Jerome Bruner (1915-2016) was one of the founding figures of cognitive psychology and one of the most creative and wide-ranging psychologists of the 20th century. His career spanned seven decades and touched nearly every area of psychology: perception, memory, thinking, language development, education, narrative, law, and culture. He was instrumental in launching the cognitive revolution and later in broadening cognitive psychology beyond the information-processing metaphor.
Early Contributions
Bruner's early work on perception (the "New Look" approach) demonstrated that perception is influenced by expectations, values, needs, and culture — challenging the view that perception is a passive recording of physical stimuli. His classic study showing that children from poor families overestimate the size of coins demonstrated that motivation and value affect perception. A Study of Thinking (1956, with Goodnow and Austin) pioneered the study of concept formation, showing how people use strategies to identify the relevant attributes that define categories.
Bruner's influence on education was enormous. His 1960 book The Process of Education argued that any subject can be taught effectively to any child at any stage of development if presented in an intellectually honest form appropriate to the child's way of thinking. His spiral curriculum concept proposed revisiting key concepts at increasing levels of sophistication. Later, Bruner argued that narrative — the human ability to organize experience into stories — is as fundamental to cognition as logical-scientific thinking, proposing two complementary modes of thought: paradigmatic (logical, categorical) and narrative (temporal, intentional, particular).