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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#4951

John S. Hougham

1821 - 1894 (73 years)

John Scherer Hougham , was Purdue University’s first appointed professor, first acting President after Purdue's first President Richard Dale Owen resigned on March 1, 1874, and later an official acting President between the administrations of Abraham C. Shortridge and Emerson E. White.

#4952

Heinrich Racker

1910 - 1960 (50 years)

Heinrich Racker was a Polish-Argentine psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish origin. Escaping Nazism, he fled to Buenos Aires in 1939. Already a doctor in musicology and philosophy, he became a psychoanalyst, first under the direction of Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, and later working with Ángel Garma and Marie Langer in Argentina. His most important work is a study of the psychoanalytic technique known as transference and countertransference, which was published for the first time in 1968.

#4953

Frieda Goldman-Eisler

1907 - 1982 (75 years)

Frieda Goldman-Eisler was a psychologist and pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics. She is known for her research on speech disfluencies; a volume dedicated in her honor calls her "the modern pioneer of the science of pausology".

#4954

Edward Richard Shaw

1855 - 1903 (48 years)

Edward Richard Shaw was a Professor and Dean, New York University, and author of numerous books, primarily children's schoolbooks. Shaw was born in 1855 at Bellport, New York . His undergraduate work was at Lafayette College, and he received his Ph.D. from New York University. After serving as Principal at Sayville, New York; Greenport, Suffolk County, New York; and Yonkers High School, he became Professor of Pedagogy in the New York University. By the time of his death, he was Dean.

#4955

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.

#4956

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.

#4957

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.

#4958

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.

#4959

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.

#4960

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...

#4961

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.

#4962

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.

#4963

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...

#4964

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.

#4965

Kenneth Spence

1907 - 1967 (60 years)

Kenneth Wartinbee Spence was a prominent American psychologist known for both his theoretical and experimental contributions to learning theory and motivation. As one of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life . A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#4966

Arnold Gesell

1880 - 1961 (81 years)

Arnold Lucius Gesell was an American psychologist, pediatrician and professor at Yale University known for his research and contributions to the fields of child hygiene and child development. Early life Gesell was born in Alma, Wisconsin, and later wrote an article analyzing his experiences there entitled "The Village of a Thousand Souls". The eldest of five children, Arnold and his siblings were born to photographer Gerhard Gesell and schoolteacher Christine Giesen. His first experience in observing child development involved watching his younger siblings learn and grow until he graduated fr...

#4967

Wayne D. Gray

Wayne D. Gray is a professor of cognitive science and director of the cognitive science doctoral program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Research Gray seeks to understand how goal-directed cognition is shaped by the accommodation of basic cognitive, perceptual, and motor operations to the cost-benefit structure of the designed task environment. These basic elements of integrated behavior, interactive routines, occur over a time span of 1/3 to 3 seconds and are typically beneath the level of our conscious awareness and deliberate control. Hence, non-deliberate forces that dynamically react...

#4968

Norman Maier

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Norman Raymond Frederick Maier was an American experimental psychologist who worked primarily at the University of Michigan. He invented the two-cords problem and co-authored Principles of Animal Psychology.

#4969

Philip E. Vernon

1905 - 1987 (82 years)

Philip Ewart Vernon was a British-born Canadian psychologist and author. He studied intellectual ability with a focus on race and intelligence. Life Philip Vernon was born in Oxford, England on 6 June 1905. His father was H. M. Vernon who was a lecturer in physiology at the University of Oxford, and was Great Britain's foremost figure in industrial psychology. His mother Dorothea Ewart was author of several works on Italian history. Philip worked with his wife, Dorothy, in the study of gifted children. They had one son, Philip Anthony Vernon, who also researched intellectual abilities. When Vernon joined the University of Calgary, he became a Canadian citizen.

#4970

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...

#4971

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 ...

#4972

Hadley Cantril

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Albert Hadley Cantril, Jr. was an American psychologist from the Princeton University, who expanded the scope of the field. Cantril made "major contributions in psychology of propaganda; public opinion research; applications of psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding, and communication; developmental psychology; psychology of social movements; measurement and scaling; humanistic psychology; the psychology of perception; and, basic to all of them, the analysis of human behavior from the transactional point of view." His influence is felt in educati...

#4973

Dana R. Carney

Dana R. Carney is an American psychologist. She is associate professor of business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow, an affiliate of the Department of Psychology and the director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

#4974

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.

#4975

Charles Spearman

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.

#4976

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.

#4977

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.

#4978

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.

#4979

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...

#4980

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.

#4981

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 ...

#4982

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.

#4983

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.

#4984

Michael W. Otto

1900 - Present (126 years)

#4985

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.

#4986

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...

#4987

J. C. R. Licklider

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.

#4988

Stanley Milgram

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.

#4989

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.

#4990

Joe L. Franklin

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.

#4991

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...

#4992

Elton Mayo

1880 - 1949 (69 years)

George Elton Mayo was an Australian born psychologist, industrial researcher, and organizational theorist. Mayo was formally trained at the University of Adelaide, acquiring a Bachelor of Arts Degree graduating with First Class Honours, majoring in philosophy and psychology, and was later awarded an honorary Master of Arts Degree from the University of Queensland .

#4993

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...

#4994

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.

#4995

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. ...

#4996

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.

#4997

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.

#4998

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.

#4999

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.

#5000

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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