Gestalt Psychology

[Ready for Fall 2026]

Modified: 2026-09-29 12:18 PsM CDST

• Gestalt psychology was the European opponent and successor to structuralism.
  • It was founded by Wertheimer, Koffka, and Kohler.
    • Wertheimer noticed the apparent movement of telephone poles while sitting in a train, an early example of the phi phenomenon.
    • Gestalt psychologists were extremely interested in perception and devised many rules to explain perceptual phenomena.
    • One of their main rules was, "the whole consists of more than simply the sum of its parts."

• Max Wertheimer conducted the first research explicitly judged as Gestalt psychology when he examined the mathematical thinking of aborigines.
  • But it was his research of the phi phenomenon and the Gestalt principles of perception that caused others to first notice the emergence of a new school of psychology.
  • Wertheimer, along with Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, formed the initial nucleus of Gestalt psychology.
• The German word gestalt needs explaining because it has no good English translation.
  • Close approximations include figure and percept, but gestalt actually means more than that.
  • A gestalt is more like a readily perceptible figure, one that stands out readily.
  • Gestalts need not only be perceptual. ,
  • Any time a concept is reconfigured into to simpler and more understandable form it may be a gestalt.
• A good way to think about gestalt psychology is to consider one of Wertheimer’s favorite problems (King & Wertheimer, 2005, pp. 390-391).
  • A hunter sees a bear one mile due south of where the hunter is standing.
  • He aims a gun at the bear, shoots, and misses.
  • The hunter next walks the one mile due south to where the bear was when the shot was fired, then walks one mile due east, then one mile due north—and ends up standing at exactly the same place from which the gun was shot.
  • What color was the bear?
  • Give up? Scroll down to see the answer.

Reference

King, D. B., & Wertheimer, M. (2005). Max Wertheimer and Gestalt theory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

The bear was white. There is only one place on the planet where the directions given make sense, the North Pole. So, the gestalt is "bear in arctic"