Orville Gilbert Brim, Jr., American social psychologist, Died at 93

Orville Gilbert Brim, Jr. was born on April 7, 1923, in Elmira, New York and died on April 15, 2016.

He was an American social psychologist.

Orville carried out research on early childhood and middle age, and is the author of books exploring ambition and the nature of and the desire for fame.

Orville grew up in Columbus, Ohio where his father was a professor at the Ohio State University.

Gilbert Brim, Jr. 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.

He was appointed a second lieutenant, Orville spent the remainder of World War II on combat duty in the Pacific theater as a pilot of B-24 bombers.

During 1951, when he was discharged Dr. Brim returned to Yale, earning his B.A. degree in 1947 and his Ph.D. in sociology .

When he completed a year as a research assistant, Orville joined the department at the University of Wisconsin as an instructor and subsequently assistant professor before moving to the Russell Sage Foundation.

As he took over a two-week leave from the Army Air Corps in 1944, Lieutenant Brim was introduced to Kathleen Jane Vigneron.

Immediately after his leave was up the two were married—a union that lasted almost 60 years and produced four children (John Gilbert, Scott Whittier, Margaret Lowry and Sarah Morgan).

During 1985, the Brims settled in Vero Beach, Florida, spending their summers at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and later, Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

In 2003, Kathy Brim died.

In 1964, Dr. Brim joined the Russell Sage Foundation of New York City in 1955 and was named president.

Orville Gilbert Brim, Jr. led the foundation’s encouraging 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.

Later, his theory was extended to schools of medicine and journalism.

In 1974, Dr. Brim was elected president of the Foundation for Child Development.

Over the period of his twelve-year career, he expanded the foundation’s field of inquiry and support, which had been centered on welfare programs for children, to include studies of their social and psychological development.

In his leadership, in 1976, the first National Survey of Children was undertaken, and three years later he established through the foundation a new, not-for-profit organization, Child Trends, in Washington, D.C.

From then, the company ‘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.

During 1985, After leaving the Foundation for Child Development, Dr. Brim Jr. wrote his 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.

Since that, it has been reprinted and translated into several languages.

Orville Gilbert Brim, Jr. 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.

During 2009, It was published.

Orville Gilbert Brim, Jr. passed away at 93 yrs old.