What Is the Structuralist Perspective?
Quick Answer
The structuralist perspective in the social sciences is an holistic theoretical paradigm based on the Gestalt psychology principle that human behavior and experience are essentially structural in nature, that is, that they consist of individual units that researchers can isolate and study alone in order to gain a greater understanding of the whole. The structuralist perspective has implications for a range of fields, including psychology, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy.
Continue ReadingFull Answer
Influenced by the "elementist" movement in the natural sciences, it was the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt who introduced structuralism. Wundt based this new psychological paradigm on his observation that conscious experiences must be defined in terms of their characteristics. The emotion of sadness, for example, cannot be usefully defined as 'sadness'; it needs to be defined in terms of its basic traits, such as specific thoughts, physical feelings, and so forth.
Between the 1920s and 1930s, Ferdinand de Saussure extended the structuralist perspective to linguistics, noting that while speakers of any language are all aware of the units of their language, which are the grammatical rules and conventions, they are not necessarily able to explain or even identify them.
Structural anthropology, meanwhile, which was pioneered by Claude Levi-Strauss in the 1940s, took de Saussure's observation further and applied it to human culture in addition to language. The units of a culture may be emic, which is classified or understood within the culture, or etic, which is classified or observed by a cultural outsider.
Learn more about PsychologyRelated Questions
-
Q:
What Is Negative Reinforcement?
A: Negative reinforcement is a concept in psychology's theory of operant conditioning that suggests a behavior is strengthened when a negative outcome is stop... Full Answer >Filed Under: -
Q:
What Is the Observer Effect in Psychology?
A: The observer effect in psychology, also known as the Hawthorne effect, refers to subjects altering their behavior when they are aware that an observer is p... Full Answer >Filed Under: -
Q:
What Is Stimulus Discrimination in Psychology?
A: Stimulus discrimination occurs in psychology when there are different consequences for the same behavior depending on the situation. An example of a stimul... Full Answer >Filed Under: -
Q:
What Is the Study of Human Behavior?
A: The study of human social behavior is called sociology, while the study of the individual human mind and behavior is called psychology. Sociology basically... Full Answer >Filed Under:
