Jerome Bruner

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 Ph.D. 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.

Bruner was born blind (due to cataracts) on October 1, 1915, in New York City, to Herman and Rose Bruner, who were Polish Jewish immigrants. An operation at age 2 restored his vision. He received a bachelor of arts degree in Psychology in 1937 from Duke University and went on to earn a master's degree in Psychology in 1939 and then a doctorate in Psychology in 1941 from Harvard University. 

In 1939, Bruner published his first psychological article on the effect of thymus extract on the sexual behavior of the female rat. During World War II, Bruner served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force committee under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, researching social psychological phenomena. In 1945, Bruner returned to Harvard as a psychology professor and was heavily involved in research relating to cognitive psychology and educational psychology. 

In 1972, Bruner left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He returned to the United States in 1980 to continue his research in developmental psychology. In 1991, Bruner joined the faculty at New York University (NYU), where he taught primarily in the School of Law. As an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, Bruner studied how psychology affects legal practice. 

During his career, Bruner was awarded honorary doctorates from Yale University, Columbia University, The New School, the Sorbonne, the ISPA Instituto Universitário, as well as colleges and universities in such locations as Berlin and Rome, was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Bruner is a distinguished member of Psi Chi. He turned 100 in October 2015 and died on June 5, 2016.

Bruner is one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology in the United States, which began through his own early research on sensation and perception as being active rather than passive processes. In 1947, Bruner published his study Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception, in which children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds were asked to estimate the size of coins or wooden disks the size of American pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. 

The results showed that the value and needs of the poor and rich children associated with coins caused them to significantly overestimate the size of the coins, especially when compared to their more accurate estimations of the same size disks. Similarly, another study conducted by Bruner and Leo Postman showed slower reaction times and less accurate answers when a deck of playing cards reversed the color of the suit symbol for some cards (e.g., red spades and black hearts). 

These series of experiments issued in what some called the 'New Look' psychology, which challenged psychologists to study not just an organism's response to a stimulus but also its internal interpretation. After these experiments on perception, Bruner turned his attention to the actual cognitions that he had indirectly studied in his perception studies.

In 1956, Bruner published the book A Study of Thinking, which formally initiated the study of cognitive psychology. Soon afterward, Bruner helped found the Harvard Center of Cognitive Studies. After a time, Bruner began to research other topics in psychology, but in 1990 he returned to the subject and gave a series of lectures, later compiled into the book Acts of Meaning. In these lectures, Bruner contested the computer model of the mind, advocating a more holistic understanding of cognitive processes.