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,
#4951
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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Bernice Cronkhite
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Bernice Brown Cronkhite was an educator and former dean of Radcliffe College, working there for thirty-six years. She was the first woman at Radcliffe College to earn a doctorate in political science.
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John Edgar Coover
1872 - 1938 (66 years)
John Edgar Coover , also known as J. E. Coover was an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his experiments into extrasensory perception. Career Coover carried out a psychical research programme at Stanford University . He conducted approximately 10, 000 experiments with 100 subjects to test for extrasensory perception . He concluded after four years of research that "statistical treatments of the data fail to reveal any cause beyond chance". He also conducted 1,000 experiments with psychics and it was revealed that they had no advantage of any supposed psychic ability over norm...
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Donald G. Paterson
1892 - 1961 (69 years)
Donald Gildersleeve Paterson was an American psychologist known for pioneering applied psychology, in particular vocational counseling, industrial/organizational psychology, and differential psychology in the United States. He was a professor of psychology at the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota from 1921 to 1960.
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Samuel Soal
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Samuel George Soal was a British mathematician and parapsychologist. He was charged with fraudulent production of data in his work in parapsychology. Biography Soal graduated with first class honours in mathematics from Queen Mary College in 1910. After service in World War I, in which he suffered shelling at the Battle of the Somme, he lectured in mathematics at Oxford in the Army School of Education, before returning as a lecturer to Queen Mary College, University of London. In 1944, he was awarded the D.Sc. from Queen Mary College, where he continued to lecture in mathematics until his retirement in 1954.
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Minnie Steckel
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Minnie Steckel was an American teacher, psychologist, clubwoman, and an activist involved in the women's poll tax repeal movement. Steckel began her career as a school teacher and worked her way up to school principal, superintendent and school psychologist, earning her bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees. From 1932 until her death in 1952, she was the dean of women and counselor at Alabama College. She served as president of the local Montevallo chapter of the American Association of University Women from 1937 to 1939, as president of the state chapter of the Business and Professional Wome...
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Clare Winnicott
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Clare Winnicott OBE was an English social worker, civil servant, psychoanalyst and teacher. She played a pivotal role in the passing of The Children's Act of 1948. Alongside her husband, D. W. Winnicott, Clare would go on to become a prolific writer and prominent social worker and children's advocate in 20th century England.
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Edwin Ray Guthrie
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Edwin Ray Guthrie was a behavioral psychologist who began his career as a mathematics teacher and philosopher. But, he became a psychologist at the age of 33. He spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he became full professor and then emeritus professor in psychology.
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Roswell G. Ham
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Roswell Gray Ham was an American educator who served as the 11th President of Mount Holyoke College from 1937 to 1957. He was born in LeMoore, California and received his B.A. from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He taught at Yale for ten years before becoming the first male president of Mount Holyoke.
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Jessie P. Guzman
1898 - 1996 (98 years)
Jessie Parkhurst Guzman was a writer, archivist, historian, educator, and college administrator, primarily at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. In her work at the Tuskegee Institute, particularly in the Department of Research and Records, she documented the lives of African Americans and maintained the Institute's lynching records.
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A. G. Mearns
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Alexander Gow Mearns FRSE MBE was a Scottish physician and public health expert. He was one of the first people in forensic science to use insect activity to determine the time of death. In authorship he is referred to as A. G. Mearns.
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H. J. Pearce
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
H. J. Pearce was an American psychologist. He was the founder of Brenau College, and served as its president from 1900 to 1943. Early life Haywood Jefferson Pearce was born in 1871. He received a PhD from a university in Germany in 1907.
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Agnes L. Rogers
1884 - 1943 (59 years)
Agnes Low Rogers was a Scottish educator and educational psychologist. Early life Agnes Low Rogers was born in Dundee, the daughter of William Thomson Rogers and Janet Low Rogers. She earned a master's degree at the University of St. Andrews in 1908. She passed the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1911, and completed doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1917. Her dissertation, published the following year, was titled Experimental Tests of Mathematical Ability and their Prognostic Value .
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Konstantin Ramul
1879 - 1975 (96 years)
Konstantin Ramul was an Estonian professor of psychology and longtime chair of psychology at the University of Tartu. He is best known for his work on the history of experimental psychology. Ramul believed that history is dependent upon psychology, though the philosopher of science Ernest Nagel criticized him for "not stat[ing] clearly the type of psychological investigation which is relevant to the historian's task" .
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Minnie Abercrombie
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Minnie Abercrombie , also known as M. L. J. Abercrombie, was a British zoologist, educationalist and psychologist. She was known for her work on invertebrates and her work in the publishing industry, conducted with her husband, Michael Abercrombie. She also contributed to the theory and practice of education through her teaching, research, lecturing and writing. In particular, she carried out pioneer psychological research into the use of groups in learning with medical, architectural and education students, and she shared with diverse audiences in many countries her extensive knowledge and ex...
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Stefan Błachowski
1889 - 1962 (73 years)
Stefan Błachowski was a Polish psychologist and professor at Poznań University. Life Błachowski was the son of a military physician, Konstanty Błachowski, and Maria Niklas. He graduated from Gymnasium no. V in Lwów and in 1907 began studying philosophy, psychology and philology at Lwów University. In 1909 he transferred briefly to Vienna University, then to Göttingen University . In 1913 he studied biology again at Vienna and successfully defended his doctoral thesis at Göttingen.
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Ethel Dench Puffer Howes
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Ethel Dench Puffer Howes was an American psychologist, suffragist, and college professor. She taught at Wellesley College, Smith College, and Simmons College. She was Executive Secretary of the National College Equal Suffrage League, and founder of the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests at Smith College.
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David Kennedy Fraser
1888 - 1962 (74 years)
David Kennedy Fraser FRSE FEIS was a Scottish psychologist, educator and amateur mathematician. He was an author of several books looking at the education of the handicapped and was closely associated with the Scottish Association for Mental Health. He campaigned vigorously for the rights of handicapped persons.
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Otto Selz
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Otto Selz was a German psychologist from Munich, Bavaria, who formulated the first non-associationist theory of thinking, in 1913. Influenced by the German phenomenological tradition, Selz used the method of introspection, but unlike his predecessors, his theory developed without the use of images and associations. Wilhelm Wundt used the method of introspection in the 1880s, but thought that higher-level mental processes could not be studied in the scientific laboratory.
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Kurt Lewin
1890 - 1947 (57 years)
Kurt Lewin was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career Lewin applied himself to three general topics: applied research, action research, and group communication.
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Henry C. McComas
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Henry Clay McComas was an American psychologist and skeptic. McComas was born December 21, 1875, in Baltimore. He achieved his bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins in 1897, his Masters at Columbia in 1898 and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1910. He worked as an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, he was also an editor for the Psychological Index.
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Frederic Bartlett
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett FRS was a British psychologist and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge. He was one of the forerunners of cognitive psychology as well as cultural psychology. Bartlett considered most of his own work on cognitive psychology to be a study in social psychology, but he was also interested in anthropology, moral science, philosophy, and sociology. Bartlett proudly referred to himself as "a Cambridge psychologist" because while he was at the University of Cambridge, settling for one type of psychology was not an option.
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Stefan Baley
1885 - 1952 (67 years)
Stefan Baley was a Polish psychologist, doctor and pedagogue of Ukrainian descent.
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Alois Höfler
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
Alois Höfler was an Austrian philosopher and university professor of education in Prague and Vienna. He was seen by the logical positivist Otto Neurath as an important link between Bernard Bolzano's work and the Vienna Circle.
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Mario Ponzo
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Mario Ponzo was an Italian academic psychologist. He was also the Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Rome as well as the Honorary President of the Italian Society of Psychology. He was born in Milan, Italy to a Piedmontese family.
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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.
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Harold Homer Anderson
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
Harold Homer Anderson was an American research professor of psychology at Michigan State University, who published on child psychology, clinical psychology, personality, and cross-national research.
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William James Sidis
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925 , in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.
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Clara Louise Thompson
1884 - Present (142 years)
Clara Louise Thompson was an American educator, Latinist, activist, feminist, and suffragette. She is the only woman to be awarded the American Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome .
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Jesse Lee Cuninggim
1870 - 1950 (80 years)
Jesse Lee Cuninggim was an American Methodist clergyman and university professor and administrator. After serving as Head of the Department of Religious Education at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, he served as the President of Scarritt College for Christian Workers, which he moved from Kansas City, Missouri to Nashville, Tennessee.
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Franz Alexander
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology. Life Franz Gabriel Alexander, in Hungarian Alexander Ferenc Gábor, was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1891, his father was Bernhard Alexander, a philosopher and literary critic, his nephew was Alfréd Rényi, a Hungarian mathematician who made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory but mostly in probability theory. Alexander studied in Berlin; there he was part of an influential group of Germa...
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Edgar Rubin
1886 - 1951 (65 years)
Edgar John Rubin was a Danish psychologist/phenomenologist, remembered for his work on figure-ground perception as seen in such optical illusions like the Rubin vase. Born to Jewish parents, Rubin was born and raised in Copenhagen. Enrolling at the University of Copenhagen in 1904, he majored in psychology and finished his magister artium examination in philosophy in 1910.
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Wilhelm Wundt
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist.
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William James
1842 - 1910 (68 years)
William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology."
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Jacques Lacan
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
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Alfred Adler
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, coining the term inferiority complex, an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as a...
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Anna Freud
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Anna Freud CBE was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian–Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.
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G. Stanley Hall
1846 - 1924 (78 years)
Granville Stanley Hall was a pioneering American psychologist and educator who earned the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States of America at Harvard College in the nineteenth century. His interests focused on human life span development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.
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Lev Vygotsky
1896 - 1934 (38 years)
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Russian and Soviet psychologist, best known for his work on psychological development in children and creating the framework known as cultural-historical activity theory.
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John B. Watson
1878 - 1958 (80 years)
John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school. Watson advanced this change in the psychological discipline through his 1913 address at Columbia University, titled Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising, as well as conducting the controversial "Little Albert" experiment and the Kerplunk experiment. He was also the editor of Psychological Review from 1910 to 1915. A Review of General Psy...
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James McKeen Cattell
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
James McKeen Cattell was the first professor of psychology in the United States, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was a long-time editor and publisher of scientific journals and publications, including Science, and served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public from 1921 to 1944.
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Melanie Klein
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distress...
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Ernest Jones
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.
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Pierre Janet
1859 - 1947 (88 years)
Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, physician, philosopher, and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory. He is ranked alongside William James and Wilhelm Wundt as one of the founding fathers of psychology. He was the first to introduce the link between past experiences and present-day disturbances and was noted for his studies involving induced somnambulism.
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