Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa (18 March 1903,

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population o ...

7 July 1955,

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emery ...

) was a psychologist who made contributions to functionalism and the history of psychology.

Life

Early life and education

Brunswik was born in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise o ...

. He graduated from the Theresianische Akademie in 1921, after studying mathematics, science, classics, and history. He enrolled as a student of psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became an assistant in Karl Bühler's Psychological Institute (student colleagues included Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Konrad Lorenz) and received a PhD in 1927. While a graduate student in psychology, he also passed the state examination for Gymnasium teachers in mathematics and physics.

Early career

Brunswik established the first psychological laboratory in Turkey while he was visiting lecturer in

Ankara Ankara ( , ; ), historically known as Ancyra and Angora, is the capital of Turkey. Located in the central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5.1 million in its urban center and over 5.7 million in Ankara Province, mak ...

during 1931–1932. He became Privatdozent at the University of Vienna in 1934. In 1933, however,

Edward C. Tolman Edward Chace Tolman (April 14, 1886 – November 19, 1959) was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Through Tolman's theories and works, he founded what is now a branch of psychology know ...

, chairman of the department of psychology at the University of California, spent a year in Vienna. He and Brunswik found that although they had been working in different areas of psychological research, their theories of behavior were complementary.

Berkeley

Brunswik met

in Vienna during 1933, and in 1935–1936 received a Rockefeller fellowship that enabled him to visit the University of California. He remained at Berkeley where he became an assistant professor of psychology in 1937 and a full professor in 1947.

Later life

On June 6, 1938, in New York City Brunswik married

Else Frenkel-Brunswik Else Frenkel-Brunswik (August 18, 1908 in Lemberg – March 31, 1958 in Berkeley, California, USA) was a Polish- Austrian Jewish psychologist. She was forced to leave Poland and later Austria as a result of anti-Jewish persecution. She is bes ...

(also a former assistant in Buhler's institute), who became well known as a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist and investigator of the authoritarian personality. Also in 1938 he participated in the International Committee composed to organise the International Congresses for the Unity of Science. Brunswik became an American citizen in 1943. After a long and painful bout of severe hypertension, Egon committed suicide in 1955.

Professional contributions

Probabilistic Functionalism

Brunswik's work in Vienna had culminated in the publication of ''Wahrnehmung und Gegenstandswelt'' in 1934. All of his subsequent work was devoted to the extension and elaboration of the fundamental position set forth in this book, namely, that psychology should give as much attention to the properties of the organism's environment as it does to the organism itself. He asserted that the environment with which the organism comes into contact is an uncertain, probabilistic one, however lawful it may be in terms of physical principles. Adaptation to a probabilistic world requires that the organism learn to employ probabilistic means to achieve goals and learn to utilize probabilistic, uncertain evidence (''proximal cues'') about the world (the ''distal object''). His "probabilistic functionalism" was the first behavioral system founded on probabilism, an approach that is attracting increasing attention in the fields of learning, thinking, decision processes, perception, communication and the study of curiosity. Brunswik's emphasis on the importance of the environment is reflected in the increasing development of "psychological ecology." He also created the term ecological validity.

History of psychology

Brunswik wrote a great deal about the history of psychology. His historical analysis is remarkable for its development in structural terms rather than in the customary longitudinal recapitulation of names, dates, and places. It consists of a general identification of the kinds of variables that have traditionally been employed in psychological theory and research and a description of the changes in the emphasis of these variables over time. Brunswik's theory stems as much from his analysis of the history of psychology as it does from his research. His historical as well as his theoretical analysis also led him to criticize orthodox methods of experimental design (particularly the "rule of one variable") and to suggest methods for avoiding what he believed to be an unfortunate artificiality inherent in classical experimental procedures.

Other work

Brunswik's main field of empirical research was perception, but he also brought his probabilistic approach to bear on problems of interpersonal perception, thinking, learning, and clinical psychology. His research findings were published in ''Perception and the Representative Design of Experiments'' (1947), which also includes Brunswik's methodological innovations and related research by others. A feature of Brunswik's work is its coherence. Each theoretical, historical, and research paper is explicitly and tightly integrated with every other one. Brunswik's cast of mind compelled him to fit together with precision his conceptual framework, his methodology, and his views of the history of psychology. In 1952, he presented an overview of the field of psychology in ''The Conceptual Framework of Psychology''.

Reception

Brunswik's ideas received wide attention during his lifetime and continue to do so. The extent of his direct influence on psychology, however, remains doubtful. The application of his ideas in

decision analysis Decision analysis (DA) is the discipline comprising the philosophy, methodology, and professional practice necessary to address important decisions in a formal manner. Decision analysis includes many procedures, methods, and tools for identifying, ...

helped improve the decisions of experts in a variety of fields including cancer prognosis, oil trading, and evaluation of candidates for graduate schools or employment. A specific, practical method for the application for Brunswik's models have been documented in the book ''How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business'' by Douglas Hubbard.

Bibliography

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References

External links

The Brunswik Society

* ttp://www.brunswik.org/photos/Landau2008/index.html "Original Brunswik", 2008 international conference {{DEFAULTSORT:Brunswik, Egon 1903 births 1955 deaths 20th-century Hungarian people 20th-century Austrian people Hungarian psychologists Austrian psychologists University of Vienna alumni Austrian emigrants to the United States University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty 20th-century American psychologists Physicians from Budapest Austrian expatriates in Turkey 1955 suicides