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,
#351
John William Atkinson
#12195
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
John William Atkinson , also known as Jack Atkinson, was an American psychologist who pioneered the scientific study of human motivation, achievement and behavior. He was a World War II veteran, teacher, scholar, and long term member of the University of Michigan community.
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Robert S. Siegler
#15789
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Robert S. Siegler is an American psychologist and professor of psychology at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the American Psychological Association's 2005 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
Go to Profile#353
William Damon
#6619
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
William Damon is a professor at Stanford University and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is one of the world's leading scholars of human development. Damon has done pioneering research on the development of purpose in life and wrote the influential book The Path to Purpose. Damon has helped design innovative developmental methods such as peer learning. Damon also is known for his studies of effective philanthropy. His current work includes a study exploring purpose in higher education and a study of family purpose across generations. Dr. Damon writes on intellectual and social development through the lifespan.
Go to Profile#354
Max Coltheart
#10407
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Max Coltheart is an Australian cognitive scientist who specialises in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry. Coltheart was born in Frankston, Victoria and grew up in Brisbane, Canberra and Bega. He commenced a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in 1957, and completed MA and PhD degrees there, then went on to a succession of academic posts including at the University of Sydney, 1965-1967, Monash University, 1967-1969, University of Waterloo, Canada 1969-1972
Go to Profile#355
Amy Cuddy
#11473
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She is a proponent of "power posing", a self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. Cuddy's most cited academic work involves using the stereotype content model that she helped develop to better understand the way people think about stereotyped people and groups. Though Cuddy left her tenure-track position at Harvard Business School in the spring of 2017, she continues...
Go to Profile#356
Jüri Allik
#16074
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jüri Allik , is an Estonian psychologist. Career Allik holds Ph.D. degrees in psychology both from the University of Moscow, Russia and University of Tampere, Finland . Spending his academic career at the University of Tartu , he became Professor of Psychophysics in 1992, and is since 2002 Professor of Experimental Psychology. He was also the head of the University of Tartu's Department of Psychology and the chairman of the Estonian Science Foundation , as well as an editor of the Estonian English-language social science and humanities journal Trames.
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Abraham S. Luchins
#9620
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Abraham S. Luchins was an American Gestalt Psychologist and a pioneer of group psychotherapy. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and died in New York. Biography Luchins was a student and staff member of Max Wertheimer, the main originator of Gestalt Psychology. After Max Wertheimer fled to the US and started lecturing at the New School for Social Research, Luchins worked as his assistant and became one of his closest collaborators from 1936 till 1942. In the 1970s he and his wife Edith Hirsch published a series of transcripts and reports on Wertheimer's advanced seminars and workshops.
Go to Profile#358
James A. Russell
#12800
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James A. Russell is an American psychologist whose work focuses on emotion. In 2009, Russell was ranked 35th in terms of citation impact in social psychology. Selected publications Books Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A., Eds. . The psychological construction of emotion. New York: Guilford Press.Russell, J. A., Ed. . Pleasure. Andover, Hampshire U.K.: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group.
Go to Profile#359
Mary Main
#8296
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Mary Main was an American psychologist notable for her work in the field of attachment. A Professor at the University of California Berkeley, Main is particularly known for her introduction of the 'disorganized' infant attachment classification and for development of the Adult Attachment Interview and coding system for assessing states of mind regarding attachment. This work has been described as 'revolutionary' and Main has been described as having 'unprecedented resonance and influence' in the field of psychology.
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David A. Kolb
#3249
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Allen Kolb is an American educational theorist whose interests and publications focus on experiential learning, the individual and social change, career development, and executive and professional education. He is the founder and chairman of Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc. , and an Emeritus Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Go to Profile#361
Ronald Melzack
#4767
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ronald Melzack was a Canadian psychologist and professor of psychology at McGill University. In 1965, he and Patrick David Wall revolutionized pain research by introducing the gate control theory of pain. In 1968, Melzack published an extension of the gate control theory, in which he asserted that pain is subjective and multidimensional because several parts of the brain contribute to it at the same time. During the mid-1970s, he developed the McGill Pain Questionnaire and became a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain. He also became the founding editor of W...
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René Zazzo
#13328
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
René Zazzo was a French psychologist and pedagogue. Zazzo's research focused on child psychology. He was one of the first people to study a group of problems relating to dyslexia and disability. Considering the development of children considered to be weak, Zazzo proposed the concept of "oligophrenic heterochrony" in order to show that this development, compared with that of normal children, occurred at various speeds, according to the particular psychobiological sector concerned. The majority of research which Zazzo produced between 1950 and 1980 centered on what he regarded as "the princi...
Go to Profile#363
Béla Julesz
#12206
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Béla Julesz was a Hungarian-born American visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual and auditory perception. Julesz was the originator of random dot stereograms which led to the creation of autostereograms. He also was the first to study texture discrimination by constraining second-order statistics.
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May-Britt Moser
#2670
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . She and her former husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain. Together with Edvard Moser she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, which they lead. Since 2012 she has he...
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Ellis Paul Torrance
#10806
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Ellis Paul Torrance was an American psychologist best known for his research in creativity. After completing his undergraduate degree at Mercer University, Torrance acquired a Master's degree at the University of Minnesota and then a doctorate from the University of Michigan. His teaching career spanned from 1957 to 1984. First, he taught at the University of Minnesota and then later at the University of Georgia, where he became professor of Educational Psychology in 1966.
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Anat Ninio
#8229
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Anat Ninio is a professor emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in the interactive context of language acquisition, the communicative functions of speech, pragmatic development, and syntactic development.
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Thomas Blass
#11502
Overall Influence
Thomas Blass was an American social psychologist, Holocaust survivor, and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is known for his work regarding Stanley Milgram and the Milgram experiment.
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G. William Domhoff
#2021
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
George William "Bill" Domhoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and research professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a founding faculty member of UCSC's Cowell College. He is best known as the author of several best-selling sociology books, including Who Rules America? and its seven subsequent editions .
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Gordon Neufeld
#19373
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gordon Neufeld is a developmental psychologist from Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of the book Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers . Early life During the 1970s, Neufeld completed an undergraduate degree from the University of Winnipeg and graduate degrees from the University of British Columbia.
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Brian Nosek
#16574
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Brian Arthur Nosek is an American social-cognitive psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science. He also co-founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and Project Implicit. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 2002.
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Sandra Bem
#7426
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem was an American psychologist known for her works in androgyny and gender studies. Her pioneering work on gender roles, gender polarization and gender stereotypes led directly to more equal employment opportunities for women in the United States.
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Arno Gruen
#11691
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Arno Gruen was a Swiss-German psychologist and psychoanalyst. Biography Gruen was born in Berlin in 1923, and emigrated to the United States as a child in 1936 when his parents, James and Rosa Gruen, fled Germany to save their lives. During the journey, Gruen celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, on June 6, 1936.
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Juan-David Nasio
#10616
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Juan-David Nasio , is an Argentinian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and writer. He is one of the founders of Séminaires Psychanalytiques de Paris. Biography After qualifying as a doctor from the University of Buenos Aires, Nasio completed his residency as a psychiatrist at the hospital in Lanús. He emigrated to France in 1969, where he attended the classes of Jacques Lacan. In May 1979, he did a course about the theme "subject of the unconscious", in the seminar of Lacan.
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J. McVicker Hunt
#11231
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Joseph McVicker Hunt was a prominent American educational psychologist and author. He promoted and researched concepts related to the malleable nature of child intelligence . That work eventually led to the theory of learning centered on the concept of the information processing system.
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Shauna Shapiro
#18127
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Shauna L. Shapiro is a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University who works on mindfulness. Education Shapiro graduated summa cum laude from Duke University, and received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Arizona. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System She has received training in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness based stress reduction, as well as studied mindfulness meditation in monasteries in Nepal and Thailand.
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Ruthellen Josselson
#13059
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ruthellen Josselson is professor of clinical psychology at The Fielding Graduate University and a psychotherapist in practice. Work She was formerly a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Towson University, a visiting professor at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. Her research focuses on women's identity and on human relationships. She received the Henry A. Murray Award, the Theodore R. Sarbin Award and the Distinguished Contributions to Qualitative Research Award from the American Psychological Association as well as a Fulbright Fellowship. She ...
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George Bonanno
#11994
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
George A. Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S. He is responsible for introducing the controversial idea of resilience to the study of loss and trauma. He is known as a pioneering researcher in the field of bereavement and trauma. The New York Times on February 15, 2011, stated that the current science of bereavement has been "driven primarily" by Bonanno. Scientific American summarized a main finding of his work, "The ability to rebound remains the norm throughout adult life." In 2019, Bonanno was honored with the James McKeen Cattell aw...
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Robert Glaser
#13981
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Robert Glaser was an American educational psychologist, who has made significant contributions to theories of learning and instruction. The key areas of his research focused on the nature of aptitudes and individual differences, the interaction of knowledge and skill in expertise, the roles of testing and technology in education, and training adapted to individual differences. Glaser has also been noted for having developed the idea of individually prescribed instruction as well as making major contributions to the theory of adaptive education.
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Seymour Sarason
#12420
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Seymour Bernard Sarason was Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught from 1945 to 1989. He is the author of over forty books and over sixty articles, and he is considered to be one of the most significant American researchers in education, educational psychology, and community psychology. One primary focus of his work was on education reform in the United States. In the 1950s he and George Mandler initiated the research on test anxiety. He founded the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic in 1961 and was one of the principal leaders in the community psychology movement. In 1974, he proposed psychological sense of community, a central concept in community psychology.
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Edgar Schein
#3272
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Edgar Henry Schein was a Swiss-born American business theorist and psychologist who was professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He founded the discipline of organizational behavior, and made notable contributions in the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. He was the son of former University of Chicago professor Marcel Schein.
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John Kihlstrom
#13632
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Frederick Kihlstrom is an American cognitive social psychologist. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he originally began teaching in 1997. In 2013, he was named the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science. He is known for his research on the unconscious mind. He was formerly the editor-in-chief of Psychological Science.
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Ellen S. Berscheid
#12907
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ellen S. Berscheid is an American social psychologist who is currently a Regents professor at the University of Minnesota, where she earlier had earned her PhD in 1965. Berscheid conducted research on interpersonal relationships, emotions and moods, and social cognition. Berscheid wrote books, articles and other publications to contribute to the field of Social Psychology. She was involved in controversy surrounding the funding for her research on why people fall in love. In addition to her position at the University of Minnesota as a Psychology and Business professor; she has also held a position at Pillsbury.
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James Wertsch
#10732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James V. Wertsch is the David R. Francis Distinguished Professor and Director Emeritus of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington University in St. Louis. Education and career Wertsch received an A.B. in psychology from University of Illinois, Urbana in 1969, an M.A.T. in education from Northwestern University in 1971, and a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Chicago in 1975. After finishing his Ph.D, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where he studied with the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria.
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Desmond Morris
#701
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Desmond John Morris FLS hon. caus. is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.
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Susan Folkman
#12428
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Susan Kleppner Folkman is an American psychologist, author, and emerita professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco . She is internationally recognized for her contributions to the field of psychological stress and coping. Her 1984 book Stress, Appraisal and Coping alongside Richard S. Lazarus, is the most widely cited academic book in its field, and the 17th most cited book in social science.
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Kenneth Ring
#12135
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Kenneth Ring is an American psychologist, born in San Francisco, California. He is the co-founder and past president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies and is the founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. He currently lives in Kentfield, California.
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Robert Rosenthal
#10145
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Robert Rosenthal is a German-born American psychologist who is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. His interests include self-fulfilling prophecies, which he explored in a well-known study of the Pygmalion effect: the effect of teachers' expectations on students.
Go to Profile#388
Scott Lilienfeld
#4727
Overall Influence
1960 - 2020 (60 years)
Scott O. Lilienfeld was a professor of psychology at Emory University and advocate for evidence-based treatments and methods within the field. He is known for his books 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, Brainwashed, and others that explore and sometimes debunk psychological claims that appear in the popular press. Along with having his work featured in major U.S. newspapers and journals such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Scientific American, Lilienfeld made television appearances on 20/20, CNN and the CBS Evening News.
Go to Profile#389
John D. Teasdale
#12690
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John D. Teasdale was a leading researcher at Oxford University, and then in the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. He dedicated his focus to understanding the cognition behind depression. Teasdale was a pioneer in the cognitive therapy advancements in the United Kingdom. He was one of the founders of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, MBCT. He has received many awards to compliment his work and is now retired but still teaching meditation and mindfulness. He has received a Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association, and has been elected Fellow of both the British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Go to Profile#390
Robert Kegan
#8952
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Kegan is an American developmental psychologist. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development and organization development.
Go to Profile#391
Elaine Hatfield
#11883
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Elaine Hatfield is an American social psychologist. She has been credited, alongside Ellen S. Berscheid, as the pioneer of the scientific study of love. She is employed as a professor in the psychology department of the University of Hawaii.
Go to Profile#392
Willem Albert Wagenaar
#17134
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Willem Albert Wagenaar was a Dutch psychologist noted for his work on the reliability of memory. He gained fame as an expert witness in some high-profile legal cases. Life and work Wagenaar studied experimental psychology at Utrecht University, where he obtained his doctorandus degree cum laude in Social Sciences in 1965. On 19 January 1972, he obtained a PhD degree in Social Sciences at the Leiden University. His thesis at Leiden, called "Sequential Response Bias. A study on choice and chance", was sponsored by Professor John P. van de Geer. From 1973 to 1974 Wagenaar received a Fulbright gr...
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Jonathan Potter
#10584
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jonathan Potter is Dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and one of the originators of discursive psychology. Life Jonathan Potter was born in Ashford, Kent, and spent most of his childhood in the village of Laughton, East Sussex; his father was a school teacher and his mother was a batik artist. He went to School in Lewes and then on to a degree in Psychology at the University of Liverpool in 1974 where he was exposed to the radical politics of the city, became interested in alternative therapies, and responded to the traditional British empirical psychology that was the mainstay of the Liverpool psychology degree programme at the time.
Go to Profile#394
Emőke Bagdy
#11123
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Emőke Bagdy is a Hungarian clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, professor emerita at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary , and former director of the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology. Her research, books, papers and talks focus on psychotherapy, health psychology and foundational problems of clinical psychology and clinical supervision.
Go to Profile#395
Stuart Vyse
#8447
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stuart Vyse is an American psychologist, teacher, speaker and author who specializes in belief in superstitions and critical thinking. He is frequently invited as a speaker and interviewed by the media as an expert on superstitious behavior. His book Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition won the American Psychological Association's William James Book Award.
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Bruce Tuckman
#7537
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Bruce Wayne Tuckman was an American psychological researcher who carried out research into the theory of group dynamics. In 1965, he published a theory generally known as "Tuckman's stages of group development".
Go to Profile#397
Mark van Vugt
#9523
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Mark van Vugt is a Dutch evolutionary psychologist who holds a professorship in evolutionary psychology and work and organizational psychology at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Van Vugt has affiliate positions at the University of Oxford, Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology .
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Vincenzo Di Nicola
#8830
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Vincenzo Di Nicola is an Italian-Canadian psychologist, psychiatrist and family therapist, and philosopher of mind. Di Nicola is a tenured Full Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry & Addiction Medicine at the University of Montreal, where he founded and directs the postgraduate course on Psychiatry and the Humanities, and Clinical Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at The George Washington University, where he gave The 4th Annual Stokes Endowment Lecture in 2013. He has taught in the Global Mental Health Faculty of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#399
Jeffrey Elman
#7233
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Jeffrey Locke Elman was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego . He specialized in the field of neural networks. In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network , also known as the 'Elman network', which is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli, and has since become widely used.
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Eleanor J. Gibson
#11054
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments.
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