In this chapter, you learned about the Gestalt school as well as its opposition to other schools in psychology, including structuralism and behaviorism.

The main root of this opposition was the rejection of the idea that psychological theory should amount to a description of isolated elements or simple associations. Alternatively, Gestalt psychologists saw the need for a description of the potentially complex relational principles between elements, such as the principles of similarity, proximity, or continuity.

The Gestalt school and its principles became a central part of psychology that are still visible today in every design and data visualization manual. Nevertheless, as one of its leading proponents, Wolfgang Köhler admitted that “the Gestalt psychologists did make mistakes”, and its proponents struggled with articulating the biological basis or functions of the principles they advocated.

Today, the legacy of Gestalt psychology resides strongly in the ideas of those it influenced: Kurt Lewin used the idea of emergence to propose a new way of interpreting behavior that emphasized the constructive relation between individuals and their surrounding environments; Egon Brunswik aimed to understand the function of the Gestalt principles and articulate a general model of perceptual inference in the form of the lens model.

Gestalt psychology and those it influenced contributed to an emphasis on the relation between humans and their physical and social environment and a continuing expansion of psychology to an ever broader set of life domains and problems, including social and organizational behavior as well as judgment and decision-making.

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