Wolfgang Köhler, intelligence and chimpanzees

Wolfgang Köhler was one of the creators of the Gestalt school and the first to use chimpanzees in a laboratory. Learn more here about his life and work.

Wolfgang Köhler was one of the most prominent representatives of the famous Gestalt psychology.. He took care of explaining one of the most complex topics of that school: learning. The curious thing is that a good part of his postulates were the fruit of long, patient and fruitful observation of chimpanzees.

This great researcher lived at a time when efforts were made to provide increasingly scientific bases for psychology.. In North America, the behaviorist school gradually prevailed. This current sought to give validity only to observable behaviors. Meanwhile, Gestalt psychology was making its way in Europe, which also worked from the laboratory, but sought a phenomenological interpretation of the findings.

Wolfgang Köhler was one of the mainstays of the Gestalt along with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. Although he was not the most outstanding of that triumvirate, he did contribute valuable elements to the advancement of the new school. This was, in general terms, his life and his work.

“It would be interesting to ask ourselves how many times essential advances in science have been made possible by the fact that the limits of special disciplines have not been respected… jumping the limits is one of the most successful techniques in science”.

-Wolfgang Köhler-

The beginnings of Wolfgang Köhler

Wolfgang Köhler was born in the city of Reval (Estonia), on January 21, 1887. He had a brother and several sisters. His father was a teacher and always instilled in his children a love of knowledge and art. When Wolfgang was only 6 years old, his family moved to Germany, where the future researcher would remain for much of his life.

Wolfgang Köhler’s university education was unique. He went through the universities of Tübingen, then Bonn and then Berlin. During his journey through higher education he was in contact with various disciplines. He was particularly impressed by the biology , physics and psychology. He received his doctorate in this last area in 1909, at the University of Berlin..

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Recently graduated, he began working at the Frankfurt Psychological Institute. He first held the position of assistant and later rose to professor. That’s where he met Max Wertheimer. and Kurt Koffka.

In 1929 he published the first major systematic work dedicated to Gestalt psychology: “Gestalt Psychology.” A revised edition of the work was published in 1947 under the title “Gestalt psychology: an introduction to new concepts in modern psychology.”

The work of the three would become the Gestalt school. In 1912 he married the artist Thekla Achenbach. A year later he was appointed director of the Anthropomorphic Monkey Research Center at the Academy of Applied Sciences of Tenerife in Preussen. His whole life would change.

Chimpanzee watching in Tenerife

Wolfgang Köhler was the first to use chimpanzees as a basis for a psychology study. Previously he had only experimented with dogs and cats in terms of conditioning. Assuming that apes were related to the human race, one of Köhler’s main objectives was to see to what extent they were similar and to what extent they differed from humans in relation to learning.

Based on his research, Wolfgang Köhler establishes the concept of learning by insightthat is, by sudden insight based on a series of previous stimuli. He presents this concept in his work The monkey mentalitypublished in 1925. In it he describes several of the experiments carried out in Tenerife.

What Köhler did with the chimpanzees was basically hinder their goal of getting food that was in their sight. At the same time, he put tools in their environment that allowed them to overcome the obstacle. The researcher discovered that The apes managed to solve the problem, but they did not do it in a linear way. That is to say, there were sort of abrupt jumps in their reasoning and performance.

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Köhler’s last years

During his stay in Tenerife the First World War occurred. There was much speculation linking Köhler to espionage for the British. That is why in 1920 he was retired from his job on the island and returned to Berlin.. At that time his fame grew and he was increasingly sought after by academic centers around the world.

Wolfgang Köhler spoke publicly against National Socialism. Thus, When World War II began, he had to emigrate to the United States., since he feared for his life. There he was hired as a teacher at prestigious universities such as Princeton and Dartmouth. In 1956 he was named president of the APA (American Psychological Association).

Despite his retirement, Köhler continued to participate in conferences and symposiums. A few years later he would be named an honorary citizen of Berlin.

Köhler’s legacy

Köhler died in 1967, in New Hampshire. His concept of insight It is still valid in psychology. His best-known works are Intelligence tests in anthropoids (1917), Dynamics in psychology (1940), The psychology of form (1947) and Dynamic connections in psychology (1959).