WOLFGANG KÖHLER: BIOGRAPHY, LEARNING THEORY AND CONTRIBUTIONS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2025

Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967) was a German psychologist and one of the most important figures in the development of the Gestalt School. Born in Estonia in 1887 and died in the United States in 1967, this author conducted important research on topics such as learning, perception, and other similar mental components.

His research career began with his doctoral thesis, which he carried out with Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin (1909). The main topic of this thesis was the audition. Later, while working as an assistant professor at the University of Frankfurt, he continued to conduct experiments on perception and hearing.

After participating in an experiment by Max Wertheimer together with Kurt Koffka, the three ended up founding the Gestalt School based on the results of that research. From this moment on, they continued researching on topics such as perception and promoting their new current of thought.

Some of his most important contributions were his theories on learning based on experiments with chimpanzees, and his book Gestalt Psychology, published in 1929. Due to his open criticism of the government of Adolf Hitler, Köhler fled to the United States, where he continued giving class until several years before his death.

Biography

Köhler was born in 1887 in Tallinn, then called Reval. Despite the fact that the city belonged to the Russian Empire, her family was of German origin, so shortly after her birth they moved to this European country.

Throughout his education, this psychologist studied at several major German universities, including Tübingen, Bonn, and Berlin. In the latter, he carried out his doctoral thesis with Carl Stumpf, one of the most important researchers of the time in the field of psychology.

Between 1910 and 1913, Köhler worked as an assistant professor at the Frankfurt Institute of Psychology. There, he participated in the famous Max Wertheimer apparent movement experiment, alongside Kurt Koffka. After meeting in that environment, the three of them came to similar conclusions about perception and decided to create their own movement.

From this experiment and its subsequent conclusions, Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka created the Gestalt School, whose name comes from the German word for "shape."

Many of the fundamental ideas of his theories come from the works of some of Köhler's professors, such as Stumpf or Ehrenfels.

Studies on the learning process

In 1913, Köhler was offered a position as director in the research department of the Prussian Academy of Anthropoid Sciences, on the island of Tenerife. This psychologist was working there for six years, studying the behavior of chimpanzees in different learning conditions.

During this time, he wrote a book on problem solving called The Mindset of the Apes. In his research, he discovered that chimpanzees were able to invent new methods of solving difficulties without the need to go through trial and error, as they were previously believed to do.

Thus, with this research, Köhler developed the concept of "insight learning", which would become one of the most important in all of psychology. In fact, many historians see the works of this author as the beginning of a new trend in research on thought.

In his book The Mentality of the Apes, Köhler says that he decided to study these animals because he believed that they had more in common with humans than with other less evolved monkeys. Thus, I thought that many of their actions were similar to ours, and wanted to learn more about the nature of intelligence by observing them.

During this time, Köhler was very critical of the majority of psychological currents existing at that time. In addition, he stressed the need to delve more into topics such as intelligence, learning or human development.

Opposition to the Nazi regime

Adolft Hitler's party came to power in Germany at the end of January 1933. For the first few months, Köhler did not show his opinion about the Nazis publicly; But when the policy of removing Jewish professors from research affected his former mentor Max Planck, the psychologist decided to express his discontent.

Thus, in April 1933, Köhler wrote an article entitled "Conversations in Germany." This is the last article published during the Nazi Regime that openly criticizes the party. During the following months, the psychologist expected to be arrested, but never had to face this situation.

By the end of the same year, however, Köhler's status at the university was rapidly declining. When, in December 1933, he refused to start his classes with the Nazi salute, he began to experience unexpected searches by the police in his classrooms, as well as increased pressure from his superiors.

In 1935, when the situation became untenable, Köhler decided to emigrate to the United States, where he began working at Swarthmore University. There he remained for twenty years, until he left his post in 1955. Afterwards, he returned to research at Darthmouth University.

At the same time, in 1956 he became the president of the American Psychological Association, probably the most important institution in this discipline. During his later years, he continued to teach in the United States while trying to build ties with researchers in Free Germany.

Learning theory

Image: Common chimpanzee, one of the animals used by Wolfgang Köhler in his experiments. Source: pexels.com

Köhler's main contributions to the field of psychology emerged from the time he spent studying a community of chimpanzees in Tenerife.

This researcher carried out several experiments with animals, in order to understand how processes such as intelligence or problem solving work in more evolved animals.

Until these experiments were carried out, the mainstream within psychology said that animals are only capable of learning through trial and error.

In fact, behaviorism (one of the most important psychological theories of the time) claimed that humans learned exclusively in the same way.

To verify the veracity of these claims, Köhler put the chimpanzees he worked with in different complex situations, in which they had to act in creative ways they had never observed before to obtain a reward.

During these experiments, chimpanzees were found to be capable of new behaviors after reflecting on the best way to win a reward. Thus, the concept of insight was created, which refers to learning that only depends on internal factors and not on the experience itself.

Learning theory by

The insight learning that Köhler observed in chimpanzees has a number of fundamental characteristics. On the one hand, having an insight implies clearly understanding the essence of a situation. On the other hand, this is not achieved through step-by-step learning, but due to unconscious and reflective processes.

Thus, to have an insight, a person (or an animal) needs to collect a large amount of data related to a specific situation. Later, through deep reflection, the subject is able to generate new knowledge that arises from the connection of previously existing ideas.

On the other hand, insights are sudden, and cause important changes in the perception of a problem. When it appears, the individual is able to see patterns in the problems that he faces, which help him to solve them. It is a fundamental learning process present only in humans and in some higher animals.

Insight learning theory was a before and after in the field of psychology, since it revealed the importance of purely internal processes in the creation of new knowledge.

From these works, the cognitive current began to take shape, which would have great importance in the following decades.

Other contributions

In addition to his important work as the founder of the Gestalt School, and his research on learning and the phenomenon of insight, Köhler was also well known for the numerous criticisms he made of some of the predominant movements in psychology of his time.

On the one hand, in his book Gestalt Psychology, this researcher criticized the concept of introspection. This tool was one of the most used in the psychology of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was based on the idea that it is possible to reach conclusions about psychological phenomena by paying attention to one's thoughts and feelings.

Köhler thought that introspection was too subjective and was unreliable in the results it produced. Thus, for him the fact that the introspectionists were unable to replicate their results practically invalidated the experiments carried out using this technique.

Finally, he also believed that introspection research could not be applied to solving human problems, which for him should be the primary goal of psychology.

On the other hand, Köhler also expressed criticism against the current known as behaviorism, one of the most important at the beginning of the 20th century.

For him, the researchers in this branch put too much focus on observable behavior, leaving aside other variables such as internal processes.

References

1. "Wolfgang Köhler" in: The National Academy Press. Retrieved on: February 03, 2019 from The National Academy Press: nap.edu.
2. "Wolfgang Kohler: Biography & Contributions to Psychology" in: Study. Retrieved on: February 03, 2019 from Study: study.com.
3. "Insight Learning" in: Psychestudy. Retrieved on: February 03, 2019 from Psychestudy: psychestudy.com.
4. "Wolfgang Köhler" in: Britannica. Retrieved on: February 03, 2019 from Britannica: britannica.com.
5. "Wolfgang Köhler" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: February 03, 2019 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.