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List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#4901

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.

#4902

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.

#4903

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.

#4904

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.

#4905

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.

#4906

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...

#4907

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.

#4908

Percival Symonds

1893 - 1960 (67 years)

Percival Mallon Symonds was an American educational psychologist. He was known for his development of several tests in the fields of educational, clinical, and school psychology, including the Foreign Language Prognosis Test, the Personality Survey, and the Symonds picture-study test, a projective test administered to adolescents.

#4909

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.

#4910

Nancy Bayley

1899 - 1994 (95 years)

Nancy Bayley was an American psychologist best known for her work on the Berkeley Growth Study and the subsequent Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Originally interested in teaching, she eventually gained interest in psychology, for which she went on to obtain her Ph.D. in from the University of Iowa in 1926. Within two years, Bayley had accepted a position at the Institute for Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. There she began the longitudinal Berkeley Growth Study, which worked to create a guide of physical and behavioral growth across development. Bayley also exam...

#4911

Louise Arseneault

Louise Arseneault is a Canadian psychologist and Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, where she has taught since 2001.

#4912

Walter Richard Miles

Walter Richard Miles

1885 - 1978 (93 years)

Walter Richard Miles was an American psychologist and a president of the American Psychological Association . He best known for his development of the two-story rat maze, his research on low dose alcohol, the development of red night vision goggles for aviation pilots, and the reduction of performance in aging individuals. However, the theme of his academic career was his fascination with apparatuses to measure behavior. C. James Goodwin noted that Miles "never became a leading figure in any particular area of research in psychology... but drifted from one area to another, with the direction...

#4913

Robert L. Thorndike

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Robert Ladd Thorndike was an American psychometrician and educational psychologist who made significant contributions to the analysis of reliability, the interpretation of error, cognitive ability, and the design and analysis of comparative surveys of achievement test performance of students in various countries.

#4914

Dominic W. Massaro

Dominic W. Massaro is Professor of Psychology and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is best known for his fuzzy logical model of perception, and more recently, for his development of the computer-animated talking head Baldi. Massaro is director of the Perceptual Science Laboratory, past president of the Society for Computers in Psychology, book review editor for the American Journal of Psychology, founding Chair of UCSC's Digital Arts and New Media program, and was founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Interpreting. He has been a Guggenheim Fell...

#4915

Margaret Kennard

1899 - 1975 (76 years)

Margaret Alice Kennard was a neurologist who principally studied the effects of neurological damage on primates. Her work led to the creation of the Kennard Principle, which posits a negative linear relationship between age of a brain lesion and the outcome expectancy: in other words, that the earlier in life a brain lesion occurs, the more likely it is for some compensation mechanism to reverse at least some of the lesion's bad effects.

#4916

Harry Helson

1898 - 1977 (79 years)

Harry Helson was an American psychologist and professor of psychology who is best known for his adaptation-level theory. Most of his work and research focused on perception, with much of it involving the perception of color. His first published work was his doctoral dissertation on Gestalt psychology, which was published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1925 and 1926. Every year at Kansas State University, a graduate student receives the Harry Helson Award recognition of excellence in scholarship and research in cognitive psychology.

#4917

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.

#4918

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.

#4919

Jacob Robert Kantor

1888 - 1984 (96 years)

Jacob Robert Kantor was a prominent American psychologist who pioneered a naturalistic system in psychology called interbehavioral psychology or interbehaviorism. He was the first to use the term "psycholinguistics" in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar in 1936.

#4920

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.

#4921

Robert H. Thouless

Robert H. Thouless

1894 - 1984 (90 years)

Robert Henry Thouless was an English psychologist and parapsychologist. He is best known as the author of Straight and Crooked Thinking , which describes flaws in reasoning and argument. Career He studied at Cambridge University where he earned B.A. hons in 1914, an M.A. in 1919 and a PhD in 1922. He was a lecturer in psychology at the universities of Manchester, Glasgow and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. He wrote on parapsychology and conducted experiments in card-calling and psychokinesis. His own experiments did not confirm the results of J. B. Rhine and he criticised the experimental protocols of previous experimenters.

#4922

Karl von Frisch

Karl von Frisch

1886 - 1982 (96 years)

Karl Ritter von Frisch, was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. His work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance. His theory, described in his 1927 book Aus dem Leben der Bienen , was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time. Only much later was it shown to be an accurate theoretical analysis.

#4923

Michael W. Otto

1900 - Present (126 years)

#4924

Harold H. Schlosberg

1904 - 1964 (60 years)

Harold Schlosberg was an American psychologist who was professor of psychology at Brown University from 1928 until the end of his life. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y, Schlosberg earned his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. An experimental psychologist, Schlosberg made notable contributions on subjects ranging from conditioned reflexes to the expression of human emotions. He co-authored the 1954 2nd edition of Experimental Psychology, an influential textbook used by a generation of graduate students. Schlosberg served as chairman of Brown's Department of Psychology from 1954 until his death in 1964.

#4925

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.

#4926

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.

#4927

Daniel Lerner

1917 - 1980 (63 years)

Daniel Lerner was an American scholar and writer known for his studies on modernization theory. Lerner's study of Balgat Turkey played a critical role in shaping American ideas about the use of mass media and US cultural products to promote economic and social development in post-colonial nations. In 1958, he wrote the seminal book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Scholars have argued that the research project that formed the basis of the book emerged from intelligence requirements in the US government, and was a result of the contract between the Office of Int...

#4928

Barbara Rothbaum

1900 - Present (126 years)

Barbara Rothbaum is a psychologist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a professor in the Psychiatry department and a pioneer in the treatment of anxiety-related disorders. Rothbaum is head of the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program at Emory as well as the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program. In the mid-1990s she founded a virtual exposure therapy company called Virtually Better, Inc. This company treats patients with anxiety disorders, addictions, pain, and the like using virtual reality instead of the actual place or scenario. It also allows the therapist to control the environment.

#4929

Frank Rosenblatt

Frank Rosenblatt

1928 - 1971 (43 years)

Frank Rosenblatt was an American psychologist notable in the field of artificial intelligence. He is sometimes called the father of deep learning for his pioneering work on neural networks. Life and career Rosenblatt was born into a Jewish family in New Rochelle, New York as the son of Dr. Frank and Katherine Rosenblatt.

#4930

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.

#4931

Wendell Johnson

1906 - 1965 (59 years)

Wendell Johnson was an American psychologist, author and was a proponent of general semantics . His life work contributed greatly to speech–language pathology, particularly in understanding the area of stuttering, as Johnson himself stuttered. The Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center at University of Iowa is named after him. Aside from his contributions to stuttering, he posthumerously became known for his controversial experiment nicknamed "The Monster Study."

#4932

Floyd Henry Allport

1890 - 1979 (89 years)

Floyd Henry Allport was an American psychologist who is often considered "the father of experimental social psychology", having played a key role in the creation of social psychology as a legitimate field of behavioral science. His book Social Psychology impacted all future writings in the field. He was particularly interested in public opinion, attitudes, morale, rumors, and behavior. He focused on exploration of these topics through laboratory experimentation and survey research.

#4933

Karl M. Dallenbach

1887 - 1971 (84 years)

Karl M. Dallenbach was an American experimental psychologist whose interests in psychology were heavily influenced by John Wallace Baird. He was a loyal student of Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University, received his Ph.D. degree in 1913, and was a member of the faculties of departments of psychology at Oregon State University, Ohio State University, Cornell, and The University of Texas at Austin.

#4934

Charles Ferster

Charles Ferster

1922 - 1981 (59 years)

Charles Bohris Ferster was an American behavioral psychologist. A pioneer of applied behavior analysis, he developed errorless learning and was a colleague of B.F. Skinner's at Harvard University, co-authoring the book Schedules of Reinforcement .

#4935

David Marr

1945 - 1980 (35 years)

David Courtenay Marr was a British neuroscientist and physiologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in computational neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.

#4936

Fritz Roethlisberger

1898 - 1974 (76 years)

Fritz Jules Roethlisberger was a social scientist and management theorist at the Harvard Business School. Biography Fritz J. Roethlisberger was born in 1898 in New York City. He earned a BA in engineering at Columbia University in 1921, supplementing this degree with a BS in engineering administration from MIT in 1923. Soon after, he shifted to philosophy studies at Harvard, where he earned an M.A. in 1925.

#4937

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 .

#4938

Stanley Smith Stevens

1906 - 1973 (67 years)

Stanley Smith Stevens was an American psychologist who founded Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, studying psychoacoustics, and he is credited with the introduction of Stevens's power law. Stevens authored a milestone textbook, the 1400+ page Handbook of Experimental Psychology . He was also one of the founding organizers of the Psychonomic Society. In 1946 he introduced a theory of levels of measurement widely used by scientists but whose use in some areas of statistics has been criticized. In addition, Stevens played a key role in the development of the use of operational definitions in...

#4939

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.

#4940

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.

#4941

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.

#4942

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...

#4943

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 .

#4944

James Arthur Bayton

1912 - 1990 (78 years)

James Arthur Bayton was an American psychologist. He conducted research in areas of personality, race, social issues, and consumer psychology. Early life and education James Arthur Bayton was born on April 5, 1912, in White stone, Virginia to George and Helen Bayton. His father, a physician, had graduated from the medical school at Howard University. Bayton graduated from Temple University's high school in 1931 and subsequently matriculated at Howard University as a Chemistry major. Bayton began his undergraduate career planning to go into medicine, however, taking psychology courses taug...

#4945

Elias Porter

1914 - 1987 (73 years)

Elias Hull Porter was an American psychologist. While at the University of Chicago Porter was a peer of other notable American psychologists, including Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Will Schutz. His work at Ohio State University and later at the University of Chicago contributed to Rogers’ development of client-centered therapy. Porter's primary contributions to the field of psychology were in the areas of non-directive approaches, relationship awareness theory and psychometric tests. His career included military, government, business and clinical settings.

#4946

Coleman Griffith

1893 - 1966 (73 years)

Coleman Roberts Griffith was an American sport psychologist. Born in Iowa, he is considered the founder of American sport psychology. Griffith studied at Greenville College until 1915, and then studied psychology at the University of Illinois. While at the University of Illinois, Griffith established what he claimed to be the first sports psychology laboratory in the United States. At this time Griffith worked closely with the University of Illinois football team, studying how factors such as psychomotor skills and personality variables related to performance and learning of athletic skills. ...

#4947

Albert Poffenberger

1885 - 1977 (92 years)

Albert T. Poffenberger was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Growing up in Pennsylvania, Poffenberger graduated from Harrisburg High School and Bucknell University. He was on the faculty of Columbia University. He authored textbooks titled Psychology in Advertising and Applied Psychology: Its Principles and Methods. He was APA president in 1934.

#4948

I. Madison Bentley

1870 - 1955 (85 years)

I. Madison Bentley, also known as Isaac Madison Bentley and later as Madison Bentley was an American psychologist. His first publication in 1897 was under the name "I. Madison Bentley." Bentley was one of the first to write about gender in his 1945 publication Sanity and Hazard in Childhood.

#4949

Ralph Piddington

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Ralph O'Reilly Piddington was a New Zealand psychologist, anthropologist and university professor. Biography He was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1906, the son of Albert and Marion O'Reilly. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics under Bronisław Malinowski. He gained a Ph.D. for his study of the Karajarri people of Pilbara, North western Australia. However, when he raised the issue of racial discrimination towards indigenous peoples he was censured by the Australian National Research Council. In 1946, he was appointed Reader in anthropology at the Department of Mental Philosophy, University of Edinburgh.

#4950

Herbert Langfeld

1879 - 1958 (79 years)

Herbert Sidney Langfeld was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association . Biography Herbert Langfeld was born in Philadelphia on July 24, 1879. He grew up in Philadelphia and was initially drawn to a diplomatic career. He was working for the American Embassy in Berlin when he was attracted to psychology. He earned a PhD in 1909 at the University of Berlin. He took a faculty position at Harvard University and ultimately went to Princeton University, where he became the psychological laboratory director and later the department chair for psychology. While at Princeton he also directly influenced the ecological psychology approach of J.

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