Wolfgang Köhler

Wolfgang Köhler (1887 to 1967) was a German psychologist who, with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, created Gestalt psychology, the view that mental wholes are different from the sum of their parts. Born in Reval, now Tallinn, to an ethnic German family, he studied at Tübingen, Bonn and Berlin and took his doctorate under Carl Stumpf in 1909. Directing a primate research station on Tenerife from 1913, he watched chimpanzees stack crates and join sticks to reach food, and concluded in The Mentality of Apes that they solved problems by insight rather than by the trial and error that Edward Thorndike had emphasised. That finding shaped later thinking about learning as the restructuring of a problem. After protesting against Nazi interference with universities he emigrated in 1935 to the United States, where he taught at Swarthmore College for about twenty years.