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,
#4651
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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Leon Festinger
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult.
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Carl Rogers
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Carl Ransom Rogers was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and was known especially for his person-centered psychotherapy. Rogers is widely considered one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1956.
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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 ...
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J. C. R. Licklider
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider , known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.
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Ruth Morris Bakwin
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Ruth Morris Bakwin was a noted pediatrician and child psychologist and the first woman intern at the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City . Bakwin and her husband, also a pediatrician, were long associated with New York University School of Medicine.
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Stanley Milgram
1933 - 1984 (51 years)
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale. Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, until his death in 1984.
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Clyde Coombs
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Clyde Hamilton Coombs was an American psychologist specializing in the field of mathematical psychology. He devised a voting system, that was hence named Coombs' method. Coombs founded the Mathematical Psychology program at the University of Michigan. His students included Amos Tversky, Robyn Dawes, and Baruch Fischhoff, all important researchers in Decision Sciences. The classic text "An Introduction to Mathematical Psychology," by Coombs, Dawes, and Tversky was a must for Michigan graduate students in Mathematical and Experimental Psychology.
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Dalbir Bindra
1922 - 1980 (58 years)
Dalbir Bindra FRSC was a Canadian neuropsychologist and a professor in the psychology department at McGill University . He is known for his contributions to the neurobiological study of motivation and behaviour and his two books on these topics; Motivation: A Systematic Reinterpretation , and A Theory of Intelligent Behaviour . He also served as chair of the McGill University Psychology Department .
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Calvin Perry Stone
1892 - 1954 (62 years)
Calvin Perry Stone was an American psychologist, known for his work in comparative and physiological psychology. He was also a past president of the American Psychological Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences .
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Otto Klineberg
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Otto Klineberg was a Canadian born psychologist. He held professorships in social psychology at Columbia University and the University of Paris. His pioneering work in the 1930s on the intelligence of white and black students in the United States and his evidence as an expert witness in Delaware were instrumental in winning the Supreme Court school segregation case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Through his work in UNESCO and elsewhere, he helped to promote psychology internationally.
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Deborah L. Best
1900 - Present (126 years)
Deborah L. Best is the William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Education Best earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and an MA in General Experimental Psychology at Wake Forest University, and a PhD in developmental psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Isabelle Liberman
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Isabelle Yoffe Liberman was an American psychologist, born in Latvia, who was an expert on reading disabilities, including dyslexia. Isabelle Liberman received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College and her doctorate from Yale University. She was a professor at the University of Connecticut from 1966 through 1987 and a research associate at the Haskins Laboratories.
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Julian Gibbs
1924 - 1983 (59 years)
Julian Howard Gibbs was an American educator and the fifteenth President of Amherst College. Gibbs graduated from Amherst College in 1947. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in 1949 and 1950 from Princeton University. After a year of postdoctoral study at Cambridge University in England with a Fulbright Fellowship, he briefly taught at the University of Minnesota. Gibbs then worked for eight years at General Electric Company and American Viscose Corporation before accepting a position at Brown University in 1960 as associate professor of chemistry. He was named a full professor in 1963 and served as the chairman of the Chemistry Department at Brown from 1964 to 1972.
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Abraham Brill
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Abraham Arden Brill was an Austrian-born psychiatrist who spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States and the first translator of Sigmund Freud into English.
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Sidney L. Pressey
1888 - 1979 (91 years)
Sidney Leavitt Pressey was professor of psychology at Ohio State University for many years. He is famous for having invented a teaching machine many years before the idea became popular."The first.. [teaching machine] was developed by Sidney L. Pressey... While originally developed as a self-scoring machine... [it] demonstrated its ability to actually teach".Pressey joined Ohio State in 1921, and stayed there until he retired in 1959. He continued publishing after retirement, with 18 papers between 1959 and 1967. He was a cognitive psychologist who "rejected a view of learning as an accumula...
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Eckhard Hess
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Eckhard Heinrich Hess was a German-born American psychologist and ethologist, known for his research on pupillometry and animal imprinting. He joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago as an instructor in 1948. He became a full professor in the Department of Psychology in 1959, and served as its chairman from 1963 to 1968. Hess pioneered the study of animal behavior from an ethological/evolutionary perspective at a time when Skinner's behaviorism was the dominant paradigm of animal behavior study in the United States.
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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.
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Merrill Carlsmith
1936 - 1984 (48 years)
James Merrill Carlsmith was an American social psychologist perhaps best known for his collaboration with Leon Festinger and Elliot Aronson in the creation and development of cognitive dissonance theory. He also worked extensively with Mark Lepper on the subject of attribution theory. With Jonathan L. Freedman and David O. Sears he wrote the textbook, Social Psychology .
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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...
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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.
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Edward Kellog Strong Jr.
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Edward Kellog Strong Jr. was a professor of Applied Psychology at Stanford University, who specialized in organizational psychology and career theory and development. Edward Strong's contributions to the field of vocational counseling and research are still evident today. He is most well known for the Strong Interest Inventory, an inventory which matches an individual with a career based on their interests and perceived abilities. He also published several books related to vocational interests and guidance, including Vocational Interests of Men and Women.
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Marion A. Wenger
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Marion Augustus "Gus" Wenger was an American psychologist who specialized in psychophysiology. He was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. At an early age he was nicknamed Gus. Wenger died at the age of 75 due to heart failure.
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Hilde Himmelweit
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Hildegard Therese Himmelweit was a German social psychologist who had a major influence on the development of the discipline in Britain. Biography Hilde was born in Berlin in 1918. Her father, Dr Siegfried Litthauer, was a chemist and industrialist. She went to Newnham College, Cambridge . She married Freddy Himmelweit. She received her PhD under Hans Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry.
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Morris Viteles
1898 - 1996 (98 years)
Morris Simon Viteles was an influential researcher and writer in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. His book Industrial Psychology, published in 1932, was the first comprehensive modern textbook in the field. His writings were so influential that he was often regarded as the founder of the field, although he disavowed that claim.
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Barbara Stoddard Burks
1902 - 1943 (41 years)
Barbara Stoddard Burks was an American psychologist known for her research on the nature-nurture debate as it pertained to intelligence and other human traits. She has been credited with "...pioneer[ing] the statistical techniques which continue to ground the trenchant nature/nurture debates about intelligence in American psychology."
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Stanley B. Freeborn
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Stanley Barron Freeborn served as the first chancellor of University of California, Davis between 1958 and June 1959. Prior to being the first chancellor of UC Davis, Freeborn was the dean of the College of Agriculture at UC Berkeley. Following his death in 1960, UC Davis renamed its assembly hall to Freeborn Hall in his honor.
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Benjamin D. Wood
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Benjamin DeKalbe Wood was an American educator, researcher, and director / professor at Columbia University and an expert in the educational field. Early life Wood was born in Brownsville, Texas, on November 10, 1894. He attended the Brownsville area schools, Mission High School, and the University of Texas.
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Maria Ovsiankina
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina was a Russian-German-American psychologist. She studied what is now known as the Ovsiankina effect, a variation of the Zeigarnik effect. Ovsiankina worked in a variety of psychology jobs, including working with schizophrenia patients. She wrote books about psychological testing.
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Kate Hevner Mueller
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Kate Hevner Mueller was an American psychologist and educator who served as dean of women at Indiana University during 1938–1949. Biography Born Kate Lucile Hevner in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, she was the second daughter and middle child to a minister father and a schoolteacher mother. She attended Williamsport High School then matriculated in 1916 to Wilson College, where she majored in English with a minor in French. She graduated in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors. During her junior year she took a course in psychology, where she developed an interest in the subject.
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William W. Biddle
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
William Wishart Biddle was an American social scientist and a major contributor to the study of community development. Although details of his personal life are rare in written records, he made contributions to the field of psychology by developing frameworks in propaganda, education, and community development. Biddle outlined in his writings that propaganda was a form of persuasion for coercing people, illustrating examples from times of war. He established that education systems should develop each individual's intelligence and focus on critical thinking to avoid autistic thinking. Biddle ...
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Sergey Kravkov
1893 - 1951 (58 years)
Sergey Vasilyevich Kravkov was a Russian psychologist and psychophysiologist, Doctor of Science in Biology , Corresponding Member of the Academy of Science of the USSR and the Academy of Medical Science of the USSR . He is considered one of the founders of physiological optics, a scientific discipline that studies physiological processes, physical and psychic regularities which characterize the functioning of the organs of human vision.
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Grace Fernald
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Grace Maxwell Fernald was an educational psychologist and influential figure in early twentieth century literacy education. Fernald established "the first clinic for remedial instruction in 1921 at the University of California, Los Angeles". Tracing tactile learning tendencies back to Quintilian, Séguin, and Montessori, Fernald's kinesthetic spelling and reading method prompted struggling students to trace words. Years of research culminated in 1943 with her classic work, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects. The popular kinesthetic method anchors modern instruction in the areas of special education and remedial reading.
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Pat Dudgeon
Patricia Lynette Dudgeon , usually known as Pat Dudgeon, is an Aboriginal Australian psychologist, Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a research professor at the University of Western Australia's School of Indigenous Studies. Her area of research includes Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention. She is actively involved with the Aboriginal community, having an ongoing commitment to social justice for Indigenous people. Dudgeon has participated in numerous state and national committees, councils, task groups and community service activities in both a v...
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Alan H. Monroe
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
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Harriet Babcock
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Harriet Babcock was an American psychologist who specialized in abnormal psychology research in addition to developing measures and theories of intelligence. After her doctoral work at Columbia University, she worked primarily in the Department of Psychology at New York University, and acted as a consultant to the New York City Guidance Bureau. Babcock developed multiple intelligence tests evaluating mental deterioration and efficiency.
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Caroline Beaumont Zachry
1894 - 1945 (51 years)
Caroline Beaumont Zachry was an educational psychologist born in New York City to James Greer Zachry and Elise Clarkson Thompson. Her maternal grandfather was Hugh Smith Thompson the Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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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Wilhelm Wundt
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist.
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William James
1842 - 1910 (68 years)
William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology."
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