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.
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#4901
Claude Emerson Welch
#4902
Richard Baerwald
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Richard Baerwald was a German academic psychologist, in Berlin. Towards the end of his life he became interested in parapsychology and occultism . He edited the Zeitschrift für Kritischen Okkultismus from 1926 to 1928.
Go to Profile#4903
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.
Go to Profile#4904
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.
Go to Profile#4905
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 ...
Go to Profile#4906
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.
Go to Profile#4907
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,
Go to Profile#4910
Dianne M. Finkelstein
#4911
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.
Go to Profile#4912
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.
Go to Profile#4913
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.
Go to Profile#4914
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.
Go to Profile#4915
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.
Go to Profile#4916
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.
Go to Profile#4917
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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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. ...
Go to Profile#4919
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.
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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...
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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.
Go to Profile#4922
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.
Go to Profile#4923
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.
Go to Profile#4924
Gregory Razran
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Gregory H. Razran was a Russian American expert on Russian psychological research. He left Russia in 1920 and studied at Columbia University gaining a doctorate in 1933. He moved to Queens College, City University of New York in 1940 where he became a professor and headed the Psychology department there from 1945 to 1966. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948.
Go to Profile#4925
Edmund Smith Conklin
1884 - 1942 (58 years)
Edmund Smith Conklin was an American author and psychologist. He was born in New Britain, Connecticut on April 19, 1884. He attended Clark University when G. Stanley Hall was a leading teacher. He graduated in psychology from Springfield college and Clark University. He was a professor and chairman of the department of psychology at Indiana University. He served at various times as visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Syracuse University. He wrote books on abnormal psychology, anomalistic psychology and the psychology of religion.
Go to Profile#4926
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#4927
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#4928
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#4929
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.
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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#4931
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.
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Lewis Terman
1877 - 1956 (79 years)
Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, academic, and proponent of eugenics. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford School of Education. Terman is best known for his revision of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius. As a prominent eugenicist, he was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association.
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Carl Hovland
1912 - 1961 (49 years)
Carl Iver Hovland was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra's propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on yo...
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Heinz Werner
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Heinz Werner was a developmental psychologist who also studied perception, aesthetics, and language. Early life Werner was born to Emilie Klauber Werner and Leopold Werner, who was a manufacturer by trade. He was the second of four children, and the first-born son. His father died when he was four, leaving his mother to raise the children. The family; however, did not suffer financially due to provision being made. Both Werner's elementary and high school education was received in Vienna. He had several interests throughout school, including music, particularly the violin, and the sciences. A...
Go to Profile#4935
Henry Murray
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Henry Alexander Murray was an American psychologist at Harvard University. From 1959 to 1962, he conducted a series of psychologically damaging and purposefully abusive experiments on minors and undergraduate students. One of those students was Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber.
Go to Profile#4936
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.
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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...
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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.
Go to Profile#4939
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Harold Clyde Bingham
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
Harold Clyde Bingham was an American psychologist and primatologist. He spent his early career as a psychology professor, interrupting this to join the United States Army during World War I. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 1925 and studied under the supervision of Robert Yerkes. Yerkes, a psychology professor, had an interest in primates, and Bingham also entered this field. He led a 1929-30 expedition to the Belgian Congo to study gorillas in the wild. Though hampered by the size of the expedition, Bingham managed to get close to several troops of the animals and record details of their behavior.
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John Wallace Baird
1869 - 1919 (50 years)
John Wallace Baird was a Canadian psychologist. He was the 27th president of the American Psychological Association . He was the first Canadian, and only the second non-American, to hold the office. He was also a founding editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, and served in subordinate editorial capacities for Psychological Review, American Journal of Psychology, and the Journal of Educational Psychology. At his death in 1919, he was the designate to succeed Granville Stanley Hall as president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
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Katharine Banham
1897 - 1995 (98 years)
Katharine May Banham was an English psychologist who specialized in developmental psychology. She was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal. Early life and education Katharine May Banham received a B.S. from the University of Manchester in 1919 and a M.S. from Cambridge University in 1921. In 1923, she earned a M.A. from the University of Toronto and graduated cum laude from the Université de Montréal in 1934, being the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from that university.
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Harvey A. Carr
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Harvey A. Carr , a founding father of functionalist psychology, was renowned for a methodical and thorough approach to his science. His work was largely devoted to studies of animal cognition and perception. Carr collaborated with John B. Watson on his most well-known project: the famous Kerplunk experiment. Carr held his post as chairman of the Psychology department at the University of Chicago from 1926 to 1938. He also served as the president of the American Psychological Association in 1926.
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Ruth Wendell Washburn
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ruth Wendell Washburn was an American educational psychologist. She received a B.A. from Vassar in 1913, an M.A. from Radcliffe in 1922, and a Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1929. The Ruth Washburn Cooperative Nursery School in Colorado Springs, Colorado is named in her honor.
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Åse Gruda Skard
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Åse Gruda Skard was a Norwegian university professor, child psychologist and author. She was a noted pioneer in the field of childhood development and psychology. Biography She was born at Kristiania , Norway. She was the daughter of Halvdan Koht and Karen Elisabeth Grude . Her father was a noted historian and professor and the University of Oslo. Her mother was an educator, author and feminist pioneer. Her brother Paul Koht was a diplomat and ambassador.
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Helga Eng
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Helga Kristine Eng was a Norwegian psychologist and educationalist. She was the third woman to receive a doctor's degree in Norway, and the first to do so in psychology. Early life and education She was born in Rakkestad as a daughter of teacher and smallholder Hans Andersen Kirkeng and Johanne Marie Sæves . She had seven siblings. She graduated from Asker Seminary in 1895, and started a career as a primary school teacher. She started in Lier, continued in Moss from 1897 to 1900 when she was hired at Lakkegata School at Tøyen, Oslo.
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