Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [190]
Out-of-Reach Bananas and Other Problems
Sultan, a male chimpanzee living in an anthropoid research center, has had nothing to eat all morning and he is hungry. His keeper lets him into a room where a bunch of bananas is hanging from the ceiling, out of reach. Sultan jumps toward the bananas a few times but comes nowhere near them. He then prowls around the cage, making discontented sounds. Some distance from where the bananas are hanging he comes upon a short stick and a large wooden box. He picks up the stick and tries to knock the bananas down, but they are too high. For a while, he bounces around, upset and angry; then, he suddenly rushes to the box, pulls it under the bananas, climbs up on it, and with a little jump seizes his prize.
Days later: The situation is the same except that now the bananas are hanging considerably higher. This time there is no stick, but there are two boxes, one larger than the other. Sultan knows what to do, or thinks he does. He drags the larger box under the bananas, climbs up, and crouches, as if to jump. But after looking up, he does not; the bananas are well beyond his range. He leaps down, seizes the smaller box, and, pulling it behind him, gallops around the room, shrieking in anger and kicking the walls. Plainly, he seized the second box not with the thought of putting it on the first one but merely to help vent his anger.
But all at once he stops shrieking, pulls the smaller box over to the other one, with some difficulty hoists it on top of the larger one, and climbs up. He has solved the problem. Wolfgang Köhler, watching and making copious notes, is deeply pleased. 17
Köhler conducted a series of studies of chimpanzee mentality between 1914 and 1920 that became almost as famous as Pavlov’s experiments with the salivating dog and Watson’s with little Albert. Not only were Köhler’s findings valuable in themselves but they led directly to similar studies of human problem solving by Gestalt psychologists that produced a number of significant discoveries.
The nature of the thinking involved in problem solving had interested philosophers and psychologists for much of the previous twenty-four centuries, but in Germany the subject had been out of fashion for some time. Like all higher-level mental processes, it lay outside the boundaries of scientific psychology as defined by the physiological psychologists and the Wundtians. In America, although William James and John Dewey had written about problem solving, Thorndike’s puzzle box experiments with cats had led many psychologists to regard it as the result of trial-and-error activity, even in human beings, rather than of conscious planning and problem solving.
Wertheimer, who in his formative years had read and admired Spinoza, took a different view: he believed in the power of the thinking mind. He was impressed, too, by the statements of Galileo and other great discoverers indicating that their breakthroughs often came from a new view of the problem that produced a sudden insight.
To illustrate how such a perception can produce a solution, Wertheimer liked to tell a little anecdote about Karl Gauss, the famous mathematician. When Gauss was six years old, his teacher asked the class who could first give the total of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10. In seconds young Gauss raised his hand. “How did you get it so quickly?” the teacher asked. Gauss said, “If I had to add one and two and three, and so on, it would have taken a long time, but one and ten are eleven, two and nine are eleven, three and eight are eleven, and so on— five elevens in all. The answer is fifty-five.” He had seen a structure that led instantly to a solution of the problem.18
Wertheimer was interested all his life in reasoning and problem solving, and in his last years wrote Productive Thinking (1945), a general discussion of the subject as seen by Gestalt psychology. But other Gestaltists, Köhler leading the