Search People Result | Academic Influence

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 Social Psychology,

#501

Josephine Kane

#184656

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Josephine Kane is a British academic and historian of architecture and the built environment. Publications The architecture of pleasure: British amusement parks 1900-1939 . Ashgate Press.

#502

Robert Ludwig Kahn

1923 - 1970 (47 years)

Robert Ludwig Kahn was a German-American scholar of German studies and poet. He grew up in Nuremberg and Leipzig as the son of Jewish parents who sent him abroad to England on a Kindertransport in 1939. After the end of World War II, Kahn learned his parents had perished in the Holocaust, which was a traumatic experience that caused him to lose his faith. He never recovered from survivor guilt.

#503

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.

#504

Rensis Likert

1903 - 1981 (78 years)

Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.

#505

John Dollard

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

John Dollard was an American psychologist and social scientist known for his studies on race relations in America and the frustration-aggression hypothesis he proposed with Neal E. Miller and others.

#506

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...

#507

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.

#508

Henri Tajfel

1919 - 1982 (63 years)

Henri Tajfel was a Polish social psychologist, best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory, as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.

#509

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.

#510

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.

#511

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.

#512

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...

#513

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...

#514

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

#515

Graham Wallas

1858 - 1932 (74 years)

Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Biography Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion and was President of the Rationalist Press Association.

#516

Pavel Blonsky

1884 - 1941 (57 years)

Pavel Petrovich Blonsky was a Russian Soviet psychologist and philosopher who lived in the Ukraine until 1918. Blonsky was one of the main theorists of Soviet paedology and introduced the behaviorist approach in Russian psychology . After the publication of the anti-paedology decree "On Paedological Distortions in the System of People's Commissariat of Education" he was severely criticized for his adherence to psychological testing and studies of inborn capabilities .

#517

Henri de Saint-Simon

Henri de Saint-Simon

1760 - 1825 (65 years)

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon , better known as Henri de Saint-Simon , was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.

#518

Traian Herseni

1907 - 1980 (73 years)

Traian Herseni was a Romanian social scientist, journalist, and political figure. First noted as a favorite disciple of Dimitrie Gusti, he helped establish the Romanian school of rural sociology in the 1920s and early '30s, and took part in interdisciplinary study groups and field trips. A prolific essayist and researcher, he studied isolated human groups across the country, trying to define relations between sociology, ethnography, and cultural anthropology, with an underlying interest in sociological epistemology. He was particularly interested in the peasant cultures and pastoral society of the Făgăraș Mountains.

#519

Sergei Rubinstein

1889 - 1960 (71 years)

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.

#520

Carveth Read

1848 - 1931 (83 years)

Carveth Read was a 19th- and 20th-century British philosopher and logician. Life He was born 16 March 1848 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. He was the third son of Edward Read and Elizabeth Truscott. He attended the University of Cambridge . He received a B.A. in 1873 and an M.A. in 1877. He was the Hilbert travelling scholar, studying at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities in 1874-1877. In 1877 he married Evelyn Thompson. From 1878 he lectured at Wren's 'Coaching' establishment . He was Grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the University College London from 1903 to 1911. From 1911 to 1921 he was Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at UCL.

#521

Daniel Lerner

1917 - 1980 (63 years)

Daniel Lerner was an American scholar and writer known for his studies on modernization theory. Lerner's study of Balgat Turkey played a critical role in shaping American ideas about the use of mass media and US cultural products to promote economic and social development in post-colonial nations. In 1958, he wrote the seminal book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Scholars have argued that the research project that formed the basis of the book emerged from intelligence requirements in the US government, and was a result of the contract between the Office of Int...

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