The Story of Psychology (55 page)

Ernst Mach, a physicist with an interest in psychology, noted in 1897 that when we see a circle at different angles, it seems circular to us even though it looks ellipsoidal to a camera, and that when we see a table from different angles, the image on the retina changes but the inner experience of seeing a table does not. The mind interprets the sensations to mean what it knows the object to be.

In 1906 Vittorio Benussi, experimenting with the famous Müller-Lyer illusion, in which two lines (the horizontal ones in the following illustration) look different in length although they are exactly the same, found that even when he told his subjects to concentrate on the horizontal lines, they could not make themselves ignore the whole figure; they could reduce the illusion but not eliminate it.

FIGURE 2
The Müller-Lyer illusion

And while Wertheimer was conducting his first experiment in Frankfurt, David Katz, a psychologist at Göttingen, was exploring the phenomena of “brightness constancy” and “color constancy.” When we see an object in shadow, he found, we perceive it as having the same brightness and color as when we see it in sunlight, even though objectively it is darker and its color different. We see it, that is, within a known context.

Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler had all been exposed to such findings and concepts in their training, and had all been influenced at Berlin by Carl Stumpf, who had imported phenomenology from philosophy into psychology. (In phenomenological psychology, the primary
materials of research are everyday real-life experiences, not elemental sensations and feelings.) Wertheimer and Koffka had also studied at Würzburg, where the research emphasis was on thought processes. All three, moreover, had done research involving higher mental functions: Wertheimer on the thinking of feeble-minded children and patients with reading disorders, Koffka in his dissertation on rhythmic Gestalten,
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Köhler in his on the psychology of acoustics.

Still, they were a distinctly dissimilar threesome, and hardly looked like an intellectual attack force capable of assaulting and defeating Wundtian psychology.

Wertheimer, reared in Prague, was a Jew. Boyish of feature but balding, he sported a huge, martial, Bismarckian mustache but was poetic, musically gifted, warm, humorous, and cheerful. He was an exciting and fluent speaker; his ideas brimmed and bubbled over. But reining in his thoughts to set them down on paper was so difficult and painful for him that he was genuinely phobic about writing.

Koffka, a Berliner, was half Jewish. Small and frail, with a long, thin face and a somber look, he was introverted, sensitive, and insecure; inexplicably, these traits, though they made him an uninspiring lecturer, endeared him to his female students. Ill at ease at the rostrum, he was comfortable at the writing table and produced systematic, scholarly expositions of the Gestalt psychology.

Köhler, a Gentile born in Estonia and reared in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, was hawk-featured, with a short, stiff thatch of hair parted in the middle. He was the most painstaking experimenter of the three, and later became a strong institute administrator. Arrogant, stiff, and formal in person—he had to know someone socially for ten years before he would use the personal
du
instead of the formal
Sie—
in his writing he could be surprisingly relaxed and charming.

In the end, the differences among the three produced an advantageous specialization of function. As one history of the Gestalt movement puts it, Wertheimer was “the intellectual father, thinker, and innovator,” Koffka “the salesman of the group,” and Köhler “the inside man, the doer.”
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But only one of the three ever held a major position in the psychological establishment. Wertheimer, his way impeded by anti-Semitism and his limited output of publications, was for years merely a lecturer, and
later a Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Berlin. Not until 1929, when he was forty-nine, did he finally become a full professor (at Frankfurt), only to have to flee abruptly four years later when the Nazis came to power. He emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research but never held a major chair in psychology.

In Germany, Koffka rose only to the rank of Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Giessen. He gave a series of lectures in America and in 1927 obtained a full professorship at Smith College—not a center of psychological research—and remained there for the rest of his life.

Köhler alone achieved major status in Germany. After several years of teaching and over six years of brilliant experimental work in the Canary Islands, in 1921 he was appointed head of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin—the premier post in German psychology—at the age of thirty-four, and made it a center of Gestalt studies. But he held the post only fourteen years; in 1935, after courageously but vainly struggling to keep Nazi influence out of the institute, he resigned, came to America, and spent the rest of his career at Swarthmore College.

Yet even before Köhler rose to his high position at Berlin, the three young men, in only ten years, breached the defenses of Wundtian psychology and established the legitimacy of their new mentalism—a psychology of the mind based on demonstrations and experimental evidence rather than on rationalist arguments and metaphysical speculations.

Although they published relatively little in that time (partly because of the disruptions of World War I), it was enough to show that Gestalt theory offered a better explanation than earlier cognitive psychologies of both perception and higher mental functions. Their evidence was so striking and their arguments so plausible that by 1921 Gestalt psychology had begun to supplant Wundtian psychology, as evidenced by Köhler’s appointment.
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Until the mid-1930s, Gestaltism was a major force in German psychology and a growing one in many other countries. It had only limited effect on American psychology before the arrival of the triumvirate between 1927 and 1935. Then, although none of the men held a leading position in the American psychological establishment, their ideas infiltrated psychological thinking and slowly began to expand it beyond the confines of behaviorism.

From the outset, Wertheimer saw Gestalt theory as far more than an explanation of perception; he believed it would prove to be the key to learning, motivation, and thinking.

He based this view not only on the odds and ends of evidence offered by the predecessors of Gestalt theory but on some early research of his own. Shortly after his Frankfurt work on the illusion of motion, he was asked by the director of the children’s clinic at the Psychiatric Institute of Vienna to find ways of teaching deaf-mute children. One method he experimented with consisted of his building a simple bridge with three wooden blocks while a deaf-mute child watched, and then dismantling it. The child would then try it, and usually, after one or two mistakes, would catch on and successfully build a number of bridges of different shapes and sizes. The child’s thinking, it appeared to Wertheimer, was based not on the number and size of the items used in the demonstration but on the perception of a stable configuration—a Gestalt—in which both uprights are of the same length and are positioned toward the ends of the horizontal piece.
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Wertheimer also read anthropological reports of numerical thinking by primitive peoples and wrote a paper on it in 1912. Speakers of certain South Sea languages, he learned, have different ways of counting fruit, money, animals, and men; each way represented a Gestalt appropriate to the item. He also discovered that people who lack our abstract system of grouping and numbering use natural groupings as numerical thinking. A primitive man about to build a hut might not count the number of vertical posts needed but would know without counting what the hut’s framework should look like and, thus, how many posts to seek.
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Using these data plus his experiments at Frankfurt, Wertheimer drew up the outlines of a new psychology in a 1913 series of lectures. The central doctrine was that our mental operations consist chiefly of Gestalten rather than strings of associated sensations and impressions, as followers of Wundt and associationists believed. A Gestalt, he said, was not a mere accumulation of associated bits but a structure with an identity; it was different from and more than the sum of its parts. The acquisition of knowledge often took place through a process of “centering” or structuring and thereby seeing things as an orderly whole.
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Although Wertheimer envisioned Gestalt theory as the basis of an
entire psychology, much of his research and more than half the research of all Gestalt psychologists in the early years dealt with perception.
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¹⁰
Within a dozen years the three leading Gestaltists, their students, and several other Gestalt-oriented psychologists had discovered a number of principles of perception, or “laws of Gestalten.” Wertheimer, drawing on his and others’ findings, named and discussed a handful of the major laws in one of his rare papers in 1923,
¹¹
and as time went on he, his colleagues, and their students discovered many others. (Eventually 114 laws of Gestalten were named.
¹²
) Here are a few of the more important ones:

Proximity:
When we see a number of similar objects, we tend to perceive them as groups or sets of those which are close to each other. Wertheimer’s simple demonstration:

FIGURE 3
The Law of Proximity: a simple case

People shown the line of dots, he found, spontaneously see it as pairs of dots close to each other (ab/cd/ …), and while it could also be construed as pairs of widely spaced dots with little room between the pairs (a/bc/de/ …), no one sees it that way, and most people cannot even make themselves do so. A more striking example:

FIGURE 4
The Law of Proximity: a more extreme case

Here one sees lines made up of three closely spaced dots, tilted slightly to the right of the vertical; one does not see, and can see only with difficulty, an alternative structure—lines made up of three widely spaced dots, tilted far to the left of the vertical.

Similarity:
When similar and dissimilar objects are mingled, we see the similar ones as groups: