Gestalt Psychology

Often summarized by the phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” Gestalt psychology refers to [Page 304]an approach to understanding everyday human experiences as a whole rather than breaking them down into a collection of individual stimuli, behaviors, or both. This approach recognizes the ability of the human brain to piece together separate stimuli in context to one another and their surroundings so that the overall impression of an object, event, or other stimulus provides more information to the individual making the observation than was provided by the individual component stimuli. In other words, the individual may actually experience something that is not present in the stimuli themselves. A common example of this is watching a motion picture at a theater. Motion pictures (on film) actually consist of a series of still shots presented in rapid succession to give the impression of movement. Any one frame of the movie alone is simply a still photograph. When presented in rapid succession, however, the brain is able to fill in the gaps so that the individual has the experience of fluid motion.

This ability of the human brain, referred to as the phi phenomena, was used by Max Wertheimer to demonstrate the value of a holistic approach to studying psychology. Since that time, many other principles of Gestalt psychology have been identified. These include emergence, reification, multi-stability, and invariance. Emergence occurs whenever there is confusion between figure and ground in an image. The figure of an image refers to the subject or object, whereas the ground refers to the setting or background. The classic example of emergence in psychology texts is a black and white picture that initially appears to be random splotches of black ink (figure) on a white paper (ground). When the individual trains his or her eye on the white portion of the picture as the figure instead of the ground, a picture of a spotted Dalmatian dog appears.

Reification is similar to emergence in that the phenomenon is based on the visual relationship between figure and ground. Reification, however, is more often associated with the arrangement of geometric shapes, whereby the relationship of the shapes (figures) on the ground begin to form a shape of the ground. Hence, the ground becomes the figure. Multi-stability refers to the tendency for an ambiguous figure to be interpreted as two or more different figures such that the brain cannot decide which figure is correct. This phenomenon can be isolated to the figure itself (e.g. Necker's cube), as well as a product of figure/ground confusion (e.g. Rubin's Figure/Vase Illusion). Finally, the principle of invariance refers to the brain's ability to recognize simple objects, regardless of distortion (e.g. size, position/rotation).

More important to survey research are the laws of pragnanz, similarity, proximity, and closure. Each of these is critical to the design and layout of self-administered questionnaires, whether on paper or online. The law of pragnanz (“good form”) is defined by the observation that individuals tend to group stimuli in a way that is most easily understood. In other words, the human brain attempts to interpret stimuli in the simplest and most orderly way possible. Thus highly complex graphics and symbols, or unnecessary variations in the layout of questions may increase cognitive burden on the respondent and reduce the quality and quantity of survey responses. The tendency to group similar items is another way the brain attempts to simplify visual elements. This tendency is known as the law of similarity. This again emphasizes the importance of consistent labeling of sections of a questionnaire. Good labels provide structure for the respondent to aide them in completing the questionnaire.

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