Center for Cognitive Studies

1960

Jerome Bruner (b. 1915), George A. Miller (1920–2012)

The two scientists who stirred up the staid, stick-in-the-mud psychology department at Harvard University in the mid-twentieth century were individuals who knew how to think outside the box. Both Jerome Bruner and George Miller earned doctoral degrees in psychology from Harvard, and both then sought out other experiences, Bruner in England and Miller at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Another common thread was that both had been part of an interdisciplinary team doing research for the US military during World War II.

In 1960, Bruner and Miller joined together to found the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with money provided by the Carnegie Foundation; the center was located in what had been the family home of psychologist William James. The interdisciplinary experience of Bruner and Miller was replicated at the center. Psychologists came from several subfields, including developmental and experimental psychology. Anthropology, linguistics, and the new field of artificial intelligence were represented, as were law, history, art history, and sociology. What bound them together was a common interest in understanding humans. Weekly colloquia attracted some of the leading thinkers of the era from all over the world.

The center’s major contribution was that it helped return psychology to the study of the mind. American psychology, in particular, had become far removed from human experience through an overemphasis on the study of behavior. Within a decade of the center’s founding, the first textbook in cognitive psychology had been published, and Americans had rediscovered Jean Piaget’s seminal studies of human reasoning. Bruner and Miller, one might say, pioneered the practice of thinking outside the (disciplinary) box.

SEE ALSO Genetic Epistemology (1926), Cybernetics (1943)

The site of the Center for Cognitive Studies: William James’s former home, 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.