American psychologist, Harvard professor from 1952 to 1972, Oxford professor from 1972 to 1980, and NYU Law School professor from 1991 until nearly his hundredth birthday; one of the two or three central figures of the mid-twentieth-century "cognitive revolution" that displaced behaviorism as the dominant paradigm in American psychology, and — in a career that had three distinct acts — successively the founder of the cognitive-psychology research program, the leading American theorist of curriculum reform in the 1960s, and, in his late work, the principal advocate for a narrative theory of meaning that placed psychology back in continuous conversation with the humanities.
Bruner was born blind in 1915 in New York City, recovered his sight through surgery at age two, took his BA at Duke and his doctorate at Harvard in 1941, and served in the U.S. Army's psychological warfare division during the Second World War. The 1947 Harvard paper "Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception" (with Cecile Goodman) — the "New Look" in perception, which showed that children's size-estimates of coins were distorted by the coins' value — was the opening salvo of the cognitive program: perception itself is shaped by mental set, not a passive registration of stimuli. In 1960, with George Miller, he founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, the institutional home of the cognitive revolution; A Study of Thinking (1956, with Goodnow and Austin) is the book-length statement of the first phase of the work.
The second act was in education. Bruner chaired the 1959 Woods Hole Conference that NASA and the National Science Foundation convened in response to Sputnik; his report, The Process of Education (1960), is among the most widely read short books on education of the twentieth century — a 97-page argument whose core claim, "any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development," and whose organizing image, the spiral curriculum in which the same ideas are returned to at progressively greater depth, entered American educational vocabulary at once. The follow-up, Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966), extended the program. His Man: A Course of Study (MACOS, 1968), an anthropology curriculum for fifth-graders built around Netsilik Inuit, was the most ambitious American curriculum development of its decade and the flashpoint of a political backlash that in 1975 brought it to the floor of Congress — the first time an American educational program had been attacked from the right on the grounds of cultural relativism. Bruner's educational writing in this period is in continuous conversation with Dewey's, with Vygotsky's (whom he was instrumental in introducing to English-language readers), and with Piaget's.
The third act, from roughly 1980 onward, is the narrative turn. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986) and Acts of Meaning (1990) argue that human beings understand themselves and each other primarily through narrative — a distinct mode of thought, organized around intention, agency, and sequence, irreducible to logical-paradigmatic reasoning — and that the cognitive revolution, having begun as a meaning-restoration program against behaviorism, had wrongly allowed the computer metaphor to reduce "meaning" to "information." The Culture of Education (1996) applies the narrative framework to pedagogy; Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002) extends it to his late work with the legal academy at NYU, where he spent the last twenty-five years of his life on the narrative structure of legal argument. He died in Manhattan in 2016, a few weeks short of his 101st birthday.
Bruner is the meeting point of three graph concerns: the cognitive revolution alongside Simon and Kahneman; educational theory alongside Dewey, Freire, and Kozol; and the late narrative turn that argues for the humanities as indispensable to a psychology of meaning.