The Story of Psychology (59 page)

Koffka marshaled a mass of experimental evidence to show that memory is not a mere sticking-together or aggregation of experiences, as in association theory, but a weaving together by means of the
meaningful
connections. Among the evidence he adduced was that of Ebbinghaus and his followers, that it is much harder to learn a string of nonsense syllables than a series of words connected by meaning. Koffka gave a simple and persuasive example: If every connection between items were merely one of association, these two lines would be equally easy to learn:

Koffka’s comment: “It is not easy for association theory to explain why the second line is learned and retained so much more easily than the first, a difficulty which, as far as I know, was never explicitly mentioned by the associationists.”
⁴⁰

Like much else about Gestalt psychology, the truth illustrated by those two lines seems so obvious that one wonders why it needed to be rediscovered. But psychology has not moved in a steady course from
ignorance toward knowledge; its progress has been more like that of an explorer of an unknown land who tentatively advances toward a distant goal by this valley or that, this river or that, and often must pursue a roundabout route or double back on his tracks when the chosen route proves a poor one. The followers of Wundt and the behaviorists made important headway toward the remote goal but went off into dead ends; the Gestaltists put psychology back on a truer course.

Boring made this point with a different metaphor in his magisterial history of psychology: “It appears that orthodoxy had been led astray along the straight and narrow path of sensory analysis. It is the wide gate and the broad way of phenomenology that lead to life.”
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Although the Gestalt psychologists were not the first or the only ones to make this discovery, it was they who made it in a form so convincing that it was amalgamated into the structure of scientific psychology.

In Germany, as we saw, Gestalt psychology became a leading school in the 1920s but virtually disappeared in the mid-thirties after its three founders and many of their former students left Germany.

In the United States, after the publication of Koffka’s introductory article in 1922, Gestalt psychology met at first with great interest and even enthusiasm.
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Koffka and Köhler were asked to give seminars and colloquia at nearly all the important American research centers; Köhler was a visiting professor at Clark University in 1925; and Harvard later offered him a visiting professorship, which he had to decline.

But behaviorism was even then rapidly becoming the ruling brand of psychology in America, and there was no room in it for Gestaltist ideas. Most behaviorists saw Gestalt psychology as a regression to a discredited, unscientific nativism. To the extent that nativism means a belief in innate ideas, this was simply untrue. To the extent that nativism means a belief that the mind, by its very nature, imposes certain kinds of order on experience, it was correct. Gestalt theory was, in a way, a modern version of Kantian epistemology.
⁴³

Decades later this central tenet of Gestalt psychology would be strikingly confirmed by several forms of research. Studies of language acquisition, for instance, showed that children sense the grammatical structure of sentences and begin speaking in grammatical sentences long before they are taught anything about grammar. Even more remarkably,
a study of deaf children who had not been taught any sign language found that when they were three or four years of age, they communicated by making up strings of gestures—quasi-sentences—that distinguished between agent, action, and object, just as verbal language does.
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The antipathy of behaviorists toward Gestalt psychology was reciprocated: Koffka, Köhler, and Wertheimer all were dismissive of behaviorism (and other psychologies) and presented their own approach as the only valid one, thereby offending many American psychologists. Reviewing the reception of Gestalt psychology in America, the psychologist Michael Sokal writes:

The result was that by the early 1930s, Gestalt psychology, though it had become a definite part of the American psychological scene, remained a subordinate part; like the structuralists, functionalists, Freudians, and others, Gestaltists were a minority in a behaviorist-dominated establishment.
⁴⁶
Nevertheless, they had an influence on the development of psychology out of all proportion to their numbers and position.

Wertheimer, a warm and impassioned teacher, had a loyal but small following at the New School for Social Research, but no physical research facilities to speak of. Yet according to his distinguished student Abraham S. Luchins, during Wertheimer’s decade in America (he died in 1943) he was a “conspicuous and disquieting figure” in the behaviorist milieu.
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Koffka, though dry and overly theoretical as a teacher, was adored by the girls he taught at Smith. However, because the college’s emphasis was on undergraduate education, he supervised only one Ph.D. in his years there. But he did have an extensive effect on the psychological community through his writings, particularly the encyclopedic
Principles of Gestalt Psychology
, and he would undoubtedly have produced other influential works had his life not been cut short in 1941, at the age of fifty-five, by heart disease.

Köhler, despite his Germanic stiffness, was best able of the three to fit into the traditional academic framework. He created a center of psychological research and scholarship at Swarthmore that attracted a number of top-notch doctoral candidates, among them David Krech, Richard Crutchfield, Jacob Nachmias, and Ulric Neisser. Köhler retired in 1958 but remained active in research until his death at eighty, nine years later. After his retirement, he received the highest accolade of American psychology, election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association, an acknowledgment both of his personal achievements and of the contributions of the Gestalt movement to psychology.

For paradoxically, even though by midcentury the movement had lost its identity and was fading from view, its most important ideas had become part of the mainstream of psychology. Indeed, they remain a significant part of it today, although a number of Gestaltist ideas are now so taken for granted that they are rarely even identified as such when cited in textbooks of psychology.

The central Gestaltist doctrine, that the whole—the
Gestalt—
is greater than the sum of its parts and that it dominates our perceptions has stood the test of time and testing. In one recent experiment, psychologist David Navon measured the time it took observers to identify large and small letters in a display like this:

FIGURE 14
The “Forest Before Trees” Effect: It takes longer to identify the tiny letters than the bigger ones they make up.

The Gestaltists 347

Observers were able to name the large letters more swiftly than the small ones, whether or not the small ones were the same as the large ones they made up; in contrast, it took them longer to name the small letters when they were different from large ones made up of them.
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Evidently, the whole was recognized more easily than the parts it was made of.

Prägnanz
, the tendency to see the simplest shape in complex patterns (see Figure 10, page 328), has held up as a valid perceptual principle. So has grouping (the Laws of Proximity and of Similarity, illustrated above on pages 326 and 327), although later research has extended and somewhat modified it.
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As for problem solving, although the reward-based, trial-and-error model espoused by behaviorism remains valid for many simpler animals, research with more intelligent animals and human beings has followed the direction taken by Köhler, Duncker, and Wertheimer. Newer models, based on information-processing theory, do not contradict Gestalt problem-solving theory so much as provide detailed programs of the step-by-step reasoning and searching for which Gestalt psychology had only such vague terms as “restructuring.”
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Gestalt psychology also significantly deepened the study of memory. The work of Ebbinghaus and his followers with nonsense syllables revealed certain of its principles, but only within the narrow confines of the meaningless. Gestalt psychology restored a perspective in which the broader aspects of memory could be investigated—the web of meanings into which we weave new material and through which we locate and recall desired information.
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Recent work on memory has gone far beyond Gestalt explanations but along the same lines.

Most important, the Gestaltists restored consciousness and meaning to psychology; they did not discredit the findings of Wundt’s followers or the behaviorists so much as radically enlarge the scope and dimensions of scientific psychology, re-establishing within it mind and all its processes—including, according to Koffka, meaning, significance, and value. As he said:

In 1950, when Gestalt psychology was losing visibility as a distinct school, Edwin Boring summed up its fate in terms that have not been improved on:

Forty years later, that valuation was reiterated by two perception researchers, Irvin Rock and Stephen Palmer, who were extending and revising Gestalt theories of perception in cognitive science terms:

T
he nature and origin of personality has long been an issue of paramount importance to psychologists. For them the question, central to understanding human nature, is: What accounts for the differences in the characteristics of individuals and in their behavior? The same issue is of the greatest interest to laypersons. For them the question, of crucial importance in everyday life, is: How can one best judge other people’s characters and know what to expect of them?