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List of the most influential people in Psychology,

#4951

Milton Rokeach

1918 - 1988 (70 years)

Milton Rokeach was a Polish-American social psychologist. He taught at Michigan State University, the University of Western Ontario, Washington State University, and the University of Southern California. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rokeach as the 85th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#4952

Theodore Newcomb

Theodore Newcomb

1903 - 1984 (81 years)

Theodore Mead Newcomb was an American social psychologist, professor and author. Newcomb led the Bennington College Study, which looked at the influence of the college experience on social and political beliefs. He was also the first to document the effects of proximity on acquaintance and attraction. Newcomb founded and directed the doctoral program in social psychology at the University of Michigan. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Newcomb as the 57th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#4953

Eckhard Hess

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Eckhard Heinrich Hess was a German-born American psychologist and ethologist, known for his research on pupillometry and animal imprinting. He joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago as an instructor in 1948. He became a full professor in the Department of Psychology in 1959, and served as its chairman from 1963 to 1968. Hess pioneered the study of animal behavior from an ethological/evolutionary perspective at a time when Skinner's behaviorism was the dominant paradigm of animal behavior study in the United States.

#4954

Daniel Berlyne

1924 - 1976 (52 years)

Daniel Ellis Berlyne was a British and Canadian psychologist. Berlyne worked at several universities both in Canada and the United States. His work was in the field of experimental and exploratory psychology. Specifically, his research focused on how objects and experiences are influenced by and have an influence on curiosity and arousal.

#4955

Lawrence Kohlberg

1927 - 1987 (60 years)

Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from 25 years earlier. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin.

#4956

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.

#4957

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...

#4958

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...

#4959

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.

#4960

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.

#4961

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.

#4962

Edward C. Tolman

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.

#4963

Clark L. Hull

1884 - 1952 (68 years)

Clark Leonard Hull was an American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Hull is known for his debates with Edward C. Tolman. He is also known for his work in drive theory.

#4964

Fritz Heider

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception . It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.

#4965

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.

#4966

Louis Leon Thurstone

1887 - 1955 (68 years)

Louis Leon Thurstone was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

#4967

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.

#4968

Sidney L. Pressey

1888 - 1979 (91 years)

Sidney Leavitt Pressey was professor of psychology at Ohio State University for many years. He is famous for having invented a teaching machine many years before the idea became popular."The first.. [teaching machine] was developed by Sidney L. Pressey... While originally developed as a self-scoring machine... [it] demonstrated its ability to actually teach".Pressey joined Ohio State in 1921, and stayed there until he retired in 1959. He continued publishing after retirement, with 18 papers between 1959 and 1967. He was a cognitive psychologist who "rejected a view of learning as an accumula...

#4969

W. Horsley Gantt

1892 - 1980 (88 years)

William Andrew Horsley Gantt was an American physiologist and psychiatrist. At the time of his death in 1980, he was one of only two surviving students of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He spent fifty-six years of his career extending Pavlov's seminal experimental research on classical conditioning. He is also recognized for his research in psychophysiology.

#4970

Abraham Brill

1874 - 1948 (74 years)

Abraham Arden Brill was an Austrian-born psychiatrist who spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States and the first translator of Sigmund Freud into English.

#4971

Sidney Jourard

1926 - 1974 (48 years)

Sidney Marshall Jourard was a Canadian psychologist, professor, and writer. He was best known as the author of the books The Transparent Self and Healthy Personality: An Approach From the Viewpoint of Humanistic Psychology, which was a synthesis of the concepts and techniques that humanistic psychologists utilized and built upon in the 1960s and 1970s. Jourard is also known for his "Self-Disclosure Theory" of humanistic therapy. He has written many other works, including essays, books, and lectures on growth as a human being.

#4972

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.

#4973

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.

#4974

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...

#4975

Charles Ferster

Charles Ferster

1922 - 1981 (59 years)

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

#4976

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.

#4977

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.

#4978

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...

#4979

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.

#4980

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.

#4981

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.

#4982

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.

#4983

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...

#4984

Julian Gibbs

1924 - 1983 (59 years)

Julian Howard Gibbs was an American educator and the fifteenth President of Amherst College. Gibbs graduated from Amherst College in 1947. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in 1949 and 1950 from Princeton University. After a year of postdoctoral study at Cambridge University in England with a Fulbright Fellowship, he briefly taught at the University of Minnesota. Gibbs then worked for eight years at General Electric Company and American Viscose Corporation before accepting a position at Brown University in 1960 as associate professor of chemistry. He was named a full professor in 1963 and served as the chairman of the Chemistry Department at Brown from 1964 to 1972.

#4985

Otto Klineberg

1899 - 1992 (93 years)

Otto Klineberg was a Canadian born psychologist. He held professorships in social psychology at Columbia University and the University of Paris. His pioneering work in the 1930s on the intelligence of white and black students in the United States and his evidence as an expert witness in Delaware were instrumental in winning the Supreme Court school segregation case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Through his work in UNESCO and elsewhere, he helped to promote psychology internationally.

#4986

Alvin C. Eurich

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Alvin Christian Eurich was a 20th-century American educator who is most notable for having served as the first president of the State University of New York from 1949–1951. Early life and education Eurich was born in Bay City, Michigan and pursued degrees in Psychology at North Central College and the University of Maine. He supported himself by working as a speech instructor while in Maine. He earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1929, where he worked as a professor and assistant dean of the College of Education from 1927 to 1936.

#4987

Wolfgang Köhler

1887 - 1967 (80 years)

Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, publish...

#4988

Ralph Pickford

1903 - 1986 (83 years)

Ralph William Pickford was an English psychologist who served as the first Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, from 1955 to 1973. He first joined the university's faculty in 1930, and received a D. Litt. degree from there in 1947. In 2005, the university established the Pickford Travelling Fellowship in his honor. In 1971, he married his second wife, Laura Ruth Bowyer, and they remained married until his death in 1986. Bowyer later provided one of the two bequests that was first used to fund the Pickford Travelling Fellowship .

#4989

Stanley B. Freeborn

1891 - 1960 (69 years)

Stanley Barron Freeborn served as the first chancellor of University of California, Davis between 1958 and June 1959. Prior to being the first chancellor of UC Davis, Freeborn was the dean of the College of Agriculture at UC Berkeley. Following his death in 1960, UC Davis renamed its assembly hall to Freeborn Hall in his honor.

#4990

Benjamin D. Wood

Benjamin D. Wood

1894 - 1986 (92 years)

Benjamin DeKalbe Wood was an American educator, researcher, and director / professor at Columbia University and an expert in the educational field. Early life Wood was born in Brownsville, Texas, on November 10, 1894. He attended the Brownsville area schools, Mission High School, and the University of Texas.

#4991

Maria Ovsiankina

1898 - 1993 (95 years)

Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina was a Russian-German-American psychologist. She studied what is now known as the Ovsiankina effect, a variation of the Zeigarnik effect. Ovsiankina worked in a variety of psychology jobs, including working with schizophrenia patients. She wrote books about psychological testing.

#4992

Kate Hevner Mueller

1898 - 1984 (86 years)

Kate Hevner Mueller was an American psychologist and educator who served as dean of women at Indiana University during 1938–1949. Biography Born Kate Lucile Hevner in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, she was the second daughter and middle child to a minister father and a schoolteacher mother. She attended Williamsport High School then matriculated in 1916 to Wilson College, where she majored in English with a minor in French. She graduated in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors. During her junior year she took a course in psychology, where she developed an interest in the subject.

#4993

William W. Biddle

William W. Biddle

1900 - 1973 (73 years)

William Wishart Biddle was an American social scientist and a major contributor to the study of community development. Although details of his personal life are rare in written records, he made contributions to the field of psychology by developing frameworks in propaganda, education, and community development. Biddle outlined in his writings that propaganda was a form of persuasion for coercing people, illustrating examples from times of war. He established that education systems should develop each individual's intelligence and focus on critical thinking to avoid autistic thinking. Biddle ...

#4994

Sergey Kravkov

1893 - 1951 (58 years)

Sergey Vasilyevich Kravkov was a Russian psychologist and psychophysiologist, Doctor of Science in Biology , Corresponding Member of the Academy of Science of the USSR and the Academy of Medical Science of the USSR . He is considered one of the founders of physiological optics, a scientific discipline that studies physiological processes, physical and psychic regularities which characterize the functioning of the organs of human vision.

#4995

Grace Fernald

1879 - 1950 (71 years)

Grace Maxwell Fernald was an educational psychologist and influential figure in early twentieth century literacy education. Fernald established "the first clinic for remedial instruction in 1921 at the University of California, Los Angeles". Tracing tactile learning tendencies back to Quintilian, Séguin, and Montessori, Fernald's kinesthetic spelling and reading method prompted struggling students to trace words. Years of research culminated in 1943 with her classic work, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects. The popular kinesthetic method anchors modern instruction in the areas of special education and remedial reading.

#4996

Pat Dudgeon

Patricia Lynette Dudgeon , usually known as Pat Dudgeon, is an Aboriginal Australian psychologist, Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a research professor at the University of Western Australia's School of Indigenous Studies. Her area of research includes Indigenous social and emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention. She is actively involved with the Aboriginal community, having an ongoing commitment to social justice for Indigenous people. Dudgeon has participated in numerous state and national committees, councils, task groups and community service activities in both a v...

#4997

Alan H. Monroe

1903 - 1975 (72 years)

#4998

Harriet Babcock

1877 - 1952 (75 years)

Harriet Babcock was an American psychologist who specialized in abnormal psychology research in addition to developing measures and theories of intelligence. After her doctoral work at Columbia University, she worked primarily in the Department of Psychology at New York University, and acted as a consultant to the New York City Guidance Bureau. Babcock developed multiple intelligence tests evaluating mental deterioration and efficiency.

#4999

Caroline Beaumont Zachry

1894 - 1945 (51 years)

Caroline Beaumont Zachry was an educational psychologist born in New York City to James Greer Zachry and Elise Clarkson Thompson. Her maternal grandfather was Hugh Smith Thompson the Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.

#5000

Kate Gordon Moore

1878 - 1963 (85 years)

Kate Gordon Moore was an American psychologist whose work focused on various aspects within cognitive psychology, and is noted for her work with color vision and perception, as well as aesthetics, memory, imagination, emotion, developmental tests for children, and attention span. Gordon's early work focused on color vision and how this interacted with memory. Her work shifted mid-career and then she started to research within the realm of education. Specifically, she published work that addressed women's education with regard to the notion that women must be educated differently from men. Her...

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