The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

Gestalt psychology originated as a German intellectual movement heavily influenced by the precedents of the Würzburg school and phenomenological approaches to science. The early Gestaltists directly challenged Wundt’s structural psychology and were largely successful in pursuing the traditions of Brentano and Stumpf. Originating in Wertheimer’s research on apparent movement, or the phi phenomenon, the Gestalt principles were founded on the assumption of the inherent organization of person-environment interactions. The writings of Köhler and Koffka expanded the perceptual basis to formulate a comprehensive system of psychology especially amenable to higher thought processes of insight, understanding, and productive thinking. When the movement was threatened with destruction by the intellectual sterility of Nazi tyranny, the leaders fled to America. Unfortunately, the Gestalt movement was out of tune with the prevailing behavioristic character of American psychology. However, the Gestaltists assumed an important role in broadening the basis of behaviorism to foster a complete view of learning processes. One application of Gestalt views, contained in Lewin’s field theory, met with success in providing an empirical model of personality and social activities. The Gestalt movement, although it did not retain a separate identity, contributed greatly to the reformulation of psychology.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

As psychology emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, advances were made in the understanding of the nervous system. The specific functions of nerve fibers were described by Bell and Magendie. Müller’s analysis of neural conduction led Du Bois-Reymond and Helmholtz to describe the nerve impulse. As a reaction against Gall’s phrenology, localization of brain functions reached systematic description by Flourens and Sherrington. Concurrently, advances in physics led to experimental studies of sensations by Young, Helmholtz, and Müller, while Purkinje justified subjective sensory experience. The second intellectual backdrop to psychology was psychophysics, which proposed that sensory experience is not completely reducible to physics and physiology. Although Weber contributed both methodologically and substantively to psychophysics, its clearest expression is found in the quantitative analysis of Fechner. His work received strong support from the experiments of Helmholtz, especially in his doctrine of unconscious inference in perception. The final movement was centered on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which completed the Copernican revolution in science and established the primacy of scientific empiricism. Spencer applied Darwin’s writings to evolutionary associationism, and Galton made an intensive examination of individual differences through mental testing. All three movements demonstrated the efficacy of empirical science.

What concept does the word ‘belief’ express, and how does it fit into the Theory of Mind? In its repertoire of syntactic niches (some not noticed in the literature) and in its range from stereotypical to marginal cases, "believe" is quite a typical word. The analysis offered here reveals striking grammatical and semantic parallels to expressions that denote depictions, such as "picture," "map," and "performance." These parallels provide unexpected solutions to classical philosophical puzzles about "belief." The analysis is extended to other propositional attitude predicates, to speech–act predicates, to predicates of actional attitude such as "intend" and "vow," and to commitment to norms of all sorts. These conclusions provide a sense of the richness of folk psychology and of how detailed linguistic analysis can uncover it, presenting challenges for future research.

The belief–action gap was originally conceptualized by psychologists who aimed to ground behaviour in beliefs but found that their models had little predictive value. The recurrent use of this concept often comes with the assumption that human behaviour is somewhat irrational or weirdly misaligned with their beliefs. This gap is particularly striking in the environmental domain, where many people seemingly think one way but act another. In this chapter, we review a number of factors that hinder general beliefs from translating into actual behaviors. We emphasize the existence of measurement issues, information deficits about the exact impact of one’s actions, structural factors, and psychological factors that together impact the robustness of the association between beliefs and actions. In particular, socio-cognitive factors have a massive impact on people’s decisions to act in ways that are aligned with their deep-seated beliefs. Once all these factors are properly taken into account, it becomes clear that the belief–action gap is not a token of human irrationality but should in fact be expected.

The excitement of cognitive psychology as a viable paradigm for contemporary research and application developed from a number of trends deeply imbedded in psychology’s past. In the twentieth century, these influences were clearly evident among the functionalists, the Gestalt movement, Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, as well as in the extended subfields of psychology, such as developmental, social, personality and clinical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, such specified advances as Bartlett’s schema theory, Hebb’s neural networks, and Broadbent’s filter model of attention provided cognitive psychology with substantive direction. The question of artificial intelligence contributed to a paradigm shift through the efforts of pioneers such as Turing and the logical theorist studies of Newell, Shaw and Simon, leading to what is described by some as the cognitive revolution. The seminal research of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser gave cognitive science its form and substance. The question of the sustainability of the cognitive paradigm remains a topic for reflection.

The theme of the essential activity of the mind provided the exciting intellectual setting that made a compelling case for psychology’s founding, and also gave rise to competing models of psychology. Structural or content psychology, championed by Wundt and Titchener, defined psychology as the experimental study of the data of immediate experience through the method of trained introspection. This natural science model sought to reduce the contents of consciousness to constituent elements of sensory origin. The restricted definition and ambiguous methodology led to challenges. Nevertheless, structural psychology secured recognition of psychology as a science, and Müller, Hering, and Ebbinghaus, attempted to modify structural psychology. Additionally, Mach and Avenarius bolstered the justification for psychology as a natural science. An alternative, described as a human science model, proposed more open definition and methodologies. Brentano’s act psychology stated that the phenomenological processes of psychological events are inseparable from the environment and consciousness. The works of Stumpf, Külpe, Dilthey and Bergson all fall into the human science model, but the lack of systematic theory reduced their successful competition with structural psychology. In many respects, the “founding” of modern psychology was a false beginning, and neither model established a lasting framework for psychology.

One bad act can permanently stain perceptions of someone’s character. Being labeled a criminal potentially has such an enduring stigma because of people’s willingness to believe that people have an internal, unchanging essence leading them to transgress. In Study 1, we developed a novel scale to assess individual differences in essentialist beliefs about criminality and found that these beliefs predicted punitiveness. Study 2 replicated these findings and also revealed that participants’ attitudes toward people who had committed crimes mediated this link. Study 3 found that participants who held essential beliefs about criminality were more likely to choose retributive punishments over those that prevented future harm. These results illustrate the importance of essentialist beliefs in the context of the legal system.

Scientific ideas are difficult to teach, difficult to learn, and difficult to accept as true because they contradict our intuitive theories of the world, constructed in childhood but retained across the lifespan, influencing our thinking even as adults. In this chapter, I discuss what intuitive theories are, where they come from, and why they blind us to more accurate theories of the world. I explore two case studies – projectile motion and evolutionary adaptation – to illustrate how intuitive theories are historically entrenched, culturally widespread, resistant to counterevidence, maladaptive for behavior, and seemingly inerasable. I conclude by considering the impact of intuitive theories on human belief and behavior more generally.

Beliefs have been studied across disciplines using a variety of approaches. In the human memory literature, expectations and beliefs drawn from prior knowledge are characterized and studied as schematic knowledge. In this chapter, we will discuss the role schematic knowledge plays in guiding the formation and retrieval of memories. A central focus will be placed upon understanding why retrieved memories are biased toward prior beliefs or schematic knowledge. Through a review of computational models and empirical findings, this chapter will convey that even though prior beliefs generate memory biases, these memory biases ultimately maximize the average memory accuracy – giving rise to optimal behavior. In the last section of the chapter, I will connect these modeling frameworks to more recent empirical results on the role of schematic knowledge, identifying potential future directions for updating the models and venues for conducting new experiments.