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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#3651

José Junça De Morais

#162443
Overall Influence
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#3652

Julie Ridley

#162455
Overall Influence
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#3653

Jaana Juvonen

#162482
Overall Influence
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#3654

Melissa Ferguson

#146114
Overall Influence
Melissa J. Ferguson is an American professor of psychology and was a Senior Associate Dean of Social Sciences at Cornell University before becoming a professor at Yale University in 2020. She is known for her work on how people form and evolve their interpretations of social events, and how people recognize and evaluate information like fake news. Ferguson's research shows that information consumers can avoid misinformation by focusing on the quality of its source.
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#3655

Marilyn Shatz

#59520
Overall Influence
Marilyn Shatz is an American scholar known for her work in language development and discourse. She holds the title of Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where she worked from 1977 until retiring in 2009.
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#3656

James F. Malec

#162510
Overall Influence
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#3657

Jerome G. Miller

#46745
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Jerome Gilbert Miller was an American social worker, academic and public sector corrections administrator, who was an authority on the reform of juvenile and adult corrections systems. He was a prominent advocate for alternatives to incarceration for offenders as well as for the de-institutionalization of individuals with developmental disabilities. His career involved university teaching, administration of juvenile justice services for three states, clinical work with offenders and advocacy for systemic change in public sector correctional services. Miller's work first drew national atten...
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#3658

Fritz A. Henn

#162642
Overall Influence
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#3659

Marco Del Giudice

#162678
Overall Influence
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#3660

Daniel L. Schwartz

#162753
Overall Influence
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#3661

Frederick D. Petty

#162758
Overall Influence
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#3662

Ralph E. Mistlberger

#162805
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
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#3663

H. Richard Lamb

#162998
Overall Influence
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#3664

Ronald Seifer

#163002
Overall Influence
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#3665

Dianne M. Tice

#163007
Overall Influence
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#3666

David Crookall

#163035
Overall Influence
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#3667

Viviane Robinson

#148394
Overall Influence
Viviane Marcelle Joan Robinson is an emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in organisational and educational psychology. Academic career After a PhD titled The behavior of caregivers: the example of clinical teams at Harvard University, completed in 1976, Robinson moved to the University of Auckland. She was appointed a Distinguished Professor in 2012.
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#3668

Elizabeth Wolef Morrison

#163050
Overall Influence
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#3669

Damien Fair

#39707
Overall Influence
Damien Fair is a behavioral neuroscientist, professor at the University of Minnesota, and director of the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain. In 2020, he was selected for the MacArthur Fellows Program. In 2013, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
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#3670

Jerry M. Burger

#163065
Overall Influence
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#3671

Todd Lencz

#156835
Overall Influence
Todd Lencz is an American psychologist and academic whose research is mainly in the field of psychiatric genetics. He is a professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, as well as a professor of Psychiatry and Molecular Medicine at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. He also leads the Laboratory of Neurogenomic Biomarkers within the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. He is the leader of the Cognitive Genomics consorTium , the founder and co-leader of the Ash...
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#3672

Andreas Hirschi

#163226
Overall Influence
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#3673

Lynne M. Reder

#163287
Overall Influence
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#3674

R. C. L. Lindsay

#143376
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Roderick Cameron Lodge Lindsay is a Canadian psychologist who studies the area of psychology and law, and focuses on eyewitness memory. In 1974, he received his bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto and in 1978 he received his master's degree from the University of Alberta. Lindsay also received his Ph. D from the University of Alberta in 1982.
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#3675

Meredyth Daneman

#163300
Overall Influence
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#3676

Jacques Lacan

#163351
Overall Influence
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#3677

Ronald E. Shor

#163366
Overall Influence
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#3678

Manuel Eisner

#97752
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. He researches the history of interpersonal violence, and has conducted a study on levels of homicide throughout Europe over a period of 800 years. His research has highlighted the ways in which cultural models of conduct of life, embedded in social institutions, have shaped patterns of daily behaviour among adolescent and young adult men, which in turn have influenced the likelihood of frictions leading to aggressive behaviour. He is also recognised f...
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#3679

Pamela Lynn Perrewe

#163475
Overall Influence
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#3680

Mary Ann Glynn

#142483
Overall Influence
Mary Ann Glynn is an American academic. She is the Joseph F. Cotter Professor of Management and Organization at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, and the president of the Academy of Management.
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#3681

Abeba Birhane

#103510
Overall Influence
Abeba Birhane is an Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist who works at the intersection of complex adaptive systems, machine learning, algorithmic bias, and critical race studies. Birhane's work with Vinay Prabhu uncovered that large-scale image datasets commonly used to develop AI systems, including ImageNet and 80 Million Tiny Images, carried racist and misogynistic labels and offensive images. She has been recognized by VentureBeat as a top innovator in computer vision and named as one of the 100 most influential persons in AI 2023 by TIME magazine.
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#3682

Catherine G. Wolf

Catherine G. Wolf
#54462
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Catherine Gody Wolf was an American psychologist and expert in human-computer interaction. She was the author of more than 100 research articles and held six patents in the areas of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and collaboration. Wolf was known for her work at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where she was a 19-year staff researcher.
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#3683

Louise Chawla

#103960
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Louise Chawla is a Professor emerita in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado, where she is a member of the Executive Committee of the Children Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design and co-editor of the Children Youth and Environments Journal.
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#3684

Deborah M. Capaldi

#163755
Overall Influence
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#3685

Michael S. Domjan

#163786
Overall Influence
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#3686

Jose Manuel Sabucedo

#134820
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jose Manuel Sabucedo is a Spanish social psychologist, professor at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. He is an expert in collective action and political violence and reconciliation, and an author of influential publications in these fields. Sabucedo is director of the research group on social behaviour and applied psychometrics at USC. He is also president of the Spanish Scientific Society of Social Psychology , and associate editor of peer-reviewed Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología since 2009. He was also editor-in-chief of Revista de Psicología Social/International Journal of Social Psychology between 2010 and 2016.
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#3687

Betsy Hoza

#147538
Overall Influence
Betsy Hoza is an American clinical psychologist. She is the Bishop Joyce Chair of Human Development Professor of Psychology at the University of Vermont. Early life and education Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Hoza was a top-seeded competitive tennis player who won the 1974 Middle States Girl 16-and-under Hardcourt Tennis Tournament. Standing at over 6 feet, Hoza played on Princeton University's Women's volleyball team under coach Susanna Occhi and on their rowing team. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton in 1981 before enrolling at the University of Maine for her Ph...
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#3688

Paul Michael Muchinsky

#163923
Overall Influence
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#3689

Niels Christian Danbolt

#164036
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
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#3690

Gerard P. Hodgkinson

#164081
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
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#3691

Avery D. Weisman

#164173
Overall Influence
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#3692

Larry L. Wolf

#164233
Overall Influence
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#3693

Luigi De Gennaro

#164240
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
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#3694

Robert Henley Woody

#164241
Overall Influence
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#3695

Eunkook Mark Suh

#164245
Overall Influence
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#3696

Dieter Zapf

#164246
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
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#3697

Francis Edward Johnston

#164250
Overall Influence
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#3698

Lillian Turner De Tormes Eby

#164289
Overall Influence
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#3699

Carmi Schooler

#132095
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Carmi Schooler was an American social psychologist known for his work on personality and structural equation modeling. Early life and education Schooler was born in the Bronx, New York City, New York, in 1933. He was educated at the Bronx High School of Science and later attended Hamilton College and New York University . He received his Ph.D. from NYU in 1959 under the supervision of Marie Jahoda. Another one of his advisors in graduate school was Robert K. Merton.
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#3700

Félix Neto

#164315
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
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