Jerome Bruner

Jerome Seymour Bruner was born on 1 October 1915 in New York City, and he died on 5 June 2016 in New York City. He is one of the most influential figures in psychology, cognitive science, and education in the past one hundred years. Although he was a psychologist by training, his interests spanned over a wide range of disciplines and issues, including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, education, literature, and law. His research and writings were also notable for their interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches; he freely borrowed findings and insights from other areas, and, in return, he inspired not only psychologists but also philosophers, educators, and anthropologists. He led the cognitive revolution and the cultural turn in psychology and the curriculum reform movement, and he was involved (albeit indirectly) in the introduction of Head Start in the United States. Bruner wrote in his 1983 autobiography that he was “an intellectual first and a scientist in support. . . . I used psychology to pursue matters that existed for me in their own right. Psychology was (and remains) only one way to use mind in behalf of these pursuits” (Bruner 1983a, cited under General Overviews, p. 77). His colleagues and collaborators included people in almost every field of intellectual activity, and his research locations were widespread from laboratories in Harvard to villages in Senegal, nursery schools in Oxfordshire, and preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. His overall interests lay in how the human mind works and develops in sociocultural contexts and by acquiring cultural tools. His interests lay also in developing finer research methods that are more attuned to the human mind in real, lived experiences. In his early career in the 1940s and 1950s, he worked on the foundations and limits of human perception and thought. In doing so, his “New Look” psychology critiqued behaviorism for being narrowly scientistic and devised clever research methods in seemingly standard experimental studies. Dissatisfaction with the existing psychological approaches had led him to initiate the cognitive revolution in the 1950s, but he later became disenchanted with cognitive science’s increasing reliance on computer or information-processing models in understanding how the human mind works. More recently, his research focused on the role of narrative in our individual thoughts and collective culture.