Orville Gilbert Brim Jr.


Orville Gilbert Brim Jr. was an American social psychologist who conducted research on early childhood and middle age. He was the author of books exploring and the nature of and the desire for fame.

Biography

Orville Gilbert Brim Jr. was born in Elmira, New York on April 7, 1923 and grew up in Columbus, Ohio where his father was a professor at Ohio State University. He was introduced to sociology as a freshman at Yale in the autumn of 1941 and had chosen it as his major field of study when he was called up for officer training in the Army Air Corps. Commissioned a second lieutenant, he spent the remainder of World War II on combat duty in the Pacific theater as a pilot of B-24 bombers.
After his discharge Dr. Brim returned to Yale, earning his B.A. degree in 1947 and his Ph.D. in sociology in 1951. After a year as a research assistant he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin as an instructor and subsequently assistant professor before moving to the Russell Sage Foundation.
During a two-week leave from the Army Air Corps in 1944, Lieutenant Brim was introduced to Kathleen Jane Vigneron. Soon after his leave was up the two were married—a union that lasted almost 60 years and produced four children.
In 1985, the Brims settled in Vero Beach, Florida, spending their summers at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and later, Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Kathy Brim died in 2003.

Work

Dr. Brim joined the Russell Sage Foundation of New York City in 1955 and was named president in 1964. He led the foundation's successful effort to encourage the law schools at leading universities to include courses in social science research in their curricula—for example, by accompanying courses in criminal law with courses in crime and its origins. The concept was later extended to schools of medicine and journalism.
In 1974, Dr. Brim was appointed president of the Foundation for Child Development. During his twelve-year tenure he expanded the foundation's field of inquiry and support, which had been centered on welfare programs for children, to include study of their social and psychological development. Under his leadership, the first National Survey of Children was undertaken, in 1976, and three years later he established through the foundation a new, not-for-profit organization, Child Trends, in Washington, D.C. Since then, Child Trends has become the nation's leading repository and clearinghouse of past and current information about America's children, an essential resource for policymakers and scholars alike.
After leaving the Foundation for Child Development in 1985, Dr. Brim wrote the first of his two books exploring widely known but little-studied aspects of human behavior. Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives, was published in 1992. It has since been reprinted and translated into several languages.
His second book, Look at Me!: The Fame Motive from Childhood to Death, examines the desire to be famous in people of different ages, backgrounds and social status, and how succeeding or failing to achieve fame affected their lives, both outwardly and inwardly. It was published in 2009.
In 1989, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation asked Dr. Brim to lead the Foundation's Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, which to this day remains the most thorough and extensive examination of middle age ever carried out. Over the next ten years, the Network conducted dozens of separate studies of midlife drawn from interviews of more than 7,000 Americans of both sexes, aged 25 to 74. The basic findings, which received nationwide attention when announced in early 1999, were that Americans tend to feel younger than they really are; that, for most, "midlife crisis" is a myth, and midlife itself—especially the years 40 to 60—is a time of good health, psychic equanimity, productive activity and satisfying personal and community relationships. In summarizing the findings, Dr. Brim declared, "On balance, the sense we all have is that midlife is the best place to be." The complete findings of the MacArthur project appeared in 2004 in How Healthy Are We" A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife, a book edited by Dr. Brim with Carol D. Ryff and Ronald C. Kessler. A follow-up study of the original 7,000 respondents to the original network survey is currently in progress at the University of Wisconsin.

Awards