• Question: Who do you think is the most influential psychologist of all time?

    Asked by anon-215362 to Laura, Kathryn, Ian, Chris, Bogdana, Alex on 10 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Bogdana Huma

      Bogdana Huma answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      I think the early psychologists were very influential because the field was new and they helped shape it. If I had to pick one person, I’d choose Gordon W. Allport because he has contributed to so many important topics such as personality, social attitudes, and prejudice.

    • Photo: Chris Fullwood

      Chris Fullwood answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      A very tough question, there are so many influential psychologists, but personally I’d opt for Carl Rogers, who helped found the humanistic approach to psychology and his ideas have been influential in so many areas, for example in counselling and in education

    • Photo: Ian Cookson

      Ian Cookson answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Sigmund Freud. Despite the fact that his work is mired in controversy, he’s about the only psychologist that the public have heard of, so his “influence” goes way beyond psychology and into other areas. Psychotherapy is still used, and his writings made other psychologists think about psychology differently in order to challenge his work, so there’s a lot there despite the problems.

    • Photo: Alex Lloyd

      Alex Lloyd answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      I would say John Watson. He is not as famous as some old psychologists, but he was one of the first psychologists to study psychology as a science. His research has changed the way we study human brains and behaviour even to this day!

    • Photo: Laura Fisk

      Laura Fisk answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      Ah! That’s a tough question. I immediately want to ask, “what do we mean by influential?”! Influential could mean lots of things… here’s a snippet of my personal ‘Hall of Fame’:
                 ‎‏‪‫‬‭‮ 
      ● a psychologist most people have probably heard of: Sigmund Freud, whose idea that we could talk to people to help them feel better massively influenced mental health care, while the apparent oddness of his ideas got lots of (not always positive) attention
      ● a psychologist whose work underpins many clinical psychologists’ work: Aaron Beck, who developed CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) which is a massively influential way of working with people in therapy these days
      ● a couple of psychologists who learned about learning: Skinner and Pavlov – they did early experiments to show how we can learn habits (I use this all the time when thinking about why people do what they do)
      ● a psychologist who taught us about how society functions: Stanley Milgram, whose work on authority (what people will do when they are told to by someone official) let us think about the role of rules and regulations and conformity etc
      ● a psychologist who got us thinking about memory – and how it’s not reliable: Elizabeth Loftus (she showed how people’s testimony in court can be influenced how the questions they are asked are phrased… our memories change…)
      ● a psychologist who taught us about learning: Albert Bandura, who showed us how children (and people) can be influenced by watching one another – social learning theory
      ● psychologists who taught us about those really tricky but important things – emotions: Schachter, Singer, William James etc etc; lots of theorists have tried to understand emotions, and ask whether each emotion we have a name for is actually a separate thing, or if they overlap and then how these emotional sensations overlap with body sensations – it’s a massive field and I love it!

    • Photo: Kathryn Atherton

      Kathryn Atherton answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      Controversially, I am going to choose not to answer this question. I think ideas themselves are more important than who has them and that we ought to try to see psychologists, and scientists in general, as a team, working together to build a collective understanding.

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