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List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#4601

Géza Róheim

1891 - 1953 (62 years)

Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist. Considered by some as the most important anthropologist-psychoanalyst, he is often credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology; was the first psychoanalytically trained anthropologist to do field research; and later developed a general cultural theory.

#4602

Charles Baudouin

1893 - 1963 (70 years)

Charles Baudouin was a French psychoanalyst and pacifist. His psychoanalytical work combined Freudianism with elements of the thought of Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Biography Baudouin was born in Nancy, France. After studying literature, Charles Baudouin continued his education in philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he became interested by the personalities of Pierre Janet and Henri Bergson. In 1913, as a young graduate in philosophy, Baudouin was interested by the work of Emile Coué and contributed to making him famous.

#4603

Robert Morris Ogden

1877 - 1959 (82 years)

Robert Morris Ogden was an American psychologist and academic. He served as the dean of the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences from 1923 to 1945. He was the first proponent of Gestalt psychology in the United States.

#4604

Orval Hobart Mowrer

1907 - 1982 (75 years)

Orval Hobart Mowrer was an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois from 1948 to 1975 known for his research on behaviour therapy. Mowrer practiced psychotherapy in Champaign-Urbana and at Galesburg State Research Hospital. In 1954 Mowrer held the position of president of the American Psychological Association. Mowrer founded Integrity Groups and was instrumental in establishing GROW groups in the United States. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mowrer as the 98th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#4605

William Thomas Heron

1897 - 1988 (91 years)

William Thomas Heron was a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. He co-authored six papers with B.F. Skinner in the 1930s, making him Skinner's most frequent co-author during the latter's career. He is known for an experiment he conducted in 1952, in which he and a graduate student attempted to test the validity of extrasensory perception.

#4606

Walther Poppelreuter

1886 - 1939 (53 years)

Walther Poppelreuter was a German psychologist and neurologist. He dealt mainly with brain injuries of soldiers during the First World War and developed psychometric examination procedures that were used in the treatment of brain-injured patients and in industrial aptitude tests. He was among the first high school teachers who advocated openly for Nazism before the "seizure of power" . His psychometric tests are often used in visual neuropsychology, especially the Poppelreuter figure visual perceptual function test.

#4607

Walter Samuel Hunter

1889 - 1954 (65 years)

Walter Samuel Hunter contributed to psychology by leading an effort to develop psychology as a science. Hunter was one of the first scholars of the time to focus not on the study of subjective mental processes but rather on the observation of animal behavior. In 1912, Hunter completed his doctoral dissertation on Delayed Reaction in Animals and Children. He was a pioneer in the effort of scientific documentation, having created Psychological Abstracts in 1927, which contained documents from psychologists in the U.S. and abroad.

#4608

Robert P. Knight

1902 - 1966 (64 years)

Robert Palmer Knight was an American psychoanalyst. He served as the medical director of the Austen Riggs Center from 1947 until his death in 1966. Early life Knight was born on July 18, 1902, in Urbana, Ohio to William James Knight and Florence Dempcy Knight. He graduated from Oberlin College. He earned his medical degree from Northwestern University.

#4609

Suzi Gage

Suzanne H. Gage is a British psychologist and epidemiologist who is interested in the nature of associations between lifestyle behaviours and mental health. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and has a popular science podcast and accompanying book, Say Why to Drugs, which explores substance use.

#4610

Robert Tryon

1901 - 1967 (66 years)

Robert Choate Tryon was an American behavioral psychologist, who pioneered the study of hereditary trait inheritance and learning in animals. His series of experiments with laboratory rats showed that animals can be selectively bred for greater aptitude at certain intelligence tests, but that this selective breeding does not increase the general intelligence of the animals.

#4611

Myrtle Byram McGraw

1899 - 1988 (89 years)

Myrtle Byram McGraw was an American psychologist, neurobiologist, and child development researcher. Education Myrtle was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the fifth of seven children of the farmer Riley McGraw and his seamstress wife Mary Byram. She grew up in an area that was still recovering from the aftermath of the American Civil War. After completing a sixth grade level of education, she took a course in a local business school to learn shorthand and typing. Afterward, she was hired by a law office, where she worked for the next two years at a salary of $3 per hour. While there, the lawyer for whom she worked had the foresight to encourage her to continue her education.

#4612

George Gallup

1901 - 1984 (83 years)

George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. Life and career Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, George Jr., known then as "Ted", would deliver milk and used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where he also played football. His higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Si...

#4613

Henry Murray

1893 - 1988 (95 years)

Henry Alexander Murray was an American psychologist at Harvard University. From 1959 to 1962, he conducted a series of psychologically damaging and purposefully abusive experiments on minors and undergraduate students. One of those students was Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber.

#4614

Paul Dressel

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Paul Dressel was an American educational psychologist. He was the founding director of the Counseling Center at Michigan State University, and the author of several books. Early life Dressel was born on November 29, 1910. He graduated from Wittenberg University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1931. He earned a master's degree from Michigan State University in 1934, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1939.

#4615

Heinz Werner

1890 - 1964 (74 years)

Heinz Werner was a developmental psychologist who also studied perception, aesthetics, and language. Early life Werner was born to Emilie Klauber Werner and Leopold Werner, who was a manufacturer by trade. He was the second of four children, and the first-born son. His father died when he was four, leaving his mother to raise the children. The family; however, did not suffer financially due to provision being made. Both Werner's elementary and high school education was received in Vienna. He had several interests throughout school, including music, particularly the violin, and the sciences. A...

#4616

Carl Hovland

1912 - 1961 (49 years)

Carl Iver Hovland was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra's propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on yo...

#4617

Lewis Terman

1877 - 1956 (79 years)

Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, academic, and proponent of eugenics. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford School of Education. Terman is best known for his revision of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius. As a prominent eugenicist, he was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association.

#4618

Karl Lashley

1890 - 1958 (68 years)

Karl Spencer Lashley was an American psychologist and behaviorist remembered for his contributions to the study of learning and memory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lashley as the 61st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#4619

Clark L. Hull

1884 - 1952 (68 years)

Clark Leonard Hull was an American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Hull is known for his debates with Edward C. Tolman. He is also known for his work in drive theory.

#4620

Fritz Heider

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception . It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.

#4621

David Wechsler

1896 - 1981 (85 years)

David Wechsler was a Romanian-American psychologist. He developed well-known intelligence scales, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children to get to know his patients at Bellevue Hospital. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Wechsler as the 51st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#4622

Charles Spearman

Charles Spearman

1863 - 1945 (82 years)

Charles Edward Spearman, FRS was an English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on models for human intelligence, including his theory that disparate cognitive test scores reflect a single general intelligence factor and coining the term g factor.

#4623

Erich Fromm

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

#4624

Gordon Allport

1897 - 1967 (70 years)

Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. Instead of these popular approaches, he developed an eclectic theory based on traits. He emphasized the uniquene...

#4625

B. F. Skinner

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher. Considered the father of Behaviorism, he was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

#4626

Louise L. Sloan

1898 - 1982 (84 years)

Louise Littig Sloan was an American ophthalmologist and vision scientist. She is credited for being a pioneer of the sub-division of clinical vision research, contributing more than 100 scientific articles in which she either authored or co-authored. Her most notable work was in the area of visual acuity testing where she developed and improved equipment. Sloan received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in experimental psychology. She spent a short period of time in both Bryn Mawr's experimental psychology program as well as the Department of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. The majori...

#4627

Abraham Maslow

1908 - 1970 (62 years)

Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th ...

#4628

John Dollard

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

John Dollard was an American psychologist and social scientist known for his studies on race relations in America and the frustration-aggression hypothesis he proposed with Neal E. Miller and others.

#4629

Jeffrey Schaler

Jeffrey Alfred Schaler is a psychologist, author, editor, retired professor of justice, law, and society at American University, and former member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He is a prominent critic of psychiatric claims and practices, especially of treatment without consent. Schaler opposes the medicalization of addiction. He has had a private practice in existential therapy since the 1970s.

#4630

Robert Richardson Sears

Robert Richardson Sears

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Robert Richardson Sears was an American psychologist who specialized in child psychology and the psychology of personality. He was the head of the psychology department at Stanford and later dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences there, continued the long-term I.Q. studies of Lewis Madison Terman at Stanford, and authored many pivotal papers and books on various aspects of psychology.

#4631

Paul Fitts

1912 - 1965 (53 years)

Paul Morris Fitts Jr. was a psychologist at the Ohio State University, where he conducted research in conjunction with personnel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, generally recognized as the "birthplace of human factors engineering." Fitts also later taught at the University of Michigan. He developed a model of human movement, Fitts's law, based on rapid, aimed movement, which went on to become one of the most highly successful and well studied mathematical models of human motion.

#4632

Florence Goodenough

Florence Goodenough

1886 - 1959 (73 years)

Florence Laura Goodenough was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota who studied child intelligence and various problems in the field of child development. She was president of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1946-1947. She is best known for published book The Measurement of Intelligence, where she introduced the Goodenough Draw-A-Man test to assess intelligence in young children through nonverbal measurement. She is noted for developing the Minnesota Preschool Scale. In 1931 she published two notable books titled Experimental Child Study and Anger in Young Children which analyzed the methods used in evaluating children.

#4633

Harry L. Hollingworth

Harry L. Hollingworth

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Harry Levi Hollingworth was one of the first psychologists to bring psychology into the advertising world, as well as a pioneer in applied psychology. Biography Hollingworth was born on May 26, 1880, in De Witt, Nebraska. Hollingworth graduated from high school at age 16, but lacking both the necessary two years of college preparatory work and the funds for university Hollingworth applied for a teaching certificate instead of pursuing a university education. After teaching for two years Hollingworth enrolled in preparatory school. As a result of these educational delays Hollingworth was 23 wh...

#4634

Michael W. Otto

1900 - Present (126 years)

#4635

Harold H. Schlosberg

1904 - 1964 (60 years)

Harold Schlosberg was an American psychologist who was professor of psychology at Brown University from 1928 until the end of his life. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y, Schlosberg earned his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. An experimental psychologist, Schlosberg made notable contributions on subjects ranging from conditioned reflexes to the expression of human emotions. He co-authored the 1954 2nd edition of Experimental Psychology, an influential textbook used by a generation of graduate students. Schlosberg served as chairman of Brown's Department of Psychology from 1954 until his death in 1964.

#4636

Edmund Smith Conklin

1884 - 1942 (58 years)

Edmund Smith Conklin was an American author and psychologist. He was born in New Britain, Connecticut on April 19, 1884. He attended Clark University when G. Stanley Hall was a leading teacher. He graduated in psychology from Springfield college and Clark University. He was a professor and chairman of the department of psychology at Indiana University. He served at various times as visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Syracuse University. He wrote books on abnormal psychology, anomalistic psychology and the psychology of religion.

#4637

Gregory Razran

1901 - 1973 (72 years)

Gregory H. Razran was a Russian American expert on Russian psychological research. He left Russia in 1920 and studied at Columbia University gaining a doctorate in 1933. He moved to Queens College, City University of New York in 1940 where he became a professor and headed the Psychology department there from 1945 to 1966. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948.

#4638

Jeanne Block

1923 - 1981 (58 years)

Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block was an American psychologist and expert on child development. She conducted research into sex-role socialization and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centered personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.

#4639

Howard Parshley

1884 - 1953 (69 years)

Howard Madison Parshley was an American zoologist, a specialist on the Heteroptera who also wrote more broadly on genetics, reproduction and human sexuality. He was responsible for translating The Second Sex into English.

#4640

Joe L. Franklin

Joe L. Franklin

1906 - 1982 (76 years)

Joseph Louis Franklin was a Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry at Rice University known for his research in mass spectrometry and ion molecule chemistry. The Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry is named after him and Frank H. Field.

#4641

Arthur Kornhauser

1896 - 1990 (94 years)

Arthur William Kornhauser was an American industrial psychologist. He was an early researcher on topics such as labor unions and worker attitudes, and advocated a form of industrial psychology that approached problems from the workers' standpoint rather than that of management. He has been described as one of the most important early figures in organizational psychology, and is particularly remembered for his focus on worker well-being. His work was interdisciplinary, crossing the boundaries between industrial psychology and sociology and political science.

#4642

James Arthur Bayton

1912 - 1990 (78 years)

James Arthur Bayton was an American psychologist. He conducted research in areas of personality, race, social issues, and consumer psychology. Early life and education James Arthur Bayton was born on April 5, 1912, in White stone, Virginia to George and Helen Bayton. His father, a physician, had graduated from the medical school at Howard University. Bayton graduated from Temple University's high school in 1931 and subsequently matriculated at Howard University as a Chemistry major. Bayton began his undergraduate career planning to go into medicine, however, taking psychology courses taug...

#4643

Elias Porter

1914 - 1987 (73 years)

Elias Hull Porter was an American psychologist. While at the University of Chicago Porter was a peer of other notable American psychologists, including Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Will Schutz. His work at Ohio State University and later at the University of Chicago contributed to Rogers’ development of client-centered therapy. Porter's primary contributions to the field of psychology were in the areas of non-directive approaches, relationship awareness theory and psychometric tests. His career included military, government, business and clinical settings.

#4644

Coleman Griffith

1893 - 1966 (73 years)

Coleman Roberts Griffith was an American sport psychologist. Born in Iowa, he is considered the founder of American sport psychology. Griffith studied at Greenville College until 1915, and then studied psychology at the University of Illinois. While at the University of Illinois, Griffith established what he claimed to be the first sports psychology laboratory in the United States. At this time Griffith worked closely with the University of Illinois football team, studying how factors such as psychomotor skills and personality variables related to performance and learning of athletic skills. ...

#4645

Albert Poffenberger

1885 - 1977 (92 years)

Albert T. Poffenberger was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Growing up in Pennsylvania, Poffenberger graduated from Harrisburg High School and Bucknell University. He was on the faculty of Columbia University. He authored textbooks titled Psychology in Advertising and Applied Psychology: Its Principles and Methods. He was APA president in 1934.

#4646

I. Madison Bentley

1870 - 1955 (85 years)

I. Madison Bentley, also known as Isaac Madison Bentley and later as Madison Bentley was an American psychologist. His first publication in 1897 was under the name "I. Madison Bentley." Bentley was one of the first to write about gender in his 1945 publication Sanity and Hazard in Childhood.

#4647

Ralph Piddington

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Ralph O'Reilly Piddington was a New Zealand psychologist, anthropologist and university professor. Biography He was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1906, the son of Albert and Marion O'Reilly. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics under Bronisław Malinowski. He gained a Ph.D. for his study of the Karajarri people of Pilbara, North western Australia. However, when he raised the issue of racial discrimination towards indigenous peoples he was censured by the Australian National Research Council. In 1946, he was appointed Reader in anthropology at the Department of Mental Philosophy, University of Edinburgh.

#4648

Herbert Langfeld

1879 - 1958 (79 years)

Herbert Sidney Langfeld was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Biography Herbert Langfeld was born in Philadelphia on July 24, 1879. He grew up in Philadelphia and was initially drawn to a diplomatic career. He was working for the American Embassy in Berlin when he was attracted to psychology. He earned a PhD in 1909 at the University of Berlin. He took a faculty position at Harvard University and ultimately went to Princeton University, where he became the psychological laboratory director and later the department chair for psychology. While at Princeton he also directly influenced the ecological psychology approach of J.

#4649

Franz Alexander

Franz Alexander

1891 - 1964 (73 years)

Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology. Life Franz Gabriel Alexander, in Hungarian Alexander Ferenc Gábor, was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1891, his father was Bernhard Alexander, a philosopher and literary critic, his nephew was Alfréd Rényi, a Hungarian mathematician who made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory but mostly in probability theory. Alexander studied in Berlin; there he was part of an influential group of Germa...

#4650

Edgar Rubin

1886 - 1951 (65 years)

Edgar John Rubin was a Danish psychologist/phenomenologist, remembered for his work on figure-ground perception as seen in such optical illusions like the Rubin vase. Born to Jewish parents, Rubin was born and raised in Copenhagen. Enrolling at the University of Copenhagen in 1904, he majored in psychology and finished his magister artium examination in philosophy in 1910.

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