Paul B. Baltes

Paul B. Baltes (June 18, 1939 – November 7, 2006) was a German psychologist whose broad scientific agenda was devoted to establishing and promoting the life-span orientation of human development. He was also a theorist in the field of the psychology of aging. He has been described by American Psychologist as one of the most influential developmental psychologists.

Paul B. Baltes was born in Saarlouis, Germany. He is credited with developing theories about lifespan and wisdom, the selective optimization with compensation theory, and theories about successful aging and developing. He received his doctorate from the University of Saarbrücken (Saarland, Germany) in 1967. After, Baltes spent 12 years at several American institutions as a professor of psychology and human development before returning to Germany in 1980. He was Director of the Center of Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Professor of Psychology at the Free University of Berlin, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. At the Max Planck Institute for Human Development he founded the Berlin Wisdom Project and became a leader in the scientific study of wisdom. Baltes later became the director of the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging.

He was a founding member of the European Academy of Sciences, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and a member and vice-president of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina. Paul Baltes also became a member of the Order Pour le mérite for scientists and artists and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

As to research and theory, Baltes was interested in advancing a life-span view of human ontogenesis that considers behavioral and cognitive functioning from childhood into old age using a family of perspectives that together specify a coherent metatheoretical view on the nature of development. Other substantive topics included work on historical cohort effects, cognitive development, a dual-process conception of lifespan intelligence, and the study of wisdom. His interests also included models of successful development and the cross-cultural comparative study of self-related agency beliefs in the context of child development and school performance. Together with his late wife, Margret Baltes, he proposed a systemic metatheory of ontogeny which characterizes lifespan development as the orchestration of three processes: selection, optimization, and compensation.

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