Egon Brunswik

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

Life

Egon Brunswik went as a child to Vienna on the Theresianische Academy. He then studied engineering at the Technical University of Vienna, but then turned to psychology and studied it along with Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and Konrad Lorenz at the University of Vienna. In 1927 he received his doctorate with Karl Bühler. In a guest lecturer in Ankara 1931/32, he founded the first psychological laboratory in Turkey. During his time as an assistant in Vienna, he became Edward Tolman know that in Vienna in 1933 was a guest. In the summer of 1933 he submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Vienna his habilitation on perception and object world, which was then adopted in 1934. He was the first post-doctoral candidates, the venia legendi wanted to have issued 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 parent discipline philosophy. In 1936 he was awarded by Tolman an appointment at the Berkeley University in California. In 1937 he married there the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Else Frenkel, which he already knew from Vienna.

Thesis topics

Brunswik emphasized the importance of the environment for the searching for valid information subject. The same object is always perceived differently from the subject, so it must be about the different information to make conclusions about the nature of the article: The environment is not directly observable, but must be developed. So Figuratively goes from environmental object " subjects" to cues of which are brought together again for a judgment of observers: the Brunswiksche lens. This makes it clear that perception is always based on prior experience and based by weights conclusions about a probabilistic environment. (see also fuzzy logic). This is known as probabilistic functionalism.

Brunswik then asks why we still occur fairly reliable conclusions about our environment and demonstrates that different cues can replace each other. Consequently, he rejects laboratory tests that just make the turning of such other variables to the core of their action, as artificial and not ecologically meaningful. He is a founder of ecological approaches in psychology and at the same time on the inferential subject an early cognitive psychologist.

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