Researching Robert Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg (born December 8, 1949) is an American psychologist and psychometrician. He is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell, Sternberg was president of the University of Wyoming for 5 months. He has been Provost and Professor at Oklahoma State University, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University. He is a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals, including American Psychologist. He is the past President for the American Psychological Association.

Sternberg has a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Stanford University, under advisor Gordon Bower. He holds thirteen honorary doctorates from two North American, one South American, one Asian, and nine European universities, and additionally holds an honorary professorship at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany. He is a Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Among his major contributions to psychology are the triarchic theory of intelligence and several influential theories related to creativity, wisdom, thinking styles, love, hate, and leadership. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sternberg as the 60th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Sternberg has acquired over $20 million in grants and contracts for his research and has conducted research on five continents. The central focus of his research is on intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. He has also studied close relationships, love, and hatred. He has authored or co-authored over 1,500 publications, including articles, book chapters, and books. His work has been critiqued due to excessive self-citation and self-plagiarism. In 2018 he resigned as the editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science in response to these claims.

Robert Sternberg is married to Karin Sternberg, a German psychologist, with whom he has a set of triplets, consisting of a boy and two girls. Sternberg and his first wife had a son and a daughter.