Robert Richardson Sears

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Presents an obituary for Robert R. Sears. Robert Richardson Sears, David Starr Jordan professor of psychology at Stanford University, chair of the Department of Psychology, 1953-1961, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, 1961-1970, and organizer and first head at Stanford of the Boys' Town Center for Youth Development, now known as the Center for the Study of Children, Youth, and Families, died at his home in Menlo Park, California, on May 22, 1989. Born in Palo Alto on August 31, 1908, he was 80 at the time of his death. During a period of failing health in his last year, he continued with his professional writing as best he could. He is survived by his wife, Pauline Snedden Sears, following 57 years of married life, and two grown children, David O. Sears and Nancy Sears Barker, plus six grandchildren. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

American Psychologist
Obituaries Robert R. Sears (1908–1989)
Lee J. Cronbach
Albert H. Hastorf
Ernest R. Hilgard
Eleanor E. Maccoby
Stanford University
May 1990
Robert Richardson Sears, David Starr Jordan professor of psychology at Stanford University, chair of the Department of Psychology, 1953–1961, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, 1961–1970, and organizer and first head at Stanford of the Boys’ Town Center for Youth Development, now known as the Center for the Study of Children, Youth, and Families, died at his home in Menlo Park, California, on May 22, 1989. Born in Palo Alto on August 31, 1908, he was 80 at the time of his death. During a period of failing health in his last year, he continued with his professional writing as best he could.

He is survived by his wife, Pauline Snedden Sears, following 57 years of married life, and two grown children, David O. Sears and Nancy Sears Barker, plus six grandchildren.

Bob’s roots were deep in Stanford, where his father, Jesse B. Sears, had graduated in 1909 and immediately joined the faculty of the School of Education, where he served continuously until retirement.

Bob’s wife, Pauline Snedden Sears, better known as Pat, also had a Stanford connection by way of her father, David S. Snedden, who had been an assistant professor of education at Stanford in the early 1900’s. Bob and Pat met as Stanford students. He graduated in 1929 and went on for graduate study in psychology at Yale University. She graduated in 1930 and spent the next year obtaining a master’s degree at Teachers College, before joining him as a graduate student at Yale. They were married in 1932, just after he received his PhD and was about to take up his position as an instructor in psychology at the University of Illinois. She completed her PhD in 1939, after they were back at Yale, having left Illinois in 1936. He moved up through the ranks to associate professor of psychology at Yale, when, in 1942, he received the attractive (and somewhat unexpected) offer to become a professor of child psychology and director of the Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa. The offer was unusual in that, up to that time, he was not identified with child development. He remained at Iowa until 1949, by which time it was as though “the job had made the man,” in the sense that he was by now a leader in developmental psychology and was invited to an important professorship at Harvard University to continue work in this area. After four years at Harvard, he accepted the invitation to return to head the Department of Psychology at Stanford because of his early ties there. Pat was appointed as a faculty member of the School of Education and is now a Professor Emerita.

Bob’s PhD dissertation at Yale was on a problem in physiological psychology—the role of the optic lobes in the formation of conditioned responses to visual stimuli in goldfish. Although the study was successful, it convinced him that he did not wish to continue this as a career line.

At Illinois, he became interested in the psychology of personality—after finding himself giving a course on personality for which he felt badly prepared. In the process he became the leading figure in the effort to bring psychoanalytic concepts into the mainstream of psychology by subjecting them to the rigors of operational definition and empirical test. His monograph, A Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic Concepts (1943), along with an earlier multi-author book, Frustration and Aggression (1939), in which he had a leading share, were widely influential in shaping the next generation of scholars.

When he became the director of the Iowa Child Welfare Station in the early 1940s, Bob began to focus on children, in particular on stable differences among children in the personality patterns they acquired. He believed that the roots of these differences could be found in the family, specifically in the kinds of socialization pressures parents applied to their children, and he was among the first to do detailed empirical studies of the connections between child-rearing practices of parents and the characteristics of their children. He carried on these studies with increasing depth and sophistication at each of the research settings in which he worked—at Iowa in the early 1940s, at Harvard in the early 1950s, and subsequently at Stanford after his move there in 1953. His two books, Patterns of Child Rearing (1957) and Identification and Child Rearing (1965), along with numerous articles in professional journals, reported landmark studies that established the arena of discourse in socialization for many years. In these studies, he strove to maintain the kind of controls called for in good experimental work without sacrificing the ecological validity of real-life interactions between parents and children, and he was the first to devise laboratory analogues of family interaction by having the children’s own parents carry out standardized socialization procedures in a laboratory setting.

His influence on the field of child psychology went beyond the leadership he provided in his theorizing and the methodological advances he achieved. He was also exceptionally effective in establishing research centers and institutions that would provide the framework for groups of students and colleagues. After leaving the Iowa research station, he established the Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard, and then established a new Laboratory of Human Development at Stanford after his move West. He took the lead at Stanford in founding Bing Nursery School as a model preschool and a research facility for the Child Development unit in the Psychology Department. Later in his career he took responsibility, as earlier noted, in the Boys’ Town Center for Youth Development.

His national leadership role involved, first, the presidency of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1951, and subsequently, from 1973 to 1975, the presidency of the Society for Research in Child Development. In the meantime he edited the monograph series of this society, from 1971 to 1975. He was a trustee of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located on Stanford lands, from 1953 to 1975, and he was a Fellow, 1968–1969. He filled many assignments within the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council.

His honors included membership in the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1975 the American Psychological Association honored him with the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, and in 1980, the American Psychological Foundation gave the Gold Medal Award for lifetime contributions to psychology to him and Pat jointly: They were the first couple to receive the award jointly.

In recognition of his leadership as executive head of the psychology department, in 1961 President J. E. Wallace Sterling, and his provost, Frederick E. Terman, selected Bob to become dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, where he served until 1970. They had chosen a person who had made a career in science, but found that he also had strong interests in the humanities and especially the arts.

Bob and the associate deans whom he had chosen spent many hours in planning the Stanford Summer Festivals, which involved such things as importing chamber orchestras from Europe. All this created a congenial atmosphere for the performing arts in a university whose reputation lay largely in science and technology. He took the initiative in bringing in an outstanding art historian as chair of the Art Department, and the Cummings Art Building was constructed during his administration.

Along with his decanal responsibilities, Bob continued to teach a seminar on Mark Twain, in whom he had a life-long interest and about whom he had published two scholarly articles.

During the last three decades of his life, Bob was deeply involved in follow-up studies of the group of intellectually gifted individuals that had been begun by Lewis Terman in 1922. He had taken on the responsibility following Terman’s death in 1956. A national planning committee that he convened saw a unique opportunity to investigate later maturity, because the earlier records could illuminate development in the later years. In all, five surveys of these cooperative subjects were carried out between 1960 and 1986. To improve the archive, Sears had directed a systematic recording that captured large amounts of previously unexamined material and coded it so that it could be examined by computer. The resulting file, which follows 700 persons over 60 years, and about 800 more for much of the period, is the first such archive in the history of psychology. Investigators from several disciplines are using it in their research today.

The long chain of research reports by Terman, Robert Sears, Pauline Sears, and others will be capped by the volume on which Bob was concentrating during his last years, in collaboration with Carole Holohan. This book, to be entitled The Gifted in Later Maturity, traces the life satisfactions and regrets of the group, their marital histories, and their adaptations to advancing age. Particular attention is given to the ways in which opportunities of women in their generation were constrained.

Bob was throughout a great friend and a great professional colleague. He was a top-notch teacher, investigator, and administrator. He was also fun to be with, whether playing ragtime on the piano, playing bridge, or expressing himself strongly on whatever matter was under discussion. Those who knew him will never forget him.
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Mean distance: 24.26 (cluster 14)