brenner holds the position of Jacob Gould Shurman
Emeritus Professor of Human Development and
Family Studies of Psychology at Cornell University.
See also: THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
Bibliography
Publications by Bronfenbrenner
The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
‘‘Ecology of the Family as a Context for Human Development.’’ De-
velopmental Psychology 22 (1986):723–742.
Bronfenbrenner, Urie, Peter McCelland, Elaine Wethington, Phyl-
lis Moen, and Stephen J. Ceci. The State of Americans: This Gen-
eration and the Next. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Thomas J. Russo
BRUNER, JEROME (1915–)
Jerome Bruner was born October 15, 1915 in New
York, the youngest of four children in a ‘‘nominally
observant’’ Jewish family. He was a leading voice in
the cognitive revolution that overtook psychology in
the 1960s, ending a half-century of domination by be-
haviorism. As a professor of psychology at Harvard
and as Director, with George Miller, of the Center for
Cognitive Studies, he was a major force in redirecting
psychology toward the study of cognitive processes in-
volved in language and thought and their develop-
ment. As Watts Professor of Psychology at Oxford
University he extended his work increasingly into is-
sues of children’s cognitive and linguistic develop-
ment and the role of education in this process.
Because Bruner has applied this perspective to a
number of problems (including perception, thinking,
language development, and education), he is widely
regarded as the world’s greatest living psychologist.
He is the author of some twenty books, one of which,
The Process of Education (1960), has been translated
into twenty-one languages.
Bruner’s view of mind was shaped by his encoun-
ters as an undergraduate at Duke University with Wil-
liam McDougall’s contrarian views: nativism versus
empiricism and mentalism versus materialism. His
ideas were further extended by the conflicts he en-
countered at Harvard as a graduate student between
the whole-person theorists Gordon Willard Allport
and Henry Murray, and the experimentalists Edwin
Garrigues Boring and Karl Spencer Lashley. The
eventual product was an experimental approach to
the higher mental processes of the language and
thinking of whole persons best represented in the
landmark volume authored with Jacqueline Goodnow
and George Austin, A Study of Thinking (1956).
Bruner’s contributions to developmental psychol-
ogy are no less distinctive. He introduced the work of
Jerome Seymour Bruner was a leading voice in the cognitive
revolution that overtook psychology in the 1960s. (Archives of the
History of American Psychology)Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky to the attention of
North Americans, extending and adding a cognitive
process perspective to intellectual development, work
well represented by the volume produced with his stu-
dents Patricia Greenfield and Rose Olver, Studies in
Cognitive Growth (1966). Along with Colwyn Tre-
varthyn and T. Berry Brazelton, Bruner pioneered
the study of infant perception and their predisposi-
tions to language, work culminating in the book
Child’s Talk (1983).Bruner has been a strong proponent of the im-
portance of culture in human development, including
education as an aspect of that culture. Minds, he ar-
gues, have the properties they do not just because we
are all humans, but because of the rules and rituals of
child-rearing and formal education. Cultural rules
and routines and the narrative forms people learn to
use to interpret their own and others’ lives are the
themes of The Culture of Education (1996).An insightful accounting of his development as a
psychologist through his first sixty years is to be found
in his autobiography, In Search of Mind: Essays in Auto-
biography (1983). The fact that he continues to be de-
voted to the problem of the cultural uses of narrative
and interpretation is exemplified by his books, withBRUNER, JEROME 71