Gestalt Psychology: Study with Video Lessons, Practice Problems & Examples

Gestalt Psychology

In this video, we're going to be talking about Gestalt psychology, which really rose to prominence in Europe in the 1910s. Gestalt is a German word that doesn't translate super well into English, but it basically refers to the way that things have been placed together. Gestalt psychology is an approach that emphasizes the processing of entire patterns rather than just individual components. One little motto or mantra that you'll hear a lot in Gestalt psychology is, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." I'm going to show you an example of what I mean by that toward the end of the video.

So, to give you some historical context, basically what happened was that some early psychologists, particularly in Europe, believed that the practice of trying to break experiences down into their individual elements, which is what structuralism was trying to do, just is not helpful because that's not really how humans perceive most things. You don't look at a painting and think blue, green, yellow. You look at a painting and almost instantaneously process the foreground, the background, the depth, the shading, the colors, the saturation. You process it as one big pattern.

You don't process the individual components. Gestalt psychologists were basically thinking structuralists are not studying perception correctly, and we need to do it better, which rightfully so. They did a good job. So the main research question here is, how do we as humans perceive and interpret information as an organized whole?

The main word to associate with Gestalt psychology is perception. Gestalt psychology ended up being very well known in the field of perception. One of the most important founders was Max Wertheimer. He is considered the founding father of Gestalt psychology and studied motion perception. A lot of Wertheimer's work really applies to how humans perceive films, like how we watch movies.

To give you a sense of that, if I was to show you this clip: he's very cute, but that's probably not the best animation you've ever seen in your life, right? It looks very choppy, almost like a bunch of pictures presented in a slideshow. Whereas if I show you this animation, I would bet you're perceiving very fluid movement, very fluid motion there.

Now those two clips are made of the same five frames, those are the parts; they have the exact same parts. However, you process them very differently. The first one is very choppy, the second one was very fluid. The only difference between them was the frame rate. The first one had a very low frame rate, so there was a long time between the frames, and the second one had a very high frame rate or a very short time between the frames.

You can see very nicely here how the whole that you are perceiving is greater than the sum of its parts. They had the same five frames, the same parts, two very different perceptual experiences for you. Max Wertheimer went on to help form something called the Principles of Perceptual Organization, which was a series of volumes trying to explain how the human brain groups visual elements to form coherent perceptions. We are actually going to be talking about some of his principles of perceptual organization in our sensation and perception chapter, so keep an eye out for that. That is Gestalt psychology in a nutshell, and I'll see you guys in our next video.

Bye-bye.

Gestalt Psychology Example 1

Okay. So in this one we're going to think about if a Gestalt psychologist were to criticize a structuralist, what might they say? Let's look through these options. So option A says, "We lack empirical evidence for the unconscious mind, therefore we can never know how it actually impacts us." That is a very fair criticism of psychoanalytic theory, though, not structuralism.

So we'll cross that out. Option B states, "Mental processes cannot be understood by analyzing parts. Humans tend to perceive things as organized wholes." And that sounds like an argument that a Gestalt psychologist would make. Remember, Gestalt psychologists are concerned with how people process things as patterns and coherent wholes.

So it looks like our answer is going to be option B. Just to understand why option C is incorrect, option C reads, "When we examine group averages to better understand how behaviors are adaptive, we risk overlooking individual differences." So that might be a criticism that you would level at functionalism, not necessarily structuralism because they're thinking of that adaptive significance there. Alright, so our answer here is going to be option B.

And there you go.

Who is considered the founder of Gestalt psychology?

• A. William James.
• B. Wilhelm Wundt.
• C. Max Wertheimer.
• D. Jean Piaget.