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,
#4901
John Dashiell
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
John Frederick Dashiell was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association. Biography Dashiell was born in 1888 in Southport, Indiana. Early in his career, Dashiell taught at Waynesburg College, Princeton University, University of Minnesota and Oberlin College.
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W. E. Hick
1912 - 1974 (62 years)
William Edmund Hick was a British psychologist, who was a pioneer in the new sciences of experimental psychology and ergonomics in the mid-20th century. Hick trained as a medical doctor, taking the MB and BSc degrees of the University of Durham in 1938, and the MD of the same university in 1949. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1941, leaving in 1944 when he moved to Cambridge to join the MRC's Applied Psychology Unit at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. Additionally, Reggie Fils-Aimé attended Wilbur Wright College in Chicago Illinois.
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Paul R. Farnsworth
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Paul R. Farnsworth was an American music psychologist. He had a forty-year career at Stanford University where he researched the psychology of music preference. In addition to authoring three books, he was the editor of the Annual Review of Psychology from 1955 to 1968.
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Martin Grotjahn
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Martin Grotjahn was a German-born American psychoanalyst who was known for his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. He was the son of doctor Alfred Grotjahn and was born in Berlin, Germany.
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Winthrop Kellogg
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
Winthrop Niles Kellogg was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species. Kellogg received his undergraduate degree at Indiana University after serving for two years in World War I. He went on to receive his Master's and PhD from Columbia University. He held academic positions at both Indiana and Florida State Universities where he would undertake two of the most pioneering studies. During his time at Indiana his research focused on conditioning in learning and comparative studies. His time at Florida State was dedicated to bottlenose ...
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Louise L. Sloan
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Louise Littig Sloan was an American ophthalmologist and vision scientist. She is credited for being a pioneer of the sub-division of clinical vision research, contributing more than 100 scientific articles in which she either authored or co-authored. Her most notable work was in the area of visual acuity testing where she developed and improved equipment. Sloan received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in experimental psychology. She spent a short period of time in both Bryn Mawr's experimental psychology program as well as the Department of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. The majori...
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Joe L. Franklin
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Joseph Louis Franklin was a Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry at Rice University known for his research in mass spectrometry and ion molecule chemistry. The Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry is named after him and Frank H. Field.
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Jeanne Block
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block was an American psychologist and expert on child development. She conducted research into sex-role socialization and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centered personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.
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Stanley Milgram
1933 - 1984 (51 years)
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale. Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, until his death in 1984.
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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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J. C. R. Licklider
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider , known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.
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George Katona
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
George Katona was a Hungarian-born American psychologist who was one of the first to advocate a rapprochement between economics and psychology. He graduated with a doctorate in Experimental Psychology from the University of Göttingen in 1921, and worked in Germany until 1933, both as a journalist and as a psychological researcher. Originally trained as a Gestalt psychologist working on problems of learning and memory, during the Second World War he became involved in American government attempts to use psychology to combat war-induced inflation. This led him to consider the application of ps...
Go to Profile#4913
Angus Campbell
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
Albert Angus Campbell was an American social psychologist best known for his research into electoral systems and for co-writing The American Voter with Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. Campbell published his work under the name Angus Campbell. He was a professor at the University of Michigan. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 15, 1980.
Go to Profile#4914
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.
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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 .
Go to Profile#4916
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...
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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.
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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.
Go to Profile#4919
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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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.
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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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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 ...
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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...
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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.
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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#4928
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.
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Harry Stack Sullivan
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives" and that "[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist". Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.
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Ben J. Winer
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Ben James Winer was an American research psychologist and academic. He served as a psychology professor at Purdue University and was president of the Psychometric Society. He has been listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists in the United States, having authored a well-known textbook on statistical analysis.
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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.
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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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Michael W. Otto
1900 - Present (126 years)
#4937
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.
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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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Clare W. Graves
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Clare W. Graves was a professor of psychology and originator of the emergent cyclical theory of adult human development, aspects of which were later popularised as Spiral Dynamics. He was born in New Richmond, Indiana.
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James P. Lichtenberger
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
James Pendleton Lichtenberger was an American sociologist and academic. Lichtenberger served as the twelfth president of the American Sociological Association. Early life and education Lichtenberger was born on 10 June 1870 in Decatur, Illinois to Conrad H. and Anna Elizabeth Lichtenberger, née Nesbitt. Lichtenberger attended Eureka College and received a bachelor's degree in 1893. He soon after enrolled in the ministry of the Church of the Disciples of Christ and was a pastor in the church in Canton, Illinois from 1896 to 1899, after which we transferred to a congregation in Buffalo, New York.
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Louisa E. Rhine
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Louisa Ella Rhine was an American doctor of botany and is known for her work in parapsychology. At the time of her death, she was recognized as the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences, and has been referred to as the "first lady of parapsychology."
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Richard Müller-Freienfels
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Richard Müller-Freienfels was a German philosopher, psychologist and social critic. He was "one of the most important mediators of empirical psychology" to poetics. Life Müller-Freienfels was born in Bad Ems on 7 August 1882. He was a lecturer and writer at the Berlin Trade School . He died on 12 December 1949 in Weilburg.
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Curt W. Bondy
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Curt Werner Bondy was a German psychologist and social educator. Literary works Pädagogische Problem im Jugendstrafvollzug, 1925Problems of Internment Camps, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1943.Bindungslose Jugend, 1952
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