Wolfgang Köhler (German: [ˈkøːlɐ]; 21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.
During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years and continued research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Köhler as the 50th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Köhler was born in the port city of Reval (now Tallinn), Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire. His family was ethnic German, and shortly after his birth, they moved to Germany.
In the course of his university education, Köhler studied at the University of Tübingen (1905–06), the University of Bonn (1906–07) and the University of Berlin (1907–09). While a student at the latter, he focused on the link between physics and psychology, in the course of which he studied with two leading scholars in those fields, Max Planck and Carl Stumpf, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. thesis (titled Akustische Untersuchungen [Acoustic investigations]) in 1909. His dissertation addressed certain aspects of psychoacoustics; Köhler had Stumpf as his advisor.
In 1910–13, he was an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt, where he worked with fellow psychologists Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. He and Koffka functioned as subjects for Wertheimer's now-famous studies of apparent movement (or the phi phenomenon), which led them in turn to conclusions about the inherent nature of vision. They collaborated on the founding of a new holistic attitude toward psychology called Gestalt theory (from the German word for "shape" or "form"), aspects of which are indebted to the earlier work of Stumpf (Köhler's teacher) and Christian von Ehrenfels (whose lectures at the University of Prague Wertheimer had attended).
In an introduction to the book, The Task of Gestalt Psychology, Carroll Pratt emphasizes Köhler's irritation at misinterpretation of his famous quote, "The whole is different from the sum of its parts". Though perhaps a simple error made in translation, many lectures in textbooks of modern-day psychology refer to Gestalt theory by saying "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". When the word 'different' is used, as Köhler originally stated, it implies that the whole bears no resemblance to the parts creating it. Most psychologists, however, understand "greater" to mean that the relationship between the parts is itself a significant part of the whole, something that is not present in the other parts if simply summed up. Example: if all the parts of a car are laid out on the floor of a garage, they do not make up a car. Only when the factor of assembly is added to the parts, do they become a car.
In 1913, Köhler left Frankfurt for the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where he had been named the director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences anthropoid research station. He worked there for six years, during which he wrote a book on problem solving titled The Mentality of Apes (1917). In this research, Köhler observed how chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas when positioned out of reach. He found that they stacked wooden crates to use as makeshift ladders, in order to retrieve the food. If the bananas were placed on the ground outside of the cage, they used sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms. Köhler concluded that the chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error (which American psychologist Edward Thorndike had claimed to be the basis of all animal learning, through his law of effect), but rather that they had an insight, in which, having realized the answer, they proceeded to carry it out in a way that was, in Köhler's words, "unwaveringly purposeful."
This is one of the prominent findings from the research done on apes. Köhler's work on the mentality of apes was seen as a turning point in the psychology of thinking. He believed that people underestimated the influence of a number of external conditions on such higher animals. In his book, The Mentality of Apes, Köhler explains that he was inspired to work with the chimpanzees for two main reasons. The first was because the "structure of their brains is more closely related to the chemistry of the human body and brain-structure than to the chemical nature of the lower apes and their brain development". He was intrigued that human traits could be observed in the everyday behaviours of this animal. Secondly, he wanted to study the chimps to gain knowledge of the nature of intelligent acts.
In the early stages of observing chimps, it was clear that the examinations should not be considered characteristic for each member of this species. Köhler recognized that, as in humans, chimpanzees demonstrated considerable differences in the intellectual field. Chimps demonstrated that they were able to grasp the objects around them in a variety of fashions. This is incorporated in their everyday playing behaviours. For this reason, it was not necessary to use experimental tests to introduce chimps to handle matter. In his book, The Mentality of Apes, Köhler describes how the apes use their hands, saying "large, powerful and flexible hands are natural links between himself and the world of things, and he attains the necessary amount of muscular force and co-ordination at an earlier age than the human child".
Köhler made most of his observations during the first six months of 1914, while working with Mr. Teuber. They provided the animals with problems that would be difficult but not impossible for the chimps to solve.
The conclusions drawn from the experiments with apes were that these animals exhibit insight and that they demonstrate intelligent behaviour that is common in humans. Köhler states that these findings hold true for every member of the species. He describes that "the correlation between intelligence and the development of the brain is confirmed". Köhler points out that a downfall of educational psychology at the time of the experiments with apes was that it had yet to create a test that was capable of assessing how far mentally healthy and mentally-ill children could go in particular situations. Köhler believed that studies of this type could be performed on young children, and that future research should focus on these possibilities. He stated that: "where the lack of human standards makes itself so much felt, I should like to emphasize particularly the importance and- if the anthropoids do not deceive us- the fruitfulness of further work in this direction".
In his book titled Gestalt Psychology, Köhler criticized the concepts of introspection, a sub-discipline in psychology that was dominant in Germany throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. Stemming from the ideas of the structuralist psychologists, introspection was defined as the self-reporting of conscious thoughts and sensations. It was believed that consciousness could be understood by breaking its elements down into basic parts.
Köhler was quick to dismiss this train of thought. He claimed that the introspectionists were too subjective in their methodologies and did not test for reliability in their findings. For example, the description of sensing the colour red made by one individual may not be the same as the description of another. Where the introspectionists failed was their inability to adequately replicate particular findings. If one person was tested for sensations regarding the colour red, these descriptions were simply shared among followers of the discipline. These descriptions were automatically taken as valid, and no further testing of a particular sensation took place. In addition to this, Köhler claimed that introspection did not focus on immediate problems regarding direct human experience. He believed that an important goal of empirical science was to obtain objective results that apply to almost everyone. The introspectionists, according to Köhler, did not consider objective experience a key point in their science.