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
Mary Whiton Calkins
1863 - 1930 (67 years)
Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.
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Cyril Burt
1883 - 1971 (88 years)
Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who also made contributions to statistics. He is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance of intelligence were discredited after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data, inventing correlations in separated twins which did not exist, alongside other fabrications.
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William McDougall
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
William McDougall FRS was an early 20th century psychologist who spent the first part of his career in the United Kingdom and the latter part in the United States. He wrote a number of influential textbooks, and was important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world.
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Sergei Rubinstein
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.
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Margaret Floy Washburn
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Margaret Floy Washburn , was a leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology ; the second woman, after Mary Whiton Calkins, to serve as president of the American Psychological Association ; and the first woman elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Washburn as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, and Robert S.
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Kazimierz Dąbrowski
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Kazimierz Dąbrowski was a Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, and physician. He is best known for his theory of "positive disintegration" as a mechanism in personality development. He was also a poet who used the pen name "Paul Cienin, Paweł Cienin".
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Karl Bühler
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Karl Ludwig Bühler was a German psychologist and linguist. In psychology he is known for his work in gestalt psychology, and he was one of the founders of the Würzburg School of psychology. In linguistics he is known for his organon model of communication and his treatment of deixis as a linguistic phenomenon.
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Alexander Mitscherlich
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Alexander Harbord Mitscherlich was a German psychoanalyst. Life Alexander Mitscherlich grew up in Munich and took up studies in history, the history of art, and philosophy at Munich University. When Mitscherlich's Jewish-born dissertation thesis supervisor Paul Joachimsen died, in 1932, his chair was passed to an antisemite, Karl Alexander von Müller, who declined to take over the dissertation projects begun by his predecessor. This is why Mitscherlich left Munich for Berlin in order to open a bookstore there, where he sold writings critical of the current developments in Germany, bringing him to the attention of the SA.
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Egon Brunswik
1903 - 1955 (52 years)
Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa was a psychologist who made contributions to functionalism and the history of psychology. Life Early life and education Brunswik was born in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He graduated from the Theresianische Akademie in 1921, after studying mathematics, science, classics, and history. He enrolled as a student of psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became an assistant in Karl Bühler's Psychological Institute and received a PhD in 1927. While a graduate student in psychology, he also passed the state examination for G...
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Yūjirō Motora
1858 - 1912 (54 years)
Yūjirō Motora , sometimes also known as Yuzero Motora, was one of the earliest Japanese psychologists. He was known for conducting research on the attention spans of school-aged children, and he set up the first psychological laboratory in Japan.
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James Ward
1843 - 1925 (82 years)
James Ward was an English psychologist and philosopher. He was a Cambridge Apostle. Life Ward was born in Kingston upon Hull, the eldest of nine children. His father was an unsuccessful merchant. Ward was educated at the Liverpool Institute and Mostyn House, but his formal schooling ended when his father became bankrupt.
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Frank Angell
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Frank Angell was an early American psychologist and the former athletic director at Stanford University. Biography Angell was born in 1857 in Scituate, Rhode Island. He graduated from the University of Vermont with an undergraduate degree in 1878. Angell spent several years teaching high school physics in Washington, DC. He earned his PhD in the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt. He then founded the experimental psychology laboratories at Cornell University and Stanford University . He remained at Stanford for the rest of his career, working primarily on psychophysics and as director of athletics.
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Gustave Gilbert
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Gustave Mark Gilbert was an American psychologist best known for his writings containing observations of high-ranking Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials. His 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship was an attempt to profile the Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler using as reference the testimonials of Hitler's closest generals and commanders. Gilbert's published work is still a subject of study in many universities and colleges, especially in the field of psychology.
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Knight Dunlap
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
Knight Dunlap was an American psychologist. He founded the Journal of Psychology, was the first editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, and was the President of the American Psychological Association. Dunlap authored numerous books and articles regarding psychology and was a talented inventor. His concentration was in experimental psychology and some of his best known inventions were the Dunlap chronoscope, the Dunlap tapping plate, and the Dunlap chair for vestibular investigation.
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Wolfgang Metzger
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Wolfgang Metzger is considered one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology in Germany. Metzger's most widely acclaimed work is Psychologie: Die Entwicklung ihrer Grundannahmen seit der Einführung des Experiments . It portrays systematically the foundations of psychology, including the different kinds of psychological reality, the problems associated with reference systems, order, and much more. Pivotal in its discussions is the cumulative knowledge, at that time, of the entire Gestalt school.
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James Sully
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
James Sully was an English psychologist, philosopher and writer. Biography James Sully was born at Bridgwater, Somerset, the son of J. W. Sully, a liberal Baptist merchant and ship-owner. He was educated at the Independent College in Taunton, Regent's Park College, at the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Hermann Lotze, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he studied under Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz.
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C. Lloyd Morgan
1852 - 1936 (84 years)
Conwy Lloyd Morgan, FRS was a British ethologist and psychologist. He is remembered for his theory of emergent evolution, and for the experimental approach to animal psychology now known as Morgan's Canon, a principle that played a major role in behaviourism, insisting that higher mental faculties should only be considered as explanations if lower faculties could not explain a behaviour.
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Moritz Lazarus
1824 - 1903 (79 years)
Moritz Lazarus , born at Filehne, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, was a German-Jewish philosopher, psychologist, and a vocal opponent of the antisemitism of his time. Life and education He was born at Filehne, Posen. The son of Aaron Levin Lazarus, a pupil of Akiba Eiger, and himself president of the bet din and the yeshiva of Filehne , he was educated in Hebrew literature and history, and subsequently in law and philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1850 he obtained his PhD degree; in the same year he married Sarah Lebenheim.
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Edmund Sanford
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Edmund Clark Sanford was an early American psychologist. He earned his PhD under the supervision of Granville Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University, and then moved with Hall to Clark University in 1888, where he became the professor of psychology and the founding director of the psychology laboratory. He is best known for his 1887 Writings of Laura Bridgman and for his 1897 textbook, A Course in Experimental Psychology. This textbook was a manual on how to conduct experiential psychology. He was present at the creation of the American Psychological Association in 1892 and the creation of the Association of American Universities in 1900.
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Konstantin Kornilov
1879 - 1957 (78 years)
Konstantin Nikolayevich Kornilov was a Soviet psychologist. Kornilov is known for being the initiator of restructuring the science of psychology on the basis of Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union, which made him to be considered the "first Soviet psychologist".
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Fred S. Keller
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Fred Simmons Keller was an American psychologist and a pioneer in experimental psychology. He taught at Columbia University for 26 years and gave his name to the Keller Plan, also known as Personalized System of Instruction, an individually paced, mastery-oriented teaching method that has had a significant impact on college-level science education system. He died at home, age 97, on February 2, 1996, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Karen Horney
1885 - 1952 (67 years)
Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst who practised in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was particularly true of her theories of sexuality and of the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis. She is credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy. She disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women, and like Adler, she traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology.
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George Stout
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
George Frederick Stout , usually cited as G. F. Stout, was a leading English philosopher and psychologist. Biography Born in South Shields on 6 January 1860, Stout studied psychology at the University of Cambridge under James Ward. Like Ward, Stout employed a philosophical approach to psychology and opposed the theory of associationism.
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Pyotr Zinchenko
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Petr Ivanovich Zinchenko was a Soviet developmental psychologist, a student of Lev Vygotsky and Alexei Leontiev and himself one of the major representatives of the Kharkiv School of Psychology. In 1963, Zinchenko founded and headed the department of psychology at Kharkiv University until his death in 1969.
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Robert L. Fantz
1925 - 1981 (56 years)
Robert Lowell Fantz was an American developmental psychologist who pioneered several studies into infant perception. In particular, the preferential looking paradigm introduced by Fantz in the 1961 is widely used in cognitive development and categorization studies among small babies.
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Edwin Holt
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Edwin Bissell Holt was a professor of philosophy and psychology at Harvard from 1901–1918. From 1926–1936 he was a visiting professor of psychology at Princeton University. Biography Holt was born in Winchester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard in 1896 and received his Ph.D., also from Harvard, in 1901. His mentors at Harvard were William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Josiah Royce.
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Ludwig Klages
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Friedrich Konrad Eduard Wilhelm Ludwig Klages was a German philosopher, psychologist, graphologist, poet, writer, and lecturer, who was a two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the Germanosphere, he is considered one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He began his career as a research chemist according to his family's wishes, though soon returned to his passions for poetry, philosophy and classical studies. He held a post at the University of Munich, where in 1905 he founded the ; the latter was forced to close in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. In 1915...
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Aleksei Leontiev
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Aleksei Nikolayevich Leontiev , was a Soviet developmental psychologist and philosopher and a founder of activity theory. Biography Aleksei Leontiev's life was closely linked to the Lomonosov Moscow State University . In 1921, he began his studies at the historical-philological faculty of the university. The historical-philological faculty, at the time, included a Department of Philosophy at which Georgy Chelpanov was teaching psychology, and Leontiev studied psychology with him. In 1924, Leontiev graduated from what became the Faculty of Social Sciences. Leontiev worked with Lev Vygotsky and ...
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George Stuart Fullerton
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
George Stuart Fullerton was an American philosopher and psychologist. Early life and education Fullerton was born in Fatehgarh, India, the son of the Rev. Robert Stuart Fullerton and Martha White Fullerton, American Presbyterian missionaries. He moved to Philadelphia with his widowed mother and his siblings, after his father's death in 1865. He graduated in 1879 from the University of Pennsylvania and in 1884 from Yale Divinity School.
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Harry Guntrip
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Henry James Samuel Guntrip was a British psychoanalyst known for his major contributions to object relations theory or school of Freudian thought. He was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a psychotherapist and lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry, Leeds University, and also a Congregationalist minister. He was described by Dr Jock Sutherland as "one of the psychoanalytic immortals".
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Victor Henri
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Victor Henri was a French-Russian physical chemist and physiologist. He was born in Marseilles as a son of Russian parents. He is known mainly as an early pioneer in enzyme kinetics. He published more than 500 papers in a variety of disciplines including biochemistry, physical chemistry, psychology, and physiology. Aleksey Krylov was his half-brother.
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Edward Wheeler Scripture
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Edward Wheeler Scripture was an American physician and psychologist. He founded the experimental psychology laboratory at Yale University, directed the Vanderbilt Speech Clinic at Columbia University and was a founder of the American Psychological Association. Trained under experimental psychology pioneer Wilhelm Wundt, Scripture became best known for his contributions to speech science.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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William Randolph Taylor
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
William Randolph Taylor was an American botanist known as an expert in phycology. Early life Taylor was born on December 21, 1895, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pennsylvania to study botany, receiving his B.S. in 1916, M.S. in 1917, and Ph.D. in 1920. In 1918, he served as private in the U.S. Army during WWI.
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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.
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William A. Brownell
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
William Arthur Brownell was an American educational psychologist. Early life Brownell was born in Smethport, Pennsylvania on May 19, 1895. He graduated from Allegheny College in 1917. He received a Ph.D. in 1926 from the University of Chicago.
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Bruno Klopfer
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Bruno Klopfer was a German psychologist, born in Bavaria. He had a profound impact on the development of psychological personality testing, and was an important pioneer and innovator in the development, scoring and popularization of projective techniques, especially the Rorschach inkblot test.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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