Jerome Bruner

Jerome Seymour Bruner, an American psychologist, shaped the fields of cognitive psychology and educational learning theory. He held the position of senior research fellow at New York University School of Law. A 2002 survey by *Review of General Psychology* placed him as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Bruner was born blind due to cataracts in New York City on October 1, 1915, to Polish Jewish immigrants Herman and Rose Bruner. Surgery at age two restored his sight. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Duke University in 1937, followed by a master’s in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, both from Harvard. His first psychology article, published in 1939, looked at how thymus extract affected female rats’ sexual behavior. During World War II, he served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, studying social psychological phenomena.

After the war, Bruner returned to Harvard in 1945 as a psychology professor, focusing on cognitive and educational psychology. In 1972, he left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford. He came back to the United States in 1980 to continue developmental psychology research. In 1991, he joined New York University’s faculty, primarily teaching at the School of Law. As an adjunct professor there, he explored how psychological factors influence legal practice. Over his career, he received honorary doctorates from Yale, Columbia, the New School, the Sorbonne, ISPA Instituto Universitário, and universities in Berlin and Rome. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a distinguished member of Psi Chi. He turned 100 in October 2015 and died on June 5, 2016.

Bruner helped pioneer cognitive psychology in the United States, starting with his early work showing that sensation and perception are active, not passive, processes. In 1947, he published *Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception*, where children from wealthy and poor backgrounds estimated the size of coins or wooden disks the size of U.S. pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. The results indicated that the value and need the children associated with coins led them to overestimate the coins’ size significantly, compared to their more accurate estimates of the disks. Another study with Leo Postman found slower reaction times and less accurate answers when a deck of playing cards reversed the color of suit symbols for some cards, like red spades and black hearts. These experiments sparked what some called the “New Look” psychology, urging psychologists to examine not just an organism’s response to a stimulus but also its internal interpretation. After this perception work, Bruner shifted focus to the cognitions he had indirectly studied.

In 1956, he published *A Study of Thinking*, which formally launched the study of cognitive psychology. Soon after, he helped found the Harvard Center of Cognitive Studies. He later explored other topics but returned to cognitive psychology in 1990 with a series of lectures compiled into *Acts of Meaning*, where he challenged the computer model of the mind and advocated for a more holistic understanding of cognitive processes.

Around 1967, Bruner turned to developmental psychology, studying how children learn. He coined the term “scaffolding” for an instructional process where the instructor provides carefully guided assistance, reducing help as the student progresses. He suggested that students experience or “represent” tasks in three ways: enactive (action-based), iconic (image-based), and symbolic (language-based). These modes are integrated and loosely sequential, translating into each other, with symbolic representation as the ultimate, most mysterious mode. His learning theory holds that when facing new material, it is effective to follow a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation, even for adult learners. Bruner’s work also suggests that a learner of any age can grasp any material if instruction is organized appropriately, contrasting with Piaget and other stage theorists. Like Bloom’s Taxonomy, he proposed a system of coding where people form a hierarchical arrangement of related categories, with each higher level becoming more specific, echoing Benjamin Bloom’s understanding of knowledge acquisition and the idea of instructional scaffolding.