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.
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#4601
Josephine Tilden
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
Josephine Elizabeth Tilden was an American expert on pacific algae. She was the first woman scientist employed by the University of Minnesota. Tilden established a research station in British Columbia which lasted only until 1906. When Tilden became an assistant Professor in 1903, she was the first female scientist employed by the University of Minnesota. In 1910, despite not having a doctorate, Tilden was promoted to full professor.
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Max Ettlinger
1877 - 1929 (52 years)
Max Ettlinger was a German psychologist, philosopher, pedagogist, and aesthetician. Literary works Ettlinger. 1905. Pierre Bonnier: Le sens du retour. Revue philos. 56 , 30–50. 1903. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 38: 56Ettlinger. 1905. Gaston Rageot: Les formes simples de l'attention. Revue philos. 56 , 113–141. 1903. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 38: 58-60Ettlinger. 1905. Henri Piéron: L'association médiate. Revue philos. 56 , 142–149. 1903. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 38: 60Ettlinger. 1905. Gustave Loisel: La sexualité.
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Jan Waterink
1890 - 1966 (76 years)
Jan Waterink was a Dutch pastor, psychologist and educationist who pioneered approaches to the testing and instruction of children with special needs. Waterink was born in Den Hulst where his family, originally from Nieuwleusen, lived. His father was a pastor and he went to the Gymnasium at Kampen followed by theological studies. He worked as a pastor in Appelscha and then at Zutphen. He studied social geography at the University of Bonn and received a doctorate in theology from the Free University in Amsterdam in March 1923. He then taught at the Lyceum in Zutphen and served as professor of pedagogy.
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Adolf Zeising
1810 - 1876 (66 years)
Adolf Zeising was a German psychologist, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy. Among his theories, Zeising claimed to have found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law,
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Dianne M. Finkelstein
#4606
Mary Dorothy Lyndon
1877 - 1924 (47 years)
Mary Dorothy Lyndon was the first female graduate from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Early life and education Lyndon was born in 1877 in Newnan, Georgia. She graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia in 1896 as its first Dramatic Arts degree holder. She continued her education in Dramatic Arts and History at Columbia University in New York City before beginning her studies at the University of Georgia during Summer school sessions.
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Elizabeth Blanchard
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Elizabeth Blanchard was an American educator who was the seventh president of Mount Holyoke College . Blanchard graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1858, and taught there for twelve years before becoming the Associate Principal from 1872-1883. She served as Principal from 1883-1888. When Mount Holyoke Female Seminary received its collegiate charter and became Mount Holyoke College, she served as Acting President from 1888-1889.
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J. Hillis Miller Sr.
1899 - 1953 (54 years)
J. Hillis Miller Sr. was an American university professor, education administrator and university president. Miller was a native of Virginia, and earned bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees before embarking on an academic career. He served as a psychology professor at the College of William & Mary and Bucknell University, the president of Keuka College, a senior administrator with the New York Department of Education, and the president of the University of Florida.
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Oscar Clute
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Oscar Clute was president of the U.S. state of Michigan's State Agricultural College from 1889 to 1893. Early years Oscar Clute was born in Albany, New York. Career 1855–1859 From 1855 to 1859 Clute taught high school.
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Josef Schiller
1877 - 1960 (83 years)
Josef Schiller was an Austrian phycologist and hydrobiologist. He studied natural sciences at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1905. Afterwards he was an assistant at the zoological station in Trieste , where he developed an expertise involving benthic algae and phytoplankton. From 1918 he worked as a lecturer of botanical hydrobiology at the University of Vienna, and in 1927 he became an associate professor on the aforementioned subject.
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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.
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Thomas Loveday
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Thomas Tudor Loveday was an English academic who was Principal of Southampton University College and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Bristol . Early life Loveday was born in Cropredy, Oxfordshire, the son of John Edward Taylor Loveday, a landowner, and Margaret Cheape of Scotland, the granddaughter of John Arbuthnott, 8th Viscount of Arbuthnott. His great-great-grandfather was the antiquary John Loveday. He was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh and later attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained an MA. He won the John Locke Scholarship in 1900, and worked as an As...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fritz Roethlisberger
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Fritz Jules Roethlisberger was a social scientist and management theorist at the Harvard Business School. Biography Fritz J. Roethlisberger was born in 1898 in New York City. He earned a BA in engineering at Columbia University in 1921, supplementing this degree with a BS in engineering administration from MIT in 1923. Soon after, he shifted to philosophy studies at Harvard, where he earned an M.A. in 1925.
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David Marr
1945 - 1980 (35 years)
David Courtenay Marr was a British neuroscientist and physiologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in computational neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.
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Karl von Frisch
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Karl Ritter von Frisch, was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. His work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance. His theory, described in his 1927 book Aus dem Leben der Bienen , was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time. Only much later was it shown to be an accurate theoretical analysis.
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Robert H. Thouless
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Robert Henry Thouless was an English psychologist and parapsychologist. He is best known as the author of Straight and Crooked Thinking , which describes flaws in reasoning and argument. Career He studied at Cambridge University where he earned B.A. hons in 1914, an M.A. in 1919 and a PhD in 1922. He was a lecturer in psychology at the universities of Manchester, Glasgow and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. He wrote on parapsychology and conducted experiments in card-calling and psychokinesis. His own experiments did not confirm the results of J. B. Rhine and he criticised the experimental protocols of previous experimenters.
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Louise Arseneault
Louise Arseneault is a Canadian psychologist and Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, where she has taught since 2001.
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Nancy Bayley
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Nancy Bayley was an American psychologist best known for her work on the Berkeley Growth Study and the subsequent Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Originally interested in teaching, she eventually gained interest in psychology, for which she went on to obtain her Ph.D. in from the University of Iowa in 1926. Within two years, Bayley had accepted a position at the Institute for Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. There she began the longitudinal Berkeley Growth Study, which worked to create a guide of physical and behavioral growth across development. Bayley also exam...
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Percival Symonds
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Percival Mallon Symonds was an American educational psychologist. He was known for his development of several tests in the fields of educational, clinical, and school psychology, including the Foreign Language Prognosis Test, the Personality Survey, and the Symonds picture-study test, a projective test administered to adolescents.
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Hilde Bruch
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Hilde Bruch was a German-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known foremost for her work on eating disorders and obesity. Bruch emigrated to the United States in 1934. She worked and studied at various medical facilities in New York City and Baltimore before becoming a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1964.
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Milton Rokeach
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Milton Rokeach was a Polish-American social psychologist. He taught at Michigan State University, the University of Western Ontario, Washington State University, and the University of Southern California. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rokeach as the 85th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Theodore Newcomb
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Theodore Mead Newcomb was an American social psychologist, professor and author. Newcomb led the Bennington College Study, which looked at the influence of the college experience on social and political beliefs. He was also the first to document the effects of proximity on acquaintance and attraction. Newcomb founded and directed the doctoral program in social psychology at the University of Michigan. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Newcomb as the 57th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Daniel Berlyne
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
Daniel Ellis Berlyne was a British and Canadian psychologist. Berlyne worked at several universities both in Canada and the United States. His work was in the field of experimental and exploratory psychology. Specifically, his research focused on how objects and experiences are influenced by and have an influence on curiosity and arousal.
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Lawrence Kohlberg
1927 - 1987 (60 years)
Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from 25 years earlier. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin.
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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.
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Carl Jung
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence, paramount to their joint vision of human psychology. Jung is widely regarded as one of the mo...
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Alvin C. Eurich
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Alvin Christian Eurich was a 20th-century American educator who is most notable for having served as the first president of the State University of New York from 1949–1951. Early life and education Eurich was born in Bay City, Michigan and pursued degrees in Psychology at North Central College and the University of Maine. He supported himself by working as a speech instructor while in Maine. He earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1929, where he worked as a professor and assistant dean of the College of Education from 1927 to 1936.
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Donald O. Hebb
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Donald Olding Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought ...
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Hadley Cantril
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Albert Hadley Cantril, Jr. was an American psychologist from the Princeton University, who expanded the scope of the field. Cantril made "major contributions in psychology of propaganda; public opinion research; applications of psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding, and communication; developmental psychology; psychology of social movements; measurement and scaling; humanistic psychology; the psychology of perception; and, basic to all of them, the analysis of human behavior from the transactional point of view." His influence is felt in educati...
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Dana R. Carney
Dana R. Carney is an American psychologist. She is associate professor of business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow, an affiliate of the Department of Psychology and the director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Edwin Boring
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Edwin Garrigues Boring was an American experimental psychologist, Professor of Psychology at Clark University and at Harvard University, who later became one of the first historians of psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Boring as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Dewey, Amos Tversky, and Wilhelm Wundt.
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Louis Leon Thurstone
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Louis Leon Thurstone was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
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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...
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Stanley Smith Stevens
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Stanley Smith Stevens was an American psychologist who founded Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, studying psychoacoustics, and he is credited with the introduction of Stevens's power law. Stevens authored a milestone textbook, the 1400+ page Handbook of Experimental Psychology . He was also one of the founding organizers of the Psychonomic Society. In 1946 he introduced a theory of levels of measurement widely used by scientists but whose use in some areas of statistics has been criticized. In addition, Stevens played a key role in the development of the use of operational definitions in...
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Wolfgang Köhler
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, publish...
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Charles Ferster
1922 - 1981 (59 years)
Charles Bohris Ferster was an American behavioral psychologist. A pioneer of applied behavior analysis, he developed errorless learning and was a colleague of B.F. Skinner's at Harvard University, co-authoring the book Schedules of Reinforcement .
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Floyd Henry Allport
1890 - 1979 (89 years)
Floyd Henry Allport was an American psychologist who is often considered "the father of experimental social psychology", having played a key role in the creation of social psychology as a legitimate field of behavioral science. His book Social Psychology impacted all future writings in the field. He was particularly interested in public opinion, attitudes, morale, rumors, and behavior. He focused on exploration of these topics through laboratory experimentation and survey research.
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Angus Campbell
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
Albert Angus Campbell was an American social psychologist best known for his research into electoral systems and for co-writing The American Voter with Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. Campbell published his work under the name Angus Campbell. He was a professor at the University of Michigan. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 15, 1980.
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Henry Garrett
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Henry Edward Garrett was an American psychologist and segregationist. Garrett was President of the American Psychological Association in 1946 and Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955. After he left Columbia, he was visiting professor at the University of Virginia. A.S. Winston chronicles, was involved in the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics , the journal Mankind Quarterly, the neofascist Northern League, and the ultra-right wing political group, the Liberty Lobby.
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David Krech
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
David Krech was an American Jewish experimental and social psychologist who lectured predominately at the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his education and career endeavors, Krech was with many psychologists including Edward Tolman, Karl Lashley, and Rensis Likert.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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W. E. Hick
1912 - 1974 (62 years)
William Edmund Hick was a British psychologist, who was a pioneer in the new sciences of experimental psychology and ergonomics in the mid-20th century. Hick trained as a medical doctor, taking the MB and BSc degrees of the University of Durham in 1938, and the MD of the same university in 1949. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1941, leaving in 1944 when he moved to Cambridge to join the MRC's Applied Psychology Unit at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. Additionally, Reggie Fils-Aimé attended Wilbur Wright College in Chicago Illinois.
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