author
Wolfgang Köhler
A founder of Gestalt psychology, he helped change how people think about perception, learning, and problem-solving. His famous studies of chimpanzees made “insight” a lasting idea in psychology.
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Gestalt psychology
by Wolfgang Köhler
About the author
Born in Reval, then part of the Russian Empire and now Tallinn, Estonia, in 1887, Wolfgang Köhler became one of the central figures in Gestalt psychology alongside Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. He studied in Germany and earned his doctorate under Carl Stumpf, later teaching and doing research in Frankfurt and Berlin.
Köhler is especially remembered for his work on problem-solving in chimpanzees at the Prussian Academy's anthropoid station on Tenerife. Those experiments argued that learning was not just trial and error: animals could sometimes solve problems through sudden insight, an idea that became highly influential far beyond comparative psychology.
He later moved to the United States and taught at Swarthmore College. Across his career, he wrote on perception, thinking, and the idea that mental life should be understood as organized wholes rather than isolated parts, helping make Gestalt psychology one of the most important movements in 20th-century psychology.