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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#4601
Kate Gordon Moore
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Kate Gordon Moore was an American psychologist whose work focused on various aspects within cognitive psychology, and is noted for her work with color vision and perception, as well as aesthetics, memory, imagination, emotion, developmental tests for children, and attention span. Gordon's early work focused on color vision and how this interacted with memory. Her work shifted mid-career and then she started to research within the realm of education. Specifically, she published work that addressed women's education with regard to the notion that women must be educated differently from men. Her...
Go to Profile#4602
Harry Helson
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Harry Helson was an American psychologist and professor of psychology who is best known for his adaptation-level theory. Most of his work and research focused on perception, with much of it involving the perception of color. His first published work was his doctoral dissertation on Gestalt psychology, which was published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1925 and 1926. Every year at Kansas State University, a graduate student receives the Harry Helson Award recognition of excellence in scholarship and research in cognitive psychology.
Go to Profile#4603
Margaret Kennard
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Margaret Alice Kennard was a neurologist who principally studied the effects of neurological damage on primates. Her work led to the creation of the Kennard Principle, which posits a negative linear relationship between age of a brain lesion and the outcome expectancy: in other words, that the earlier in life a brain lesion occurs, the more likely it is for some compensation mechanism to reverse at least some of the lesion's bad effects.
Go to Profile#4604
José Bleger
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
José Bleger was an Argentine psychoanalyst. He sought a rapprochement of psychoanalysis and Marxism in works such as Psychoanalysis and materialist dialectics . He also contributed to Kleinian clinical practice and thought.
Go to Profile#4605
Dominic W. Massaro
Dominic W. Massaro is Professor of Psychology and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is best known for his fuzzy logical model of perception, and more recently, for his development of the computer-animated talking head Baldi. Massaro is director of the Perceptual Science Laboratory, past president of the Society for Computers in Psychology, book review editor for the American Journal of Psychology, founding Chair of UCSC's Digital Arts and New Media program, and was founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Interpreting. He has been a Guggenheim Fell...
Go to Profile#4606
Robert L. Thorndike
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Robert Ladd Thorndike was an American psychometrician and educational psychologist who made significant contributions to the analysis of reliability, the interpretation of error, cognitive ability, and the design and analysis of comparative surveys of achievement test performance of students in various countries.
Go to Profile#4607
Walter Richard Miles
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Walter Richard Miles was an American psychologist and a president of the American Psychological Association . He best known for his development of the two-story rat maze, his research on low dose alcohol, the development of red night vision goggles for aviation pilots, and the reduction of performance in aging individuals. However, the theme of his academic career was his fascination with apparatuses to measure behavior. C. James Goodwin noted that Miles "never became a leading figure in any particular area of research in psychology... but drifted from one area to another, with the direction...
Go to Profile#4608
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.
Go to Profile#4609
Boris Teplov
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Boris Mikhailovich Teplov was a Soviet psychologist who studied problems of inborn individual differences and talents and a founder of a Soviet psychological school of Differential psychology. His well-known opponent was Aleksey Leontyev who believed that people's talents are not inborn but rather determined by education and other external influence. Boris Teplov was editor-in-chief of the principal Russian journal on psychology Voprosy Psikhologii.
Go to Profile#4610
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...
Go to Profile#4611
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.
Go to Profile#4612
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.
Go to Profile#4613
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.
Go to Profile#4614
Joseph Banks Rhine
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Joseph Banks Rhine , usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and the Parapsychological Association. Rhine wrote the books Extrasensory Perception and Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind.
Go to Profile#4615
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...
Go to Profile#4616
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.
Go to Profile#4617
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.
Go to Profile#4618
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.
Go to Profile#4619
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.
Go to Profile#4620
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.
Go to Profile#4621
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.
Go to Profile#4622
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...
Go to Profile#4623
Harry Cassidy
1900 - 1951 (51 years)
Harry Cassidy was a Canadian academic, social reformer, civil servant and, briefly, a politician. Cassidy was born on January 8, 1900, to parents Herbert Cassidy and Maria Morris Cassidy, transplanted Maritimers who ran a general store. In 1916 Cassidy enlisted underage in the army, spending the next three years in uniform and returning to Canada in the spring of 1919. Harry Cassidy was a pioneer in the field of social work. He was the founding dean of the School of Social Welfare at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1940s before resigning to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Go to Profile#4624
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...
Go to Profile#4625
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.
Go to Profile#4626
Henri Tajfel
1919 - 1982 (63 years)
Henri Tajfel was a Polish social psychologist, best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory, as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.
Go to Profile#4627
Irving Janis
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Irving Lester Janis was an American research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley most famous for his theory of "groupthink" which described the systematic errors made by groups when making collective decisions. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Janis as the 79th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4628
Muzafer Sherif
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-American social psychologist. He helped develop social judgment theory and realistic conflict theory. Sherif was a founder of modern social psychology who developed several unique and powerful techniques for understanding social processes, particularly social norms and social conflict. Many of his original contributions to social psychology have been absorbed into the field so fully that his role in the development and discovery has disappeared. Other reformulations of social psychology have taken his contributions for granted, and re-presented his ideas as new.
Go to Profile#4629
Edward C. Tolman
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Through Tolman's theories and works, he founded what is now a branch of psychology known as purposive behaviorism. Tolman also promoted the concept known as latent learning first coined by Blodgett . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tolman as the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4630
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...
Go to Profile#4631
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.
Go to Profile#4632
Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their ...
Go to Profile#4633
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.
Go to Profile#4634
Sigmund Freud
1856 - 1939 (83 years)
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Go to Profile#4635
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...
Go to Profile#4636
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.
Go to Profile#4637
Winthrop Kellogg
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
Winthrop Niles Kellogg was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species. Kellogg received his undergraduate degree at Indiana University after serving for two years in World War I. He went on to receive his Master's and PhD from Columbia University. He held academic positions at both Indiana and Florida State Universities where he would undertake two of the most pioneering studies. During his time at Indiana his research focused on conditioning in learning and comparative studies. His time at Florida State was dedicated to bottlenose ...
Go to Profile#4638
Harry R. Wellman
1899 - 1997 (98 years)
Harrison Richard Wellman was professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and became acting president of the University of California in 1967. Early years Wellman and a twin brother were the youngest of eight children of Richard Harrison Wellman and his second wife, Jennie Wellman. Harry's family was living just north of the Canada–United States border when he was born. His mother died less than a year after he was born. Harry and his siblings initially moved to his maternal grandparents' ranch in Montana, and then to a family wheat farm in Umapine, Oregon.
Go to Profile#4639
Anny Rosenberg Katan
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.
Go to Profile#4640
Walter Charles Langer
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Walter Charles Langer was an American psychoanalyst who prepared a detailed psychological analysis of Adolf Hitler in 1943. Langer studied psychoanalysis at Harvard University, where he worked as a professor upon completion of his education. Langer was later employed by the Office of Strategic Services , where in 1943 he prepared a psychoanalysis profile of Hitler. In this analysis, Langer accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide as the "most plausible outcome", and the possibility of a military coup against Hitler well before the assassination attempt of 1944.
Go to Profile#4641
Martin Grotjahn
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Martin Grotjahn was a German-born American psychoanalyst who was known for his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. He was the son of doctor Alfred Grotjahn and was born in Berlin, Germany.
Go to Profile#4642
Paul R. Farnsworth
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Paul R. Farnsworth was an American music psychologist. He had a forty-year career at Stanford University where he researched the psychology of music preference. In addition to authoring three books, he was the editor of the Annual Review of Psychology from 1955 to 1968.
Go to Profile#4643
Gertrude Rand
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Marie Gertrude Rand Ferree was an American research scientist who is known for her extensive body of work about color perception. Her work included "mapping the retina for its perceptional abilities", "developing new instruments and lamps for ophthalmologists", and "detection and measurement of color blindness". Rand, with LeGrand H. Hardy and M. Catherine Rittler, developed the HRR pseudoisochromatic color test.
Go to Profile#4644
Harold Clyde Bingham
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
Harold Clyde Bingham was an American psychologist and primatologist. He spent his early career as a psychology professor, interrupting this to join the United States Army during World War I. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 1925 and studied under the supervision of Robert Yerkes. Yerkes, a psychology professor, had an interest in primates, and Bingham also entered this field. He led a 1929-30 expedition to the Belgian Congo to study gorillas in the wild. Though hampered by the size of the expedition, Bingham managed to get close to several troops of the animals and record details of their behavior.
Go to Profile#4645
T. C. Schneirla
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Theodore Christian Schneirla was an American animal psychologist who performed some of the first studies on the behavior patterns of army ants. Schneirla was educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor , and joined the staff of New York University in 1928. He made the first of eight trips to the Barro Colorado Island, Panama Canal Zone, to study the behavior of army ants in 1932. His "Studies on Army Ants in Panama," published the next year, provided new insight into their behavior. He discovered that these ants operate on a 36-day cycle consisting of a 16-day nomadic pattern followed by a 20-day stationary phase.
Go to Profile#4646
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.
Go to Profile#4647
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.
Go to Profile#4648
John Dashiell
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
John Frederick Dashiell was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association. Biography Dashiell was born in 1888 in Southport, Indiana. Early in his career, Dashiell taught at Waynesburg College, Princeton University, University of Minnesota and Oberlin College.
Go to Profile#4649
John Wallace Baird
1869 - 1919 (50 years)
John Wallace Baird was a Canadian psychologist. He was the 27th president of the American Psychological Association . He was the first Canadian, and only the second non-American, to hold the office. He was also a founding editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, and served in subordinate editorial capacities for Psychological Review, American Journal of Psychology, and the Journal of Educational Psychology. At his death in 1919, he was the designate to succeed Granville Stanley Hall as president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#4650
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.
Go to Profile