Egon Brunswik

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Egon Brunswik (born March 18, 1903 in Budapest as Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa, † July 7, 1955 in Berkeley (California) ) was an American psychologist of Austro-Hungarian origin.

Life

As a child, Egon Brunswik went to Vienna to attend the Theresian Academy . He then studied engineering at the Vienna University of Technology , but then turned to psychology and studied it together with Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and Konrad Lorenz at the University of Vienna . In 1927 he received his doctorate under Karl Bühler . During a visiting professorship in Ankara in 1931/32 he founded the first psychological laboratory in Turkey. During his assistantship in Vienna he met Edward Tolman , who was a guest in Vienna in 1933. In the summer of 1933 he submitted his habilitation to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna on the subject of perception and the world of objects , which was then accepted in 1934. He was the first habilitation applicant who wanted to have the venia legendi granted only for the field of psychology. This is important insofar as it represented a further step in the separation of the subject psychology from the mother discipline philosophy . In 1936 he received a call from Tolman to Berkeley University in California. In 1937 he married the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Else Frenkel , whom he already knew from Vienna.

Work topics

Brunswik emphasizes the importance of the environment for the subject looking for valid information. The same object is perceived differently by the subject again and again, so that it has to draw conclusions about the nature of the object from the various information: The environment cannot be perceived directly, but has to be made accessible. Figuratively, a “fan” of cues emanates from the environmental object, which the observer brings together again for a judgment: the Brunswik lens . This makes it clear that perception is always based on conclusions about a probabilistic environment based on previous experience and weightings . (see also fuzzy logic ). This is known as probabilistic functionalism .

Brunswik then asks why we still come to quite reliable conclusions about our environment and shows that different cues can replace one another. Consequently, he rejects laboratory experiments that make switching off such other variables the core of their approach, as artificial and ecologically inconclusive. He thus becomes a founder of ecological approaches in psychology and at the same time an early cognitive psychologist through the inferring subject .

The Brunswik lens model has proven to be extremely productive as a structural model for topics such as perception , learning , decision-making , curiosity and communication . In its basic features it is based on ideas of Fritz Heider , which he presented in his book Ding und Medium . It was taken up and further developed in various theories such as the Social Judgment Theory (SJT) and mathematized in 1964 by Albert William Tucker . In this form, it is still used today for basic research designs.

He coined the term “ ratiomorphic apparatus”, a preconscious tacit knowledge that does not arise from reflected rational thinking.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Norbert Bischof: Psychology. A basic course for the discerning. 2nd edition, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2009, p. 261.
  2. ^ Austrian sociologists in exile. 1933 to 1945. ( Memento of the original from June 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / agso.uni-graz.at
  3. ^ Roland W. Scholz: "Mutual Learning" and Probabilistic Functionalism. What universities and society can learn from each other and from Egon Brunswik. ( Memento of the original from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Working Paper of Environmental Natural and Environmental Social Sciences (UNS) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, May 1999, p. 5 (PDF; 5.5 MB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uns.ethz.ch
  4. ^ Riedl, R. 1987. Culture: Late ignition of evolution? Answers to questions about evolution and epistemology. Munich: Piper. Pp. 187, 197
  5. ↑ First mentioned in Brunswik, E. (1955). "Ratiomorphic" models of perception and thinking. Acta Psychologica, 11, 108-109.

Publications (selection)

  • Perception and the world of objects: the foundation of a psychology from the object . Deuticke, Leipzig 1934
  • Experimental psychology in demonstrations . Springer, Vienna 1935
  • The Organism and the Causal Texture of the Environment . In: Psychol. Rev. Volume 42, 1935, pp. 43-77. (E. Tolman &)
  • Probability as a determiner of rat behavior . In: Journal of Experimental Psychology Volume 25, 1939
  • The conceptual focus of systems . In: MH Marx (Ed.): Psychologicals theory . MacMillan, New York 1951 (originally from 1939)
  • Organismic achievement and environmental probability . In: Psychological Review. Volume 50, 1943, pp. 255-272
  • The Conceptual Framework of Biology (= International Encyclopedia of Unified Science . Volume 1, No. 10). University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1952; 5th edition 1969.
  • Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments . University of California Press, Berkeley 1956 (originally from 1947)
  • The conceptual framework of psychology . Chicago 1952

literature

  • KR Fischer, F. Stadler (ed.): Perception and the world of objects: On the life's work of Egon Brunswik (1903–1955). Springer, Vienna 1997.
  • Kenneth R. Hammond (Ed.): The Psychology of Egon Brunswik. Holt, New York 1966.
  • Kenneth R. Hammond, TR Stewart (Ed.): The Essential Brunswik. Oxford University Press, Cary, NC 2001.
  • Edward Tolman: Egon Brunswik: 1903–1955. In: American Journal of Psychology. Volume 69, No. 2, 1956, pp. 315-324.
  • Bernhard Wolf: Brunswik and ecological perspectives in psychology. Weinheim 1995.
  • Uwe Wolfradt, Elfriede Billmann-Mahecha, Armin Stock (eds.): German-speaking psychologists 1933–1945: An encyclopedia of persons, supplemented by a text by Erich Stern. Springer-Verlag, 2014, ISBN 3-658-01481-4 X .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brunswik, Egon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brunswik Edler from Korompa, Egon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1955
Place of death Berkeley, California