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,
#4801
Margaret Verrall
1857 - 1916 (59 years)
Margaret de Gaudrion Verrall was a classical scholar and lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge. Much of her life and research was concerned with the study of parapsychology, mainly in order to examine how psychic abilities might demonstrate the abilities, breadth and power of the human mind. She began to exhibit and develop psychic abilities herself around 1901, and became both a recipient and analyst of many cross-correspondences produced by psychics, most notably the Palm Sunday scripts.
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Naomi Norsworthy
1877 - 1916 (39 years)
Naomi Norsworthy was an American psychologist who served as the first female faculty member at Columbia University Teacher's College. Her parents had emigrated from England two years before her birth. Norsworthy was the eldest of four children with two younger brothers and a third who died soon after birth. She was educated in public school in Rutherford, New Jersey then enrolled in New Jersey State Normal School at the age of 15, and was among the youngest students there; she graduated from the school in three years.
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John S. Hougham
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
John Scherer Hougham , was Purdue University’s first appointed professor, first acting President after Purdue's first President Richard Dale Owen resigned on March 1, 1874, and later an official acting President between the administrations of Abraham C. Shortridge and Emerson E. White.
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Heinrich Racker
1910 - 1960 (50 years)
Heinrich Racker was a Polish-Argentine psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish origin. Escaping Nazism, he fled to Buenos Aires in 1939. Already a doctor in musicology and philosophy, he became a psychoanalyst, first under the direction of Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, and later working with Ángel Garma and Marie Langer in Argentina. His most important work is a study of the psychoanalytic technique known as transference and countertransference, which was published for the first time in 1968.
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Frieda Goldman-Eisler
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Frieda Goldman-Eisler was a psychologist and pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics. She is known for her research on speech disfluencies; a volume dedicated in her honor calls her "the modern pioneer of the science of pausology".
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Edward Richard Shaw
1855 - 1903 (48 years)
Edward Richard Shaw was a Professor and Dean, New York University, and author of numerous books, primarily children's schoolbooks. Shaw was born in 1855 at Bellport, New York . His undergraduate work was at Lafayette College, and he received his Ph.D. from New York University. After serving as Principal at Sayville, New York; Greenport, Suffolk County, New York; and Yonkers High School, he became Professor of Pedagogy in the New York University. By the time of his death, he was Dean.
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Ingebrikt Grose
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Ingebrikt Fredrick Grose or Ingebricks F. Grose was an author, college professor and founding president of Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota. Background Inglebrikt was the first child of Johan and Ingeborg Grose. His father, Johan had arrived in the United States during 1854 from Stetten, then a part of Prussia. His mother, Ingeborg emigrated to the United States from the western Norway during the same year. His parents were married in Wisconsin in 1860 and moved to Kenyon, Minnesota, where Grose was born in 1862. Grose attended primary school in Kenyon, after which he traveled to St.
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James Drever
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Sir James Drever FRSE was a Scottish psychologist and academic who was the first Professor of Psychology at a Scottish university. Early life Sir James Drever was born on 8 April 1873 in Balfour, on Shapinsay Island, Orkney. After an argument between Drever's father and their landlord, he evicted the family from their home. Drever's family then migrated to Stromness. He was a rather delicate and sickly child who quickly grew fond of reading. Drever was gifted with the ability to learn and memorize things rapidly as well as retain the information. He could repeat several pages of his favorite author's works.
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Alice Hamlin Hinman
1869 - 1934 (65 years)
Alice Hamlin Hinman was a psychologist who changed the public school education system from backwards to progressive from 1907 to 1919 through her influence and membership on the Lincoln Board of Education.
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Constance Davey
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Constance Muriel Davey was an Australian psychologist who worked in the South Australian Department of Education, where she introduced the state's first special education classes. Biography Davey was born in 1882 in Nuriootpa, South Australia, to Emily Mary and Stephen Henry Davey. She began teaching at a Port Adelaide private school in 1908 and at St Peter's Collegiate Girls' School in 1909. She attended the University of Adelaide as a part-time student, completing a B.A. in philosophy in 1915 and an M.A. in 1918. In 1921 she won a Catherine Helen Spence Memorial Scholarship which allowed ...
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Josephine Tilden
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
Josephine Elizabeth Tilden was an American expert on pacific algae. She was the first woman scientist employed by the University of Minnesota. Tilden established a research station in British Columbia which lasted only until 1906. When Tilden became an assistant Professor in 1903, she was the first female scientist employed by the University of Minnesota. In 1910, despite not having a doctorate, Tilden was promoted to full professor.
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Max Ettlinger
1877 - 1929 (52 years)
Max Ettlinger was a German psychologist, philosopher, pedagogist, and aesthetician. Literary works Ettlinger. 1905. Pierre Bonnier: Le sens du retour. Revue philos. 56 , 30–50. 1903. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 38: 56Ettlinger. 1905. Gaston Rageot: Les formes simples de l'attention. Revue philos. 56 , 113–141. 1903. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 38: 58-60Ettlinger. 1905. Henri Piéron: L'association médiate. Revue philos. 56 , 142–149. 1903. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 38: 60Ettlinger. 1905. Gustave Loisel: La sexualité.
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Jan Waterink
1890 - 1966 (76 years)
Jan Waterink was a Dutch pastor, psychologist and educationist who pioneered approaches to the testing and instruction of children with special needs. Waterink was born in Den Hulst where his family, originally from Nieuwleusen, lived. His father was a pastor and he went to the Gymnasium at Kampen followed by theological studies. He worked as a pastor in Appelscha and then at Zutphen. He studied social geography at the University of Bonn and received a doctorate in theology from the Free University in Amsterdam in March 1923. He then taught at the Lyceum in Zutphen and served as professor of pedagogy.
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Adolf Zeising
1810 - 1876 (66 years)
Adolf Zeising was a German psychologist, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy. Among his theories, Zeising claimed to have found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law,
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Dianne M. Finkelstein
#4816
Mary Dorothy Lyndon
1877 - 1924 (47 years)
Mary Dorothy Lyndon was the first female graduate from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Early life and education Lyndon was born in 1877 in Newnan, Georgia. She graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia in 1896 as its first Dramatic Arts degree holder. She continued her education in Dramatic Arts and History at Columbia University in New York City before beginning her studies at the University of Georgia during Summer school sessions.
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Elizabeth Blanchard
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Elizabeth Blanchard was an American educator who was the seventh president of Mount Holyoke College . Blanchard graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1858, and taught there for twelve years before becoming the Associate Principal from 1872-1883. She served as Principal from 1883-1888. When Mount Holyoke Female Seminary received its collegiate charter and became Mount Holyoke College, she served as Acting President from 1888-1889.
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J. Hillis Miller Sr.
1899 - 1953 (54 years)
J. Hillis Miller Sr. was an American university professor, education administrator and university president. Miller was a native of Virginia, and earned bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees before embarking on an academic career. He served as a psychology professor at the College of William & Mary and Bucknell University, the president of Keuka College, a senior administrator with the New York Department of Education, and the president of the University of Florida.
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Oscar Clute
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Oscar Clute was president of the U.S. state of Michigan's State Agricultural College from 1889 to 1893. Early years Oscar Clute was born in Albany, New York. Career 1855–1859 From 1855 to 1859 Clute taught high school.
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Josef Schiller
1877 - 1960 (83 years)
Josef Schiller was an Austrian phycologist and hydrobiologist. He studied natural sciences at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1905. Afterwards he was an assistant at the zoological station in Trieste , where he developed an expertise involving benthic algae and phytoplankton. From 1918 he worked as a lecturer of botanical hydrobiology at the University of Vienna, and in 1927 he became an associate professor on the aforementioned subject.
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Ralph Pickford
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Ralph William Pickford was an English psychologist who served as the first Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, from 1955 to 1973. He first joined the university's faculty in 1930, and received a D. Litt. degree from there in 1947. In 2005, the university established the Pickford Travelling Fellowship in his honor. In 1971, he married his second wife, Laura Ruth Bowyer, and they remained married until his death in 1986. Bowyer later provided one of the two bequests that was first used to fund the Pickford Travelling Fellowship .
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Thomas Loveday
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Thomas Tudor Loveday was an English academic who was Principal of Southampton University College and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Bristol . Early life Loveday was born in Cropredy, Oxfordshire, the son of John Edward Taylor Loveday, a landowner, and Margaret Cheape of Scotland, the granddaughter of John Arbuthnott, 8th Viscount of Arbuthnott. His great-great-grandfather was the antiquary John Loveday. He was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh and later attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained an MA. He won the John Locke Scholarship in 1900, and worked as an As...
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Wolfgang Köhler
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, publish...
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Alvin C. Eurich
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Alvin Christian Eurich was a 20th-century American educator who is most notable for having served as the first president of the State University of New York from 1949–1951. Early life and education Eurich was born in Bay City, Michigan and pursued degrees in Psychology at North Central College and the University of Maine. He supported himself by working as a speech instructor while in Maine. He earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1929, where he worked as a professor and assistant dean of the College of Education from 1927 to 1936.
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Wilhelm Reich
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, The Impulsive Character , The Function of the Orgasm , Character Analysis , and The Mass Psychology of Fascism , he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.
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Walter V. Bingham
1880 - 1952 (72 years)
Walter Van Dyke Bingham was an applied and industrial psychologist who made significant contributions to intelligence testing. A pioneer in applied psychology, Bingham got his start in experimental psychology, receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under James R. Angell. Bingham went from Dartmouth in 1915 to organize the Division of Applied Psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. When war came to the United States, Bingham was recruited by Robert Yerkes as a member of a small group that developed the Army Alpha and Beta tests. During World War I Bingham served as executive secretary of the committee on classification of personnel in the U.S.
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J. E. Wallace Wallin
1876 - 1969 (93 years)
John Edward Wallace Wallin was an American psychologist and an early proponent of educational services for the mentally handicapped. Wallin wrote more than 30 books and published over 300 articles. He established several psychology clinics and was a noted professor, author and mental health director for a state board of education. Wallin also led the founding of the American Association of Clinical Psychologists, which later became Division 12 of the American Psychological Association .
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Raymond Dodge
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Raymond Dodge was an American experimental psychologist who studied the movements of the eye, developed an instrument known as the Tachistoscope to discover new eye movements and conduct experiments around reading. He began his education at Williams College and after receiving a degree in philosophy, Dodge decided to further his education at the University of Halle. Dodge became a philosophy professor for Ursinus College in 1896. Dodge ended his career after being the 25th president of the American Psychological Association in 1916. After working with APA Dodge decided to retire in 1942.
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Zing-Yang Kuo
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Kuo Zing-yang , was a Chinese experimental and physiological psychologist. He was a renowned educator and is also notable as having been the President of Zhejiang University, who was expelled by Zhejiang students in 1935.
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Herbert Woodrow
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Herbert Hollingsworth Woodrow was an American psychologist. He served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1941 and was a faculty member at several universities. He was a first cousin of Woodrow Wilson.
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Helen L. Koch
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
Helen Lois Koch was an American developmental psychologist and a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago. Koch developed nursery school teacher training programs during World War II and she researched the differences between sets of fraternal twins, identical twins and non-twin siblings.
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George S. Klein
1917 - 1971 (54 years)
George Stuart Klein was an American psychologist and psychoanalyst who made significant contributions in the experimental areas of the "new-look perception", "cognitive controls", "subliminal perception", "REM-dream" studies as well as in the advancement of psychoanalytic "ego psychology".
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Joseph Banks Rhine
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Joseph Banks Rhine , usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and the Parapsychological Association. Rhine wrote the books Extrasensory Perception and Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind.
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Arthur Kornhauser
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
Arthur William Kornhauser was an American industrial psychologist. He was an early researcher on topics such as labor unions and worker attitudes, and advocated a form of industrial psychology that approached problems from the workers' standpoint rather than that of management. He has been described as one of the most important early figures in organizational psychology, and is particularly remembered for his focus on worker well-being. His work was interdisciplinary, crossing the boundaries between industrial psychology and sociology and political science.
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William Stern
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
William Stern was a German psychologist and philosopher. He is known for the development of personalistic psychology, which placed emphasis on the individual by examining measurable personality traits as well as the interaction of those traits within each person to create the self.
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Howard Parshley
1884 - 1953 (69 years)
Howard Madison Parshley was an American zoologist, a specialist on the Heteroptera who also wrote more broadly on genetics, reproduction and human sexuality. He was responsible for translating The Second Sex into English.
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William Thomas Heron
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
William Thomas Heron was a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. He co-authored six papers with B.F. Skinner in the 1930s, making him Skinner's most frequent co-author during the latter's career. He is known for an experiment he conducted in 1952, in which he and a graduate student attempted to test the validity of extrasensory perception.
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Walter Samuel Hunter
1889 - 1954 (65 years)
Walter Samuel Hunter contributed to psychology by leading an effort to develop psychology as a science. Hunter was one of the first scholars of the time to focus not on the study of subjective mental processes but rather on the observation of animal behavior. In 1912, Hunter completed his doctoral dissertation on Delayed Reaction in Animals and Children. He was a pioneer in the effort of scientific documentation, having created Psychological Abstracts in 1927, which contained documents from psychologists in the U.S. and abroad.
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Robert P. Knight
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Robert Palmer Knight was an American psychoanalyst. He served as the medical director of the Austen Riggs Center from 1947 until his death in 1966. Early life Knight was born on July 18, 1902, in Urbana, Ohio to William James Knight and Florence Dempcy Knight. He graduated from Oberlin College. He earned his medical degree from Northwestern University.
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Suzi Gage
Suzanne H. Gage is a British psychologist and epidemiologist who is interested in the nature of associations between lifestyle behaviours and mental health. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and has a popular science podcast and accompanying book, Say Why to Drugs, which explores substance use.
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Robert Tryon
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Robert Choate Tryon was an American behavioral psychologist, who pioneered the study of hereditary trait inheritance and learning in animals. His series of experiments with laboratory rats showed that animals can be selectively bred for greater aptitude at certain intelligence tests, but that this selective breeding does not increase the general intelligence of the animals.
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Arthur Melton
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Arthur Weever Melton was an American experimental psychologist, researcher, and professor. He served as the editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology for twelve years. Background Arthur "Art" Weever Melton was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas on August 13, 1906. At 18 years old, he began undergraduate studies in Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis where he worked with John A. McGeoch, a functionalist, who performed studies exploring how the distribution of practice, rest, and interpolated learning affects the formation and loss of association. Melton received a BA in psychology in 1928.
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Hillel J. Einhorn
1941 - 1987 (46 years)
Hillel J. Einhorn was an American psychologist who played a key role in the development of the field of behavioral decision theory. Einhorn earned BA and MA degrees at Brooklyn College, married Susan Michaels in 1966, and received his PhD in psychology from Wayne State University in 1969 under the supervision of Alan Bass. In 1969, Einhorn joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He was promoted to professor in 1976 and appointed to the Wallace W. Booth professorship in 1986. In addition to his research contributions, Einhorn restructured the behavi...
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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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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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Ruth Morris Bakwin
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Ruth Morris Bakwin was a noted pediatrician and child psychologist and the first woman intern at the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City . Bakwin and her husband, also a pediatrician, were long associated with New York University School of Medicine.
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B. F. Skinner
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher. Considered the father of Behaviorism, he was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
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Carl Rogers
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Carl Ransom Rogers was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and was known especially for his person-centered psychotherapy. Rogers is widely considered one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1956.
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Leon Festinger
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult.
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