Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#4751

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.

#4752

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.

#4753

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...

#4754

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.

#4755

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.

#4756

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.

#4757

Gustave Gilbert

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.

#4758

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.

#4759

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.

#4760

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.

#4761

C. Lloyd Morgan

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.

#4762

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.

#4763

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.

#4764

Konstantin Kornilov

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".

#4765

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.

#4766

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.

#4767

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.

#4768

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.

#4769

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.

#4770

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.

#4771

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...

#4772

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 ...

#4773

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.

#4774

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".

#4775

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.

#4776

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.

#4777

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.

#4778

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.

#4779

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.

#4780

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.

#4781

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.

#4782

James H. Hyslop

James H. Hyslop

1854 - 1920 (66 years)

James Hervey Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D, was an American psychical researcher, psychologist, and professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University. He was one of the first American psychologists to connect psychology with psychic phenomena. In 1906 he helped reorganize the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City and served as the secretary-treasurer for the organization until his death.

#4783

James V. McConnell

James V. McConnell

1925 - 1990 (65 years)

James V. McConnell was an American biologist and animal psychologist. He is most known for his research on learning and memory transfer in planarians conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. McConnell also published several science fiction short stories in the mid-1950s.

#4784

Carl Seashore

1866 - 1949 (83 years)

Carl Emil Seashore, born Sjöstrand was a prominent American psychologist and educator. He was the author of numerous books and articles principally regarding the fields of speech–language pathology, music education, and the psychology of music and art. He served as Dean of the Graduate College of University of Iowa from 1908–1937. He is most commonly associated with the development of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability.

#4785

Robert Waelder

1900 - 1967 (67 years)

Robert Waelder was a noted Austrian psychoanalyst and member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Waelder studied under Anna Freud and Hermann Nunberg. He was known for his work bringing together psychoanalysis and politics and wrote extensively on the subject.

#4786

Ralph Hefferline

1910 - 1974 (64 years)

Ralph Franklin Hefferline was a psychology professor at Columbia University. Hefferline became a patient of Fritz Perls around 1946. He joined a small training group led by Perls in 1948 in New York, and went on to contribute a chapter to the book which defined Gestalt Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, co-authored by Perls, Paul Goodman and Hefferline, published in 1951. He was the third and junior author and provided the section containing practical exercises.

#4787

Charles Augustus Strong

1862 - 1940 (78 years)

Charles Augustus Strong was an American philosopher and psychologist. He spent the earlier part of his career teaching in the United States, but after his wife died, in 1906 he settled with their daughter in Italy, near Florence. Between 1918 and 1936 he wrote most of his works there.

#4788

Eduard Spranger

Eduard Spranger

1882 - 1963 (81 years)

Eduard Spranger was a German philosopher and psychologist. A student of Wilhelm Dilthey, Spranger was born in Berlin and died in Tübingen. He was considered a humanist who developed a philosophical pedagogy as an act of 'self defense' against the psychology-oriented experimental theory of the times.

#4789

George Estabrooks

1885 - 1973 (88 years)

George Hoben Estabrooks was a Canadian-American psychologist and an authority on hypnosis during World War II. He was a Harvard University graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, and chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University. He claimed to have used hypnosis to help spies have split personalities to not actually know they were spies in case of capture. He stated it was easy to create and easy to cure using hypnosis.

#4790

Karl Zener

1903 - 1964 (61 years)

Karl Edward Zener was a perceptual psychologist best known for his affiliation with Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine and their work in the field of extra-sensory perception . Biography Zener was born in Indianapolis, Indiana the son of German-descent Clarence and Ida Zener, and brother of Katharine and Clarence . He received a Ph.B. from the University of Chicago in 1923, followed by M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Harvard University in 1924 and 1926. He then went on to spend a year as a United States National Research Council Fellow at the University of Berlin before returning to the U.S. A...

#4791

Mimí Langer

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Marie "Mimí" Lisbeth Langer was an Austrian-born Latin American psychoanalyst and human rights activist. She was a cofounder of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Biography The daughter of Rudolf Glas and Margarethe Glas, Langer was born in Vienna in 1910. She had a sister, Gusti Eva Glas. Langer attended a private girls' school started by educator Eugenie Schwarzwald. After finishing medical school , she attended Freud's Psychoanalytic Institute.

#4792

William Thetford

1923 - 1988 (65 years)

William Thetford was an American psychologist, medical psychologist and professor. He is best known for his collaboration with Helen Schucman in typing the original manuscript and being on the editing team for A Course in Miracles , a self-study curriculum in spiritual psychology. He died in 1988, aged 65, in Tiburon, California, after having made his involvement with the ACIM material and its study the most central focus of his life.

#4793

Kurt Schneider

1887 - 1967 (80 years)

Kurt Schneider was a German psychiatrist known largely for his writing on the diagnosis and understanding of schizophrenia, as well as personality disorders then known as psychopathic personalities.

#4794

Carl Murchison

1887 - 1961 (74 years)

Carl Allanmore Murchison was an American psychologist and an early promoter of the discipline of psychology. Unlike most psychologists who became prominent in the history books, Murchison was not an influential theorist or researcher. Instead, he was an extremely active organizer, publisher, and editor.

#4795

Erich Neumann

1905 - 1960 (55 years)

Erich Neumann was a German psychologist, philosopher, writer, and student of Carl Jung. Life and career Neumann was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1927 and then continued to study medicine at the University of Berlin, where he acquired his first degree in medicine in 1933. In 1934 Neumann and his wife Julie, who had been Zionists since they were teenagers, spurred on by fear of persecution of Jews by the Nazi government, moved to Tel Aviv. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C.

#4796

James Braid

1795 - 1860 (65 years)

James Braid was a Scottish surgeon, natural philosopher, and "gentleman scientist". He was a significant innovator in the treatment of clubfoot, spinal curvature, knock-knees, bandy legs, and squint; a significant pioneer of hypnotism and hypnotherapy, and an important and influential pioneer in the adoption of both hypnotic anaesthesia and chemical anaesthesia. He is regarded by some, such as Kroger , as the "Father of Modern Hypnotism"; however, in relation to the issue of there being significant connections between Braid's "hypnotism" and "modern hypnotism" , let alone "identity", Weitzenh...

#4797

Theodor Waitz

1821 - 1864 (43 years)

Theodor Waitz was a German psychologist and anthropologist. His research in psychology brought him into touch with anthropology, and he will be best remembered by his monumental work in six volumes, Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker .

#4798

Matatarō Matsumoto

Matatarō Matsumoto

1865 - 1943 (78 years)

was a Japanese psychologist who set up the first psychological laboratory in Japan. He has been described as "the most eminent figure in the history of psychology in Japan". He founded the Japanese Journal of Psychology and the Japanese Psychological Association.

#4799

Graham Wallas

1858 - 1932 (74 years)

Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Biography Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion and was President of the Rationalist Press Association.

#4800

Selma Fraiberg

1918 - 1981 (63 years)

Selma Fraiberg was an American child psychoanalyst, author and social worker. At the time of her death, Selma Fraiberg was a professor of child psychoanalysis at the University of California, San Francisco and a clinician who devoted her career to helping troubled children. She was also professor emeritus of child psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she had taught from 1963 to 1979, and had also been director of the Child Developmental Project in Washtenaw County, Mich., for children with emotional problems.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions