Egon Brunswik

Life

Brunswik is born in Budapest. He graduates from the Theresianische Akademie in 1921, after studying mathematics, science, classics, and history. He enrolls as a student of psychology at the University of Vienna, where he becomes an assistant in Karl Bühler's Psychological Institute (student colleagues included Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Konrad Lorenz) and receives a PhD in 1927. While a graduate student in psychology, he also passes the state examination for Gymnasium teachers in mathematics and physics.

Brunswik establishes the first psychological laboratory in Turkey while he is visiting lecturer in Ankara during 1931-1932. He becomes Privatdozent at the University of Vienna in 1934. In 1933, however, Edward C. Tolman, chairman of the department of psychology at the University of California, spend a year in Vienna. He and Brunswik find that although they are working in different areas of psychological research, their theories of behavior are complementary.

Brunswik meets Edward C. Tolman in Vienna during 1933, and in 1935-1936 receives a Rockefeller fellowship that enables him to visit the University of California. He remains at Berkeley where he becomes assistant professor of psychology in 1937 and a full professor in 1947.

On June 6, 1938, in New York City Brunswik marries Else Frenkel-Brunswik (also a former assistant in Buhler's institute), who becomes well known as a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist and investigator of the authoritarian personality. Also in 1938 he participates in the International Committee composed to organise the International Congresses for the Unity of Science. Brunswik becomes an American citizen in 1943.

After a long and painful bout of severe hypertension, Egon commits suicide in 1955.

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 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.