The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#1
Martin Seligman
#114
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#2
Albert Bandura
#86
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist. He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University. Bandura was responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, and was also of influence in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. This Bobo doll experiment de...
Go to Profile#3
Noam Chomsky
#5
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#4
Jerome Bruner
#108
Overall Influence
1915 - 2016 (101 years)
Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Daniel Kahneman
#25
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
#6
Hans Eysenck
#156
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-born British psychologist who spent his professional career in Great Britain. He is best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, although he worked on other issues in psychology. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the most frequently cited living psychologist in the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature.
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Rollo May
#327
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Rollo Reece May was an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will . He is often associated with humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy, and alongside Viktor Frankl, was a major proponent of existential psychotherapy. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was a close friend who had a significant influence on his work.
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Erik Erikson
#223
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Erik Homburger Erikson was a German-American child psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychosocial development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity crisis. Despite lacking a university degree, Erikson served as a professor at prominent institutions, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
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Ray Hyman
#1043
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#10
George Armitage Miller
#318
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
George Armitage Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture.
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Leda Cosmides
#600
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#12
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#427
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
#13
Mary Ainsworth
#405
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver.
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Raymond Cattell
#635
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure. His work also explored the basic dimensions of personality and temperament, the range of cognitive abilities, the dynamic dimensions of motivation and emotion, the clinical dimensions of abnormal personality, patterns of group syntality and social behavior, applications of personality research to psychotherapy and learning theory, predictors of creativity and achievement, and many multivariate research methods including the refinement of factor analytic methods for exploring and measuring these domains.
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Ed Diener
#779
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
#16
Stanislav Grof
#504
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Stanislav "Stan" Grof is a Czech-born psychiatrist who has been living in the United States since the 1960s. Grof is one of the principal developers of transpersonal psychology and research into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of psychological healing, deep self-exploration, and obtaining growth and insights into the human psyche. In 1993, Grof received an Honorary Award from the Association for Transpersonal Psychology for major contributions to and development of the field of transpersonal psychology, given at the occasion of the 25th Anniversary Convocation held in Asilomar, California.
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Eleanor Rosch
#549
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#18
Steven Pinker
#93
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cognitive scientist, linguist, and author, Steven Pinker currently holds the title of Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Previously, Pinker taught at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pinker earned his bachelor’s in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1979 at Harvard. Pinker is recognized for his interdisciplinary work, combining psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, and is a vocal proponent of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Though he has sev...
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Ulric Neisser
#954
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology". Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed. In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While Cogniti...
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Philip Zimbardo
#439
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
#21
Stanley Schachter
#1118
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Stanley Schachter was an American social psychologist best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal and the explanation one attaches to this arousal. Schachter also studied and published many works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Schac...
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Albert Ellis
#634
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Albert Ellis was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behavior therapy . He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology . He also founded, and was the President of, the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and an early proponent and developer of cognitive-behavioral therapies.
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C. E. M. Hansel
#3377
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Charles Edward Mark Hansel was a British psychologist most notable for his criticism of parapsychological studies. Early life and education Hansel was born in 1917 in Bedford, England and attended Bedford School as a child. He received a commission in the RAF Equipment branch as an acting pilot officer in April 1939, serving in England, Iraq, and Egypt. After his service, he attended Bournemouth Municipal College of Technology and Commerce, earning a BA, and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, where he studied Moral Sciences, Part II Psychology and earned his MA.
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Solomon Asch
#1236
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Solomon Eliot Asch was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics. His work follows a common theme of Gestalt psychology that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters the parts. Asch stated: "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function". Asc...
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Robert Sternberg
#639
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#26
Urie Bronfenbrenner
#451
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developed in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. He argued that natural experiments and applied developmental interventions provide valuable scientific opportunities. These beliefs were exemplified in his involvement in developing the US Head Start program in 1965.
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Allen Newell
#57
Overall Influence
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver . He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
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Susan Blackmore
#887
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#29
James Alcock
#2889
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#30
Alan Baddeley
#2014
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Alan David Baddeley CBE FRS is a British psychologist. He is known for his research on memory and for developing the three-component model of working memory. He is a professor of psychology at the University of York.
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Timothy Leary
#70
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", and writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested 36 times; President Richard Nixon allegedly described him as "the most dangerous man in America".
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Jonathan Haidt
#720
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#33
Paul Ekman
#603
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
#34
Bernard Weiner
#1931
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Bernard Weiner is an American social psychologist known for developing a form of attribution theory which seeks to explain the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure. His contributions include linking attribution theory, the psychology of motivation, and emotion.
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Walter Mischel
#1859
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Walter Mischel was an Austrian-born American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He was the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mischel as the 25th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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George Mandler
#1218
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
George Mandler was an Austrian-born American psychologist, who became a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Career Mandler was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924. He received his B.S. from New York University, and his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1953 after serving in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service and Counter Intelligence Corps in World War II. Later he studied at the University of Basel and taught at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. In 1965 he became the founding chair of the Department of Psychology at the Uni...
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Julian Rotter
#1684
Overall Influence
1916 - 2014 (98 years)
Julian B. Rotter was an American psychologist known for developing social learning theory and research into locus of control. He was a faculty member at Ohio State University and then the University of Connecticut. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rotter as the 64th most eminent and 18th most widely cited psychologist of the 20th century. A 2014 study published in 2014 placed at #54 among psychologists whose careers spanned the post-World War II era.
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David Rumelhart
#565
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
David Everett Rumelhart was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.
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Charles Tart
#1916
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Charles T. Tart is an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness , as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in parapsychology.
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Ian Stevenson
#1775
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Ian Pretyman Stevenson was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist, the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years. He was chair of their department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death in 2007.
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Stephen Kosslyn
#1114
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Michael Kosslyn is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. Kosslyn is best known for his work on visual cognition and the science of learning. Kosslyn currently serves as the president of Active Learning Sciences Inc., which helps institutions design active-learning based courses and educational programs. He is also the founder and chief academic officer of Foundry College, an online two-year college.
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John H. Flavell
#2481
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
John H. Flavell is an American developmental psychologist specializing in children's cognitive development. Education After serving in The United States Army for two years from 1945 to 1947, John H. Flavell enrolled at Northeastern University where he earned his bachelor's degree in psychology. After graduation, he was admitted into the clinical psychology program at Clark University and Harvard University. John H. Flavell earned his MA from Clark University in 1952 and in 1955 he earned his Ph.D. Through the discovery of new developmental phenomena and analysis of the theories of Jean Piage...
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Howard Gardner
#370
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#44
James McClelland
#1394
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the large increase in scientific interest in connectionism in the 1980s.
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Clark Moustakas
#3162
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Clark E. Moustakas was an American psychologist and one of the leading experts on humanistic and clinical psychology. He helped establish the Association for Humanistic Psychology and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. He is the author of numerous books and articles on humanistic psychology, education and human science research. His most recent books: Phenomenological Research Methods; Heuristic Research; Existential Psychotherapy and the Interpretation of Dreams; Being-In, Being-For, Being-With; and Relationship Play Therapy are valuable additions to research and clinical literature. His ...
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Lee Cronbach
#3194
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Lee Joseph Cronbach was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to psychological testing and measurement. At the University of Illinois, Urbana, Cronbach produced many of his works: the "Alpha" paper , as well as an essay titled "The Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology", in the American Psychologist magazine in 1957, where he discussed his thoughts on the increasing divergence between the fields of experimental psychology and correlational psychology .
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Elliot Aronson
#2577
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Elliot Aronson is an American psychologist who has carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique that facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his 1972 social psychology textbook, The Social Animal, he stated Aronson's First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy", thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research.
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David Buss
#2118
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#49
Robin Dunbar
#1767
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
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Élisabeth Roudinesco
#686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Élisabeth Roudinesco is a French scholar, historian and psychoanalyst. She conducts a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis at the École Normale Supérieure. Roudinesco's work focuses mainly on psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis in France, but also worldwide. She has written biographies of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Her biography of Freud, Freud, In his Time and Ours, was awarded the "Prix Décembre" 2014 and The "Prix des Prix" 2014. With Michel Plon, she published a huge Dictionary of Psychoanalysis , which was translated into many languages, though not yet into English. Her book Généalogies was awarded The Best Book Prize by The Société française d'histoire de la médecine.
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