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,
#4701
Kurt Koffka
1886 - 1941 (55 years)
Kurt Koffka was a German psychologist and professor. He was born and educated in Berlin, Germany; he died in Northampton, Massachusetts, from coronary thrombosis. He was influenced by his maternal uncle, a biologist, to pursue science. He had many interests including visual perception, brain damage, sound localization, developmental psychology, and experimental psychology. He worked alongside Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler to develop Gestalt psychology. Koffka had several publications including "The Growth of the Mind: An Introduction to Child Psychology" and "The Principles of Gestalt P...
Go to Profile#4702
Hermann Ebbinghaus
1850 - 1909 (59 years)
Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve. He was the father of the neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.
Go to Profile#4703
James Mark Baldwin
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
James Mark Baldwin was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Princeton and the University of Toronto. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.
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Alexander Luria
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Alexander Romanovich Luria was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms. He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general. Luria's magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man , is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Work...
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Fritz Perls
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Friedrich Salomon Perls , better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Perls coined the term "Gestalt therapy" to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964 and lived there until 1969.
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Edward Thorndike
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Edward Lee Thorndike was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for educational psychology. He also worked on solving industrial problems, such as employee exams and testing.
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Harry Harlow
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked with him for a short period of time.
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Hugo Münsterberg
1863 - 1916 (53 years)
Hugo Münsterberg was a German-American psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in applied psychology, extending his research and theories to industrial/organizational , legal, medical, clinical, educational and business settings. Münsterberg experienced immense turmoil with the outbreak of the First World War. Torn between his loyalty to the United States and his homeland, he often defended Germany's actions, attracting highly contrasting reactions.
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George Herbert Mead
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.
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Robert Yerkes
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Robert Mearns Yerkes was an American psychologist, ethologist, eugenicist and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology. Yerkes was a pioneer in the study both of human and primate intelligence and of the social behavior of gorillas and chimpanzeess. Along with John D. Dodson, Yerkes developed the Yerkes–Dodson law relating arousal to performance.
Go to Profile#4711
Sándor Ferenczi
1873 - 1933 (60 years)
Sándor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Biography Born Sándor Fränkel to Baruch Fränkel and Rosa Eibenschütz, both Polish Jews, he later magyarized his surname to Ferenczi.
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Heinz Kohut
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Heinz Kohut was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.
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Franz Brentano
1838 - 1917 (79 years)
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist. His 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, considered his magnum opus, is credited with having reintroduced the medieval scholastic concept of intentionality into contemporary philosophy.
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Medard Boss
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Medard Boss was a Swiss psychoanalytic psychiatrist who developed a form of psychotherapy known as Daseinsanalysis, which united the psychotherapeutic practice of psychoanalysis with the existential phenomenological philosophy of friend and mentor Martin Heidegger.
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Ernst Heinrich Weber
1795 - 1878 (83 years)
Ernst Heinrich Weber was a German physician who is considered one of the founders of experimental psychology. He was an influential and important figure in the areas of physiology and psychology during his lifetime and beyond. His studies on sensation and touch, along with his emphasis on good experimental techniques led to new directions and areas of study for future psychologists, physiologists, and anatomists.
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Donald Winnicott
1896 - 1971 (75 years)
Donald Woods Winnicott was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society twice , and a close associate of Marion Milner.
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Walter Dill Scott
1869 - 1955 (86 years)
Walter Dill Scott was an American psychologist and academic administrator who was one of the first applied psychologists and the 10th president of Northwestern University. He applied psychology to various business practices such as personnel selection and advertising.
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Théodore Flournoy
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Théodore Flournoy was a Swiss professor of psychology at the University of Geneva and author of books on parapsychology and spiritism. He studied a wide variety of subjects before he devoted his life to psychology. Flournoy had an interest in a very skeptical area of psychology. He did extensive observations on a participant to investigate psychical phenomena. He was the President of the Sixth International Congress of Psychology, the Chair of Experimental Psychology at the University of Geneva in 1891 and was the first professor of psychology in Europe to become a member of the Faculty of Sc...
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Gustave Le Bon
1841 - 1931 (90 years)
Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.
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Bluma Zeigarnik
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist of Lithuanian origin, a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology and the so-called Vygotsky Circle. She contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period.
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Charles Samuel Myers
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Charles Samuel Myers, CBE, FRS was an English physician who worked as a psychologist. Although he did not invent the term, his first academic paper, published by The Lancet in 1915, concerned shell shock. In 1921 he was co-founder of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology.
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Charles Henry Thompson
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Charles Henry Thompson was an American educational psychologist and the first African-American to earn a doctorate degree in educational psychology. He obtained a Master's degree and Ph.D at the University of Chicago. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, he became an educator at Howard University. During his time at Howard, he was the dean of the liberal art college and later became the dean of Howard's graduate school, where he made several administrative and scholarship changes. Additionally, he founded The Journal of Negro Education, an academic journal pertaining to the education of African-American students.
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Andreas Bjerre
1879 - 1925 (46 years)
Sören Andreas Bjerre, known as Andreas Bjerre, was a Swedish academic specialising in criminal law and criminal psychology. Early life and career Born in Göteborg in 1879, Andreas Bjerre was the son of Sören Bjerre, who was a rich butter-merchant, and Sophie Jörgensen. His brother was the psychologist Poul Bjerre .
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Eugen Kahn
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Eugen Kahn was a German psychiatrist. His "habilitation" supervisors were Emil Kraepelin and Ernst Rüdin. He argued Willenlos was a misnomer for the Haltlose, as the patients demonstrated plenty of "will" and simply lacked the ability to translate it into action. He was the first Sterling Professor of Psychiatry and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale 1930-1946.
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Philip S. Holzman
#4726
Albert Lilius
1873 - 1947 (74 years)
Albert Henrik Lilius was a child psychologist a pioneering researcher in Finland and professor at the University of Helsinki. He published a book about Nordic figures from the history of educational work along with several others.
Go to Profile#4727
Georg Anschütz
1886 - 1953 (67 years)
Georg Ernst Anschütz was a German psychologist, who worked especially in the field of music psychology and synaesthesia. Due to his exposed role during the National Socialism period, he was dismissed from university service after 1945. His writings were nevertheless reprinted until the 1970s.
Go to Profile#4728
Karl Beth
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Karl Beth was a German academic involved in the fields of the history of religion, the psychology of religion, and Christianity. He has been described as "one of the founding fathers of the psychology of religion".
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Walter J. Lonner
#4730
Marvin D. Dunnette
#4731
John Clarence Defries
#4732
Lillien Jane Martin
1851 - 1943 (92 years)
Lillien Jane Martin was an American psychologist. She published over twelve books. Martin experienced ageism and sexism as an early woman in psychology. Early life and education Lillien Jane Martin was born on July 7, 1851, at Olean, New York. At the age of four, she entered the nearby Olean Academy. At the age of sixteen, her talents were recognized such that she became a teacher at a girls' school in Wisconsin. By the age of 26, in 1876, she had earned enough money to return to her native New York where she enrolled at Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, New York.
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Hendrik Verwoerd
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd , also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, scholar, and newspaper editor who served as Prime Minister of South Africa and is commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid. Verwoerd played a significant role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies, as Minister of Native Affairs and then as prime minister . Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership.
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Eberhard Zwicker
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Karl Eberhard Zwicker was a German acoustics scientist and full professor at the Technical University of Munich. Zwicker studied physics and electrical engineering at the University of Stuttgart and was an assistant of . In 1967 he was appointed full professor of the newly founded Institute for Electro-Acoustics of the Technical University of Munich.
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Friedrich Jodl
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Friedrich Jodl was a German philosopher and psychologist. Biography Friedrich Jodl grew up in a Munich family association which, due to its proximity to the royal court, had provided numerous senior civil servants in Bavaria. The painter Heinrich Bürkel, a family friend, introduced him to the fine arts at an early age.
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Ian Hindmarch
#4737
Jerome E. Singer
#4738
Guy Montrose Whipple
1876 - 1941 (65 years)
Guy Montrose Whipple was an American educational psychologist known for developing psychological tests of human intelligence and personality. His other research interests included gifted education, literacy, vocational education, and the psychology of eyewitness testimony. A 1997 article about giftedness described Whipple as "an all-but-forgotten pioneer in this field".
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Otto Klemm
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Gustav Otto Klemm was a German psychologist and philosopher, as well as the first chair as Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Leipzig. While his psychological work is largely irrelevant today, Klemm is one of the best-known representatives of the Leipzig School of Gestalt psychology. His studies on human motor, which were carried out under his guidance, had scientific validity, both in terms of their findings as well as the careful methodology. He is next to Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein among the first researchers who have studied the phenomenon of variability of partial ...
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Gao Juefu
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Gao Juefu , also known as Gao Zhuo , was one of China's modern psychologists and a psychology historian. He was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province. When he was young, he studied at the Beijing Higher Normal School and the University of Hong Kong Department of Education.
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Johannes von Kries
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Johannes Adolf von Kries was a German physiological psychologist who formulated the modern “duplicity” or “duplexity” theory of vision mediated by rod cells at low light levels and three types of cone cells at higher light levels. He made important contributions in the field of haemodynamics. In addition, von Kries was a significant theorist of the foundations of probability.
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Christine Eiser
#4743
John E. Arnold
1913 - 1963 (50 years)
John Edward Arnold was an American professor of mechanical engineering and professor of business administration at Stanford University. He was a pioneer in scientifically defining and advancing inventiveness, based on the psychology of creative thinking and imagination, and an internationally recognized innovator in educational philosophy.
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Donald Saklofske
Donald Harold Saklofske is a Canadian psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. He is a former president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences and the current editor-in-chief of its official journal, Personality and Individual Differences. He is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
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Cesare Musatti
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Cesare Luigi Musatti was an Italian philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was a leading figure for the first generation of Italian psychoanalysts. Musatti studied under Vittorio Benussi before becoming his assistant. Musatti edited the Italian edition of the works of Sigmund Freud.
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Joseph Zohar
#4747
Henri-Étienne Beaunis
1830 - 1921 (91 years)
Henri-Étienne Beaunis was a French physiologist and psychologist. He defended the thesis of the Nancy School in the field of hypnosis. He is known for his works on anatomy, physiology, psychology and hypnosis.
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Edmund B. Delabarre
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Edmund Burke Delabarre , was a researcher and professor of psychology at Brown University. He graduated from Amherst College in 1886. He was a pioneer in the field of shape perception and on the interaction between mental processes and the involuntary movements of the body.
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Wilhelm Fridolin Volkmann
1821 - 1877 (56 years)
Wilhelm Fridolin Volkmann [later the title Ritter von Volkmar was appended to his name] was an Austrian philosopher and psychologist. Biography He was born and educated in Prague. In 1846 he became a lecturer in aesthetics, afterwards in philosophy, at the University of Prague, and in 1856 was appointed to a professorship in philosophy there. His chief studies were in the exact psychology of the school of Herbart, for whose general principles Volkmann was probably the most conspicuous expounder.
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Emil Utitz
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Emil Utitz was a Czech philosopher and psychologist of Jewish descent. He was educated in Prague, where he was a classmate of Franz Kafka. After studies in Munich, Leipzig, and Prague, he became a professor in Rostock, and from 1925 was Chair of Philosophy at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. After his forced retirement in 1933, he became a professor in Prague. In 1942, he was deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto, where he was head of the library. After the liberation of Theresienstadt in 1945, he returned to Prague. Utitz died in Jena in 1956, while travelling through East Germany to give lec...
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