Cognitive revolution

Cognitive turn is the term for a development within the paradigms of the psychological science community from behaviorism to cognitivism out.

An important stage in the cognitive revolution was Noam Chomsky's critique of behaviorism (which itself is the subject of criticism ), which he in his review of BF Skinner's book Verbal Behavior has formulated. Became famous for his sentence

"It is quite possible - overwhelmingly probable, one might also guess - that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology. "

(Translation: It is quite possible - overwhelmingly probable, one might guess - that we will always learn more about human life and human personality through novels than by scientific psychology. )

Pioneered Albert Bandura in 1965 with his " Bobo Doll Experiment", the results of which in his opinion could not be explained by behaviorist principles but demanding cognitive processes. In addition, Ulrich Neisser ' Cognitive Psychology ' has helped 1967 the level of knowledge of the ' cognitive psychology ' in the scientific community to break through.

Critics speak of the cognitive revolution ( engl: cognitive revolution ) from the character of a scientific revolution (in the sense of Kuhn ). The behaviorist approach was therefore - even leading representatives of the cognitive revolution, according - not in the sense of Popper's falsified, he did not drown in a "sea of anomalies " and he was not a " degenerating research program " within the meaning Lakatos '. Cause of the cognitive revolution was not a failure of the behaviorist approach to the explanation of phenomena, but rather a ( sociological explanatory ) Change of interests of researchers. Empirical evidence also contradicts the hypothesis that the cognitive turn represents a radical change in scientific psychology: For more articles have been published in behaviorist as in cognitive journals from 1979 to 1988; Moreover, these articles were cited more often. If the behaviorist been replaced by the cognitivist approach, would have been expected as a finding that increasingly cognitivist work will be published and discussed.