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.
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.
List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#4851
Bruno Bettelheim
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#4852
Harry L. Hollingworth
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Harry Levi Hollingworth was one of the first psychologists to bring psychology into the advertising world, as well as a pioneer in applied psychology. Biography Hollingworth was born on May 26, 1880, in De Witt, Nebraska. Hollingworth graduated from high school at age 16, but lacking both the necessary two years of college preparatory work and the funds for university Hollingworth applied for a teaching certificate instead of pursuing a university education. After teaching for two years Hollingworth enrolled in preparatory school. As a result of these educational delays Hollingworth was 23 wh...
Go to Profile#4853
Florence Goodenough
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Florence Laura Goodenough was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota who studied child intelligence and various problems in the field of child development. She was president of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1946-1947. She is best known for published book The Measurement of Intelligence, where she introduced the Goodenough Draw-A-Man test to assess intelligence in young children through nonverbal measurement. She is noted for developing the Minnesota Preschool Scale. In 1931 she published two notable books titled Experimental Child Study and Anger in Young Children which analyzed the methods used in evaluating children.
Go to Profile#4854
Paul Fitts
1912 - 1965 (53 years)
Paul Morris Fitts Jr. was a psychologist at the Ohio State University, where he conducted research in conjunction with personnel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, generally recognized as the "birthplace of human factors engineering." Fitts also later taught at the University of Michigan. He developed a model of human movement, Fitts's law, based on rapid, aimed movement, which went on to become one of the most highly successful and well studied mathematical models of human motion.
Go to Profile#4855
Robert Richardson Sears
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Robert Richardson Sears was an American psychologist who specialized in child psychology and the psychology of personality. He was the head of the psychology department at Stanford and later dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences there, continued the long-term I.Q. studies of Lewis Madison Terman at Stanford, and authored many pivotal papers and books on various aspects of psychology.
Go to Profile#4856
Jeffrey Schaler
Jeffrey Alfred Schaler is a psychologist, author, editor, retired professor of justice, law, and society at American University, and former member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He is a prominent critic of psychiatric claims and practices, especially of treatment without consent. Schaler opposes the medicalization of addiction. He has had a private practice in existential therapy since the 1970s.
Go to Profile#4857
Kate Gordon Moore
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Kate Gordon Moore was an American psychologist whose work focused on various aspects within cognitive psychology, and is noted for her work with color vision and perception, as well as aesthetics, memory, imagination, emotion, developmental tests for children, and attention span. Gordon's early work focused on color vision and how this interacted with memory. Her work shifted mid-career and then she started to research within the realm of education. Specifically, she published work that addressed women's education with regard to the notion that women must be educated differently from men. Her...
Go to Profile#4858
John Dollard
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
John Dollard was an American psychologist and social scientist known for his studies on race relations in America and the frustration-aggression hypothesis he proposed with Neal E. Miller and others.
Go to Profile#4859
Henri Tajfel
1919 - 1982 (63 years)
Henri Tajfel was a Polish social psychologist, best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory, as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.
Go to Profile#4860
José Bleger
1922 - 1972 (50 years)
José Bleger was an Argentine psychoanalyst. He sought a rapprochement of psychoanalysis and Marxism in works such as Psychoanalysis and materialist dialectics . He also contributed to Kleinian clinical practice and thought.
Go to Profile#4861
Irving Janis
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Irving Lester Janis was an American research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley most famous for his theory of "groupthink" which described the systematic errors made by groups when making collective decisions. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Janis as the 79th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4862
George Gallup
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. Life and career Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, George Jr., known then as "Ted", would deliver milk and used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where he also played football. His higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Si...
Go to Profile#4863
Kenneth Spence
1907 - 1967 (60 years)
Kenneth Wartinbee Spence was a prominent American psychologist known for both his theoretical and experimental contributions to learning theory and motivation. As one of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4864
Paul Dressel
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Paul Dressel was an American educational psychologist. He was the founding director of the Counseling Center at Michigan State University, and the author of several books. Early life Dressel was born on November 29, 1910. He graduated from Wittenberg University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1931. He earned a master's degree from Michigan State University in 1934, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1939.
Go to Profile#4865
Boris Teplov
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Boris Mikhailovich Teplov was a Soviet psychologist who studied problems of inborn individual differences and talents and a founder of a Soviet psychological school of Differential psychology. His well-known opponent was Aleksey Leontyev who believed that people's talents are not inborn but rather determined by education and other external influence. Boris Teplov was editor-in-chief of the principal Russian journal on psychology Voprosy Psikhologii.
Go to Profile#4866
Arnold Gesell
1880 - 1961 (81 years)
Arnold Lucius Gesell was an American psychologist, pediatrician and professor at Yale University known for his research and contributions to the fields of child hygiene and child development. Early life Gesell was born in Alma, Wisconsin, and later wrote an article analyzing his experiences there entitled "The Village of a Thousand Souls". The eldest of five children, Arnold and his siblings were born to photographer Gerhard Gesell and schoolteacher Christine Giesen. His first experience in observing child development involved watching his younger siblings learn and grow until he graduated fr...
Go to Profile#4867
Wayne D. Gray
Wayne D. Gray is a professor of cognitive science and director of the cognitive science doctoral program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Research Gray seeks to understand how goal-directed cognition is shaped by the accommodation of basic cognitive, perceptual, and motor operations to the cost-benefit structure of the designed task environment. These basic elements of integrated behavior, interactive routines, occur over a time span of 1/3 to 3 seconds and are typically beneath the level of our conscious awareness and deliberate control. Hence, non-deliberate forces that dynamically react...
Go to Profile#4868
Norman Maier
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Norman Raymond Frederick Maier was an American experimental psychologist who worked primarily at the University of Michigan. He invented the two-cords problem and co-authored Principles of Animal Psychology.
Go to Profile#4869
Rensis Likert
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.
Go to Profile#4870
Philip E. Vernon
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Philip Ewart Vernon was a British-born Canadian psychologist and author. He studied intellectual ability with a focus on race and intelligence. Life Philip Vernon was born in Oxford, England on 6 June 1905. His father was H. M. Vernon who was a lecturer in physiology at the University of Oxford, and was Great Britain's foremost figure in industrial psychology. His mother Dorothea Ewart was author of several works on Italian history. Philip worked with his wife, Dorothy, in the study of gifted children. They had one son, Philip Anthony Vernon, who also researched intellectual abilities. When Vernon joined the University of Calgary, he became a Canadian citizen.
Go to Profile#4871
Karl Lashley
1890 - 1958 (68 years)
Karl Spencer Lashley was an American psychologist and behaviorist remembered for his contributions to the study of learning and memory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lashley as the 61st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4872
Muzafer Sherif
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-American social psychologist. He helped develop social judgment theory and realistic conflict theory. Sherif was a founder of modern social psychology who developed several unique and powerful techniques for understanding social processes, particularly social norms and social conflict. Many of his original contributions to social psychology have been absorbed into the field so fully that his role in the development and discovery has disappeared. Other reformulations of social psychology have taken his contributions for granted, and re-presented his ideas as new.
Go to Profile#4873
Abraham Maslow
1908 - 1970 (62 years)
Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th ...
Go to Profile#4874
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.
Go to Profile#4875
Gordon Allport
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. Instead of these popular approaches, he developed an eclectic theory based on traits. He emphasized the uniquene...
Go to Profile#4876
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.
Go to Profile#4877
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.
Go to Profile#4878
Louis Leon Thurstone
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Louis Leon Thurstone was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
Go to Profile#4879
Harry Cassidy
1900 - 1951 (51 years)
Harry Cassidy was a Canadian academic, social reformer, civil servant and, briefly, a politician. Cassidy was born on January 8, 1900, to parents Herbert Cassidy and Maria Morris Cassidy, transplanted Maritimers who ran a general store. In 1916 Cassidy enlisted underage in the army, spending the next three years in uniform and returning to Canada in the spring of 1919. Harry Cassidy was a pioneer in the field of social work. He was the founding dean of the School of Social Welfare at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1940s before resigning to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Go to Profile#4880
Edward C. Tolman
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Through Tolman's theories and works, he founded what is now a branch of psychology known as purposive behaviorism. Tolman also promoted the concept known as latent learning first coined by Blodgett . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tolman as the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4881
Erich Fromm
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Go to Profile#4882
Charles Spearman
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Charles Edward Spearman, FRS was an English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on models for human intelligence, including his theory that disparate cognitive test scores reflect a single general intelligence factor and coining the term g factor.
Go to Profile#4883
David Wechsler
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
David Wechsler was a Romanian-American psychologist. He developed well-known intelligence scales, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children to get to know his patients at Bellevue Hospital. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Wechsler as the 51st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4884
Edwin Boring
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Edwin Garrigues Boring was an American experimental psychologist, Professor of Psychology at Clark University and at Harvard University, who later became one of the first historians of psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Boring as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Dewey, Amos Tversky, and Wilhelm Wundt.
Go to Profile#4885
Dana R. Carney
Dana R. Carney is an American psychologist. She is associate professor of business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow, an affiliate of the Department of Psychology and the director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#4886
Hadley Cantril
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Albert Hadley Cantril, Jr. was an American psychologist from the Princeton University, who expanded the scope of the field. Cantril made "major contributions in psychology of propaganda; public opinion research; applications of psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding, and communication; developmental psychology; psychology of social movements; measurement and scaling; humanistic psychology; the psychology of perception; and, basic to all of them, the analysis of human behavior from the transactional point of view." His influence is felt in educati...
Go to Profile#4887
Fritz Heider
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception . It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.
Go to Profile#4888
Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their ...
Go to Profile#4889
Clark L. Hull
1884 - 1952 (68 years)
Clark Leonard Hull was an American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Hull is known for his debates with Edward C. Tolman. He is also known for his work in drive theory.
Go to Profile#4890
Sigmund Freud
1856 - 1939 (83 years)
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Go to Profile#4891
Donald O. Hebb
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Donald Olding Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought ...
Go to Profile#4892
David Krech
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
David Krech was an American Jewish experimental and social psychologist who lectured predominately at the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his education and career endeavors, Krech was with many psychologists including Edward Tolman, Karl Lashley, and Rensis Likert.
Go to Profile#4893
Carl Jung
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence, paramount to their joint vision of human psychology. Jung is widely regarded as one of the mo...
Go to Profile#4894
Harry R. Wellman
1899 - 1997 (98 years)
Harrison Richard Wellman was professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and became acting president of the University of California in 1967. Early years Wellman and a twin brother were the youngest of eight children of Richard Harrison Wellman and his second wife, Jennie Wellman. Harry's family was living just north of the Canada–United States border when he was born. His mother died less than a year after he was born. Harry and his siblings initially moved to his maternal grandparents' ranch in Montana, and then to a family wheat farm in Umapine, Oregon.
Go to Profile#4895
Anny Rosenberg Katan
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.
Go to Profile#4896
Walter Charles Langer
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Walter Charles Langer was an American psychoanalyst who prepared a detailed psychological analysis of Adolf Hitler in 1943. Langer studied psychoanalysis at Harvard University, where he worked as a professor upon completion of his education. Langer was later employed by the Office of Strategic Services , where in 1943 he prepared a psychoanalysis profile of Hitler. In this analysis, Langer accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide as the "most plausible outcome", and the possibility of a military coup against Hitler well before the assassination attempt of 1944.
Go to Profile#4897
W. Horsley Gantt
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
William Andrew Horsley Gantt was an American physiologist and psychiatrist. At the time of his death in 1980, he was one of only two surviving students of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He spent fifty-six years of his career extending Pavlov's seminal experimental research on classical conditioning. He is also recognized for his research in psychophysiology.
Go to Profile#4898
Sidney Jourard
1926 - 1974 (48 years)
Sidney Marshall Jourard was a Canadian psychologist, professor, and writer. He was best known as the author of the books The Transparent Self and Healthy Personality: An Approach From the Viewpoint of Humanistic Psychology, which was a synthesis of the concepts and techniques that humanistic psychologists utilized and built upon in the 1960s and 1970s. Jourard is also known for his "Self-Disclosure Theory" of humanistic therapy. He has written many other works, including essays, books, and lectures on growth as a human being.
Go to Profile#4899
Henry Garrett
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Henry Edward Garrett was an American psychologist and segregationist. Garrett was President of the American Psychological Association in 1946 and Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955. After he left Columbia, he was visiting professor at the University of Virginia. A.S. Winston chronicles, was involved in the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics , the journal Mankind Quarterly, the neofascist Northern League, and the ultra-right wing political group, the Liberty Lobby.
Go to Profile#4900
Roger Barker
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Roger Garlock Barker was a social scientist, a founder of environmental psychology and a leading figure in the field for decades, perhaps best known for his development of the concept of behavior settings and staffing theory. He was also a central figure in the development of ecological psychology and rehabilitation psychology.
Go to Profile