Teaching, and served as president of the American Educational Research Association. Gage was a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he moved in 1962 after 14 years at the University of Illinois. Deborah Stipek, dean of the Stanford School of Education, called Gage a "giant among educational researchers." David C.
Go to Profile#310
Robert A. Baker
#12531
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Robert Allen Baker Jr. was an American psychologist, professor of psychology emeritus of the University of Kentucky, skeptic, author, and investigator of ghosts, UFO abductions, lake monsters and other paranormal phenomena. He is the editor of Psychology in the Wry, a collection of satire, and was formerly the co-editor of Approaches, a quarterly journal of contemporary poetry. His satirical and humorous verses have appeared in Vogue, Saturday Review, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, Worm-Runners' Digest, and other journals. He wrote 15 books and is a past fellow of the Committee for Sk...
Go to Profile#311
Robert Kurzban
#10340
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Robert Kurzban is an American freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology. Career Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of inappropriate relationships with undergraduate students. Following his resignation, he was dismissed as the director of the department's honors program. He also resigned as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and as Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. Since then he has worked as a fr...
Go to Profile#312
Roy Baumeister
#12405
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#313
Janet E. Helms
#11709
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#314
Lauren Alloy
#15874
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Lauren B. Alloy is an American psychologist, recognized for her research on mood disorders. Along with colleagues Lyn Abramson and Gerald Metalsky, she developed the hopelessness theory of depression. With Abramson, she also developed the depressive realism hypothesis. Alloy is a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#315
Mark Seidenberg
#4100
Overall Influence
Mark Seidenberg is Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. He is a specialist in psycholinguistics, focusing specifically on the cognitive and neurological bases of language and reading. Seidenberg received his Ph.D. from Columbia University under the mentorship of Thomas Bever and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. He has held academic positions at McGill University, the University of Southern California, and since 2001 at the University of Wisconsin.
Go to Profile#316
Kenneth B. Clark
#7190
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
#317
Frans de Waal
#1790
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Franciscus Bernardus Maria "Frans" de Waal is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory, and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape . His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Roy...
Go to Profile#318
Hanna Damasio
#4743
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, and emotion, using both the lesion method and functional neuroimaging. She is currently a Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#319
Deirdre Barrett
#6967
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Deirdre Barrett is an American author and psychologist known for her research on dreams, hypnosis and imagery, and has written on evolutionary psychology. Barrett is a teacher at Harvard Medical School, and a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and of the American Psychological Association’s Div. 30, the Society for Psychological Hypnosis. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Dreaming: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams and a consulting editor for Imagination, Cognition, and Personality and The International Journal for Clinical and Ex...
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Teresa Amabile
#4006
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Teresa M. Amabile is an American academic who is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Biography Amabile is primarily known for her research and writing on creativity, dating to the late 1970s. Originally educated as a chemist, Amabile received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University in 1977. She now studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Her research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of em...
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Kenneth J. Gergen
#11129
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Kenneth J. Gergen is an American social psychologist and emeritus professor at Swarthmore College. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and his PhD from Duke University . Biography The son of John Jay Gergen, the chair of the Mathematics Department at Duke University, and Aubigne Munger , Gergen grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He had three brothers, one of whom is David Gergen, the prominent political analyst. After completing public schooling, he attended Yale University. Graduating in 1957, he subsequently became an officer in the U.S. Navy. He then returned to graduate school at Duke University, where he received his PhD in psychology in 1963.
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Norbert Schwarz
#10172
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Norbert Schwarz is Provost Professor in the Department of Psychology and the USC Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and a co-director of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center.
Go to Profile#323
Nicholas Mackintosh
#7090
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Nicholas John Seymour Mackintosh, was a British experimental psychologist and author, specialising in intelligence, psychometrics and animal learning. Education Mackintosh was born in London, the son of Ian Mackintosh and his wife Daphne Cochrane. He was educated at Winchester College and the University of Oxford where he was a student of Magdalen College, Oxford and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1963 supervised by Stuart Sutherland.
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Howard Rachlin
#4746
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Howard Rachlin was an American psychologist and the founder of teleological behaviorism. He was Emeritus Research Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University in New York. His initial work was in the quantitative analysis of operant behavior in pigeons, on which he worked with William M. Baum, developing ideas from Richard Herrnstein's matching law. He subsequently became one of the founders of Behavioral Economics.
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Stephen Rollnick
#7523
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Stephen Rollnick is Honorary Distinguished Professor in the School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. Alongside William R Miller, he developed many of the founding principles of motivational interviewing.
Go to Profile#326
Allen Bergin
#13094
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Allen Eric Bergin is a clinical psychologist known for his research on psychotherapy outcomes and on integrating psychotherapy and religion. His 1980 article on theistic values was groundbreaking in the field and elicited over 1,000 responses and requests for reprints, and including those from Carl Rogers and Albert Bandura. Bergin is also noted for his interchanges with probabilistic atheist Albert Ellis.
Go to Profile#327
Jean Matter Mandler
#12309
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Jean Matter Mandler is Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego and visiting professor at University College London. She was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1929 and attended Carleton College before transferring to Swarthmore College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1951. She received her Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1956. After a series of research positions – common for women in the 1950–1960s – at Harvard, the University of Toronto, and at UCSD, she became an associate professor at UCSD in 1973 and professor in 1977; she retired as a research professor in 2000.
Go to Profile#328
Michael Thalbourne
#28943
Overall Influence
1955 - 2010 (55 years)
Michael Anthony Thalbourne was an Australian psychologist who worked in the field of parapsychology. He was educated at the University of Adelaide and the University of Edinburgh. His books include: A glossary of terms used in parapsychology , The common thread between ESP and PK , and Parapsychology in the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the future of Psychical Research .
Go to Profile#329
Andrew N. Meltzoff
#9233
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Andrew N. Meltzoff is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition, personality and brain development.
Go to Profile#330
Michael Persinger
#8994
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Michael A. Persinger was an American-Canadian professor of psychology at Laurentian University, a position he had held from 1971 until his death in 2018. His most well-known hypotheses include the temporal lobes of the human brain as the central correlate for mystical experiences, subtle changes in geomagnetic activity as mediators of parapsychological phenomena, the tectonic strain within the Earth's crust as the source of luminous phenomena attributed to unidentified aerial objects, and the importance of specific quantifications for energy , photon flux density , and small shifts in magneti...
Go to Profile#331
Henry L. Roediger III
#9175
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III is an American psychology researcher in the area of human learning and memory. He rose to prominence for his work on the psychological aspects of false memories. Biography Born in Roanoke, Virginia, and raised in Danville, Virginia, Roediger received his undergraduate education from Washington and Lee University, graduating magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1969. He went on to study at Yale University, receiving his PhD in 1973 with his dissertation "Inhibition in recall from cueing with recall targets". After receiving his doctorate he joined the faculty at Purdue University, where he stayed for fifteen years .
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Eugen Drewermann
#2454
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Eugen Drewermann is a German church critic, theologian, peace activist and former Catholic priest. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Drewermann was born in Bergkamen near Dortmund. He is best known in Germany for his work toward a non-violent form of Christianity, which, he believes, requires an integration of Depth psychology into Exegesis and Theology. Trained in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and comparative religious studies, he criticized the Roman Catholic Church's literal and biologistic interpretations of miracles, the virgin birth, Ascension, and Resurrection as superstitious and medieval.
Go to Profile#333
Herbert W. Marsh
#16294
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Herbert W. Marsh is an educational psychologist who has published influential research on self-concept, motivation and university students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness. The website of Oxford University, where he is currently a faculty member, notes the following. Professor Marsh was recognised as the most productive educational psychologist in the world, one of the top 10 international researchers in Higher Education and in Social Psychology, and the 11th most productive researcher in the world across all disciplines of psychology. He is a highly cited researcher on ISI’s list of th...
Go to Profile#334
Zdeněk Matějček
#8287
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Zdeněk Matějček was a Czech child psychologist, researcher, and childcare reformer, who pioneered the study of the institutional conditions of raising children in an environment of psychological deprivation. He was a significant reformer of child care, emphasising the irreplaceable role of the family. He was known for studies of the effects on children of being held in prison camps during World War II, was a co-founder and the first chairman of an association that involved animals, such as dogs and horses, in child therapy, and was the principal organizer of a meeting of the International Association for Research in Learning Disabilities, held in Prague on October 2–5, 1989.
Go to Profile#335
James W. Fowler
#5412
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
James William Fowler III was an American theologian who was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University. He was director of both the Center for Research on Faith and Moral Development, and the Center for Ethics until he retired in 2005. He was a minister in the United Methodist Church. Fowler is best known for his book Stages of Faith, published in 1981, in which he sought to develop the idea of a developmental process in "human faith".
Go to Profile#336
Ogden Lindsley
#6131
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Ogden R. Lindsley was an American psychologist. He is best known for developing precision teaching . In 1948, he obtained an A.B. in Psychology from Brown University and two years later in 1950 a Sc.M. in Experimental Psychology. At Harvard University he studied Psychology under B. F. Skinner, earning his Ph.D. in 1957.
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Stephen Levinson
#5647
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Stephen C. Levinson FBA is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
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Shinobu Kitayama
#13075
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Shinobu Kitayama is a Japanese social psychologist and the Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He is also the Social Psychology Area Chair and Director of the Culture & Cognition Program at the University of Michigan. He is the editor-in-chief of the Attitudes and Social Cognition section of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from Kyoto University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan. Together with Mayumi Karasawa, he discovered the birthday-number effect, the subconscious tendency of people to prefer the numbers in the date of their birthday over other numbers.
Go to Profile#339
Henri Nouwen
#4070
Overall Influence
1932 - 1996 (64 years)
Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer and theologian. His interests were rooted primarily in psychology, pastoral ministry, spirituality, social justice and community. Over the course of his life, Nouwen was heavily influenced by the work of Anton Boisen, Thomas Merton, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, and Jean Vanier.
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Stuart Sutherland
#11008
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Stuart Sutherland was a British psychologist and writer. Education Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at University of Oxford for his PhD which was awarded in 1957 for research supervised by John Zachary Young.
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Paul E. Meehl
#10647
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Paul Everett Meehl was an American clinical psychologist, Hathaway and Regents' Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, and past president of the American Psychological Association. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Meehl as the 74th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Eleanor J. Gibson. Throughout his nearly 60-year career, Meehl made seminal contributions to psychology, including empirical studies and theoretical accounts of construct validity, schizophrenia etiology, psychological assessment, behavioral prediction, and p...
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Brian MacWhinney
#9022
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including P...
Go to Profile#343
Joseph J. Sandler
#11572
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Joseph J. Sandler was a British psychoanalyst within the Anna Freud Grouping – now the Contemporary Freudians – of the British Psychoanalytical Society; and is perhaps best known for what has been called his 'silent revolution' in re-aligning the concepts of the object relations school within the framework of ego psychology.
Go to Profile#344
Yuichi Shoda
#18765
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Yuichi Shoda is a Japanese-born psychologist and academic who contributed to the development of the cognitive-affective personality system theory of personality. Biography Shoda was born and grew up in Japan. He studied physics at Hokkaido University in Sapporo. After attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, he started graduate school in psychology at Stanford, and finished at Columbia University with a PhD degree in psychology in 1990. He joined the University of Washington in 1996.
Go to Profile#345
Lyman Wynne
#10181
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Lyman C. Wynne was an American psychiatrist and psychologist with a special interest in schizophrenia. His early research helped lay the foundation for family-based therapies, influencing others such as R. D. Laing and Margaret Singer. He made a number of discoveries about the interaction of genetics and the environment in the development of schizophrenia, working with adopted twins. He published numerous articles and co-edited "The Nature of Schizophrenia" , received the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Award for schizophrenia research from the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in 1965, the Meritorious Service Medal from the U.S.
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Robyn Fivush
#13197
Overall Influence
Robyn Fivush is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, College of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta, Georgia. She is well known for her research on parent-child narrative in relation to the development of autobiographical memory. Fivush is affiliated with the Departments of Psychology and Women's Studies at Emory.
Go to Profile#347
Laurence Steinberg
#11625
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Laurence Steinberg is an American university professor of psychology, specializing in adolescent psychological development. Career Steinberg teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Additionally, he has been a faculty scholar of the William T. Grant Foundation and was director of the John D. and Catherine T.
Go to Profile#348
Hans Wallach
#12069
Overall Influence
1904 - 1998 (94 years)
Hans Wallach was a German-American experimental psychologist whose research focused on perception and learning. Although he was trained in the Gestalt psychology tradition, much of his later work explored the adaptability of perceptual systems based on the perceiver's experience, whereas most Gestalt theorists emphasized inherent qualities of stimuli and downplayed the role of experience. Wallach's studies of achromatic surface color laid the groundwork for subsequent theories of lightness constancy, and his work on sound localization elucidated the perceptual processing that underlies stereophonic sound.
Go to Profile#349
Stephen Grossberg
#6275
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
Go to Profile#350
Sheldon Cohen
#13671
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sheldon Cohen is the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the director of the Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease. He is a member of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon and adjunct professor of Psychiatry and of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
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