Jerome Bruner

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Jerome Bruner bigraphy, stories - Psychologists

Jerome Bruner : biography

October 1, 1915 –

Jerome Seymour Bruner

Biography

Jerome Bruner was born on October 1, 1915 in New York, to Heman and Rose Bruner, who immigrated from Poland. He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology, in 1937 from Duke University. Bruner 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, studying 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 of the Allied Expeditory Force Europe committee under 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 1970, Bruner left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford in England. 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, where he still teaches students today. As an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, he studies how psychology affects legal practice. Throughout his career, Bruner has been awarded honorary doctorates from Yale and Columbia, as well as colleges and universities in such locations as Sorbonne, Berlin, and Rome, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Legal psychology

In 1991, Bruner arrived at NYU as a visiting professor to do research and to found the Colloquium on the Theory of Legal Practice. The goal of this institution is to "study how law is practiced and how its practice can be understood by using tools developed in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory." Currently Bruner is Senior Research Fellow in Law at NYU.

Narrative construction of reality

In 1980 Bruner returned to the United States, taking up the position of professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1981. For the next decade, he worked on the development of a theory of the narrative construction of reality, his work culminating in several seminal publications. His book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds has been cited by over 16,100 scholarly publications, making it one of the most influential works of the 20th century.

Language development

In 1972 Bruner was appointed Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, where he remained until 1980. In his Oxford years, Bruner focused on early language development. Rejecting the nativist account of language acquisition proposed by Noam Chomsky, Bruner offered an alternative in the form of an interactionist or social interactionist theory of language development. In this approach, the social and interpersonal nature of language was emphasized, appealing to the work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin and John Searle for theoretical grounding. Following Lev Vygotsky the Russian theoretician of socio-cultural development, Bruner proposed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition in general and language in particular. He emphasized that children learn language in order to communicate, and, at the same time, they also learn the linguistic code. Meaningful language is acquired in the context of meaningful parent-infant interaction, learning “scaffolded” or supported by the child’s Language Acquisition Support System (LASS).

In Oxford Bruner collected a large group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who participated in the effort to understand how young children manage to crack the linguistic code, among them Alison Garton, Alison Gopnik, Magda Kalmar :hu:Kalmár Magda (pszichológus), Alan Leslie, Andrew Meltzoff, Anat Ninio, Roy Pea, Susan Sugarman , Michael Scaife, Marian Sigman , Kathy Sylva and many others. Much emphasis was placed on employing the then-revolutionary method of videotaped home-observations, Bruner showing the way to a new wave of researchers to get out of the laboratory and take on the complexities of naturally occurring events in a child’s life. This work was published in a large number of journal articles, and in 1983 Bruner published a summary of them in the book Child’s talk: Learning to Use Language.