Wolfgang Köhler watched chimpanzees stack crates and saw insight, not trial and error
On Tenerife during the First World War, a German psychologist hung bananas out of reach and watched chimpanzees pile up wooden boxes to climb to them. Wolfgang Köhler concluded the apes had grasped the solution before acting, a direct challenge to the idea that animals learn only by blind trial and error.
Köhler was born in 1887 in Reval, now Tallinn, to an ethnic German family that soon moved to Germany. At Berlin he studied physics with Max Planck and psychology with Carl Stumpf, writing a doctorate on acoustics in 1909. As an assistant in Frankfurt from 1910 he and Kurt Koffka served as subjects in Max Wertheimer's studies of apparent motion, and the three went on to found Gestalt psychology, named from the German for shape or form.
In 1913 he became director of the Prussian Academy's ape research station on Tenerife and stayed six years. Given food beyond their reach, his chimpanzees stacked crates as ladders or used sticks to extend their arms. Edward Thorndike had argued that all animal learning rests on trial and error; Köhler saw animals that, once they had the answer, carried it out in a way he called unwaveringly purposeful. The Mentality of Apes (1917) changed how psychologists thought about thinking itself, and he noted that individual chimps differed in ability much as people do.
He fought on two fronts at home and abroad. Against the German introspectionists he argued that self-reports of sensation were subjective and never properly replicated. Against American behaviourism he defended direct experience and pointed out that body signals such as heart rate could reveal inner processes. He was also irritated that his line about wholes was commonly misquoted: his claim was that a whole differs from its parts added up, not that it is greater than them.
Under the Nazis he protested the dismissal of Jewish professors and the demand that lecturers open classes with a Nazi salute. In 1935 he left for the United States, where Swarthmore College gave him a professorship he held for 20 years. He died in 1967, and a 2002 survey placed him 50th among the most cited psychologists of the century.
Source: Wolfgang Köhler
