Question: Which psychologist would you consider to have had the biggest impact on the science?

Ben Kenward answered on 20 Jun 2017:

This is a really hard question because psychology has been so many different things at different times, and still today is different things to different people. For example, some might pick a really famous psychologist like Freud, but I don’t want to pick someone like that because the psychodynamic method used by Freudian psychologists is not very scientific (it’s not based on theories supported by good evidence).

There are many more scientific psychologists who have had great impact, from people like William James back in the 1800’s to Daniel Kahneman who is still around and famous for making people realise just how irrational people can be, and how much difference this makes to things like economic decisions. I’d like to choose someone less famous who I _hope_ will have a very big impact, and it beginning to do so. Brian Nosek started the Reproducibility Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project) which is intended to address one of the biggest problems facing modern psychology – that some of the results from experiments that we believe to be true, may very well not be!