Robert Richardson Sears

Robert Richardson Sears
Photograph of Sears from the 1940s
Born	August 31, 1908 Palo Alto, California
Died	May 22, 1989 (1989-05-23) (aged 80) Menlo Park, California
Citizenship	American
Scientific career
Fields	Child Psychology
Institutions	Stanford University

Robert Richardson Sears (/sɪərz/; August 31, 1908 – May 22, 1989) was an eminent American psychologist who specialized in child psychology. He was for many years the head of the psychology department at Stanford and later dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences there, continued the long-term I.Q. studies of Lewis Madison Terman at Stanford, and authored many pivotal papers and books on various aspects of psychology.

Early life

He was born in Palo Alto, California to Jesse Brundage Sears, a professor at Stanford University, and Stella Louise (Richardson) Sears. As a child Sears attended Palo Alto Union High School. He received his Artium Baccalaureus degree from Stanford in 1929 and a Ph. D. from Yale University in 1932. He was married on June 25, 1932 to Pauline Kirkpatrick Snedden, who co-authored a book with him and with whom he shared an award for achievement in psychology late in their lives.

Professional life

After leaving Yale, Sears was first an instructor in psychology at the University of Illinois from 1932 to 1936 and at the same time was a clinical psychologist at the Institute for Juvenile Research there. He returned to Yale as an associate professor of psychology in 1936 and remained there until 1942.

From 1942 until 1949 he was director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa. where he worked with such luminaries as Kurt Zadek Lewin From 1949 until 1953 he directed the Laboratory of Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In 1953 Sears returned to Stanford where he served as chair of the Psychology department until 1961, Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences from 1961 to 1970, and David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology from 1970 until 1975.

Sears was president of the American Psychological Association in 1951.

Select works

• Frustration and aggression (1939, with John Dollard, Leonard William Doob, Neal Elgar Miller, Orval Hobart Mowrer, ISBN 0-313-22201-0)
• Survey of objective studies of psychoanalytic concepts (1943, Social Science Research Council, ISBN 0-313-21249-X)
• Patterns of child rearing (1957, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Harry Levin, Edgar L. Lowell, Pauline Snedden Sears, and John W. M. Whiting, Jean Berwick, ISBN 0-8047-0916-5)
• Identification and child rearing (1966, Lucy Rau Ferguson, Ram Dass, ISBN 0-422-98500-7)
• Seven Ages of Man (June 1973, S. Shirley Feldman, ISBN 978-0-913232-06-4)
• Your ancients revisited: A history of child development (1975, ISBN 978-0-226-33154-6)