The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#4701
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...
Go to Profile#4702
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.
Go to Profile#4703
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.
Go to Profile#4705
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.
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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.
Go to Profile#4714
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.
Go to Profile#4718
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.
Go to Profile#4719
John Ridley Stroop
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
John Ridley Stroop , better known as J. Ridley Stroop, was an American psychologist whose research in cognition and interference continues to be considered by some as the gold standard in attentional studies and profound enough to continue to be cited for relevance into the 21st century. However, Christianity was the real passion of his life; psychology was simply an occupation.
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Gardner Murphy
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Gardner Murphy was an American psychologist who specialized in social and personality psychology and parapsychology. His career highlights include serving as president of the American Psychological Association and the British Society for Psychical Research.
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Morton Prince
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Morton Henry Prince was an American physician who specialized in neurology and abnormal psychology, and was a leading force in establishing psychology as a clinical and academic discipline. He was part of a handful of men who disseminated European ideas about psychopathology, especially in understanding dissociative phenomenon; and helped found the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906, which he edited until his death.
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Wilfred Bion
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965. Early life and military service Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England. After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order , and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917, and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 ...
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James Rowland Angell
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
James Rowland Angell was an American psychologist and educator who served as the 16th President of Yale University between 1921 and 1937. His father, James Burrill Angell , was president of the University of Vermont from 1866 to 1871 and then the University of Michigan from 1871 to 1909.
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Virginia Satir
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Virginia Satir was an American author and psychotherapist, recognized for her approach to family therapy. Her pioneering work in the field of family reconstruction therapy honored her with the title "Mother of Family Therapy". Her most well-known books are Conjoint Family Therapy, 1964, Peoplemaking, 1972, and The New Peoplemaking, 1988.
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Georg Elias Müller
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
Georg Elias Müller was a significant early German experimental psychologist who is credited with the theory of retroactive interference. Biography Early life Georg Elias Müller was born in Grimma, Saxony on 20 July 1850 to August Friedrich Müller and Rosalie Zehme Müller. His father was a theologian and professor of religion at a nearby royal academy. His family was deeply involved in a revivalist orthodoxy that he eventually broke away from. As a child he attended the Gymnasium at Leipzig.
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Charlotte Bühler
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Charlotte Bühler was a German-American developmental psychologist. Life Bühler was born Charlotte Berta Malachowski in Berlin, the elder of two children of Jewish government architect Hermann Malachowski, and his wife Rose .
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Théodule-Armand Ribot
1839 - 1916 (77 years)
Théodule-Armand Ribot was a French psychologist. He was born at Guingamp, and was educated at the Lycée de St Brieuc. He is known as the founder of scientific psychology in France, and gave his name to Ribot's Law regarding retrograde amnesia.
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Sigmund Freud
#4729
James J. Gibson
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S.
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Charles Hubbard Judd
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Charles Hubbard Judd was an American educational psychologist who played an influential role in the formation of the discipline. Part of the larger scientific movement of this period, Judd pushed for the use of scientific methods to the understanding of education and, thus, wanted to limit the use of theory in the field. Judd who was known for applying scientific methods to the study of educational issues.
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James Strachey
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English. He is perhaps best known as the general editor of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, "the international authority".
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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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