Gestalt Seen in My Life

Psychology covers numerous topics that involve principles studied by psychologists to explain the reason humans make their real life decisions. One example of this is Gestalt’s principles or laws of perception. He believed that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and because of this, he set in stone something known as grouping laws. These were six laws that showed how grouping was essential in understanding certain concepts.

He starts with the law of proximity where we group together things that are closer together. Next, he discusses the law of similarity where we group together things that have similar characteristics. The law of continuation is next where we group together objects whose contours form a continuous straight or curved line. After that, he discusses connectedness where we interpret the figures differently based on the way that they are connected. Common fate is another law where he states that we group objects based on movement. Gestalt’s last principle is pragnanz where we perceive a pattern as simple as possible. Here we look for simple and symmetric forms in our environment. These six principles are known as gestalts principles and are seen in our every day life.

Like stated earlier, we see Gestalt’s principles every day in our own lives. Recently, I experienced a great example of a time where I needed to use the law of proximity and the law of similarity. My friends and I decided to go out to dinner since everyone was home. As weird as it is, most of my friends go to the same four schools so a lot of us have our home friends at college as well! Since all of us were finally out of school, we decided to go grab a bite to eat but as we were walking up to a deli, we noticed an old restaurant known as ‘Ferroro’s’ that we used to go to. Feeling a little nostalgic, we decided to go there instead. I was in the front of my friends so when we walked in the waitress asked us how many people we had so she could find us a table. Since we were initially going to an informal place that did not involve a person count, we didn’t know how many people there were. Luckily, my friends were standing in the same groups as their schools. I know that there are three friends per school in my friend group and there are four colleges in our friend group. With this information, I turned around and saw them in their separate groups and immediately calculated that four times three would be 12 and that we were a 12 person group.

This real life experience included two of Gestalt’s principles. I used the proximity law here since they were standing in little clusters of even sizes. With this, I was able to calculate the amount of people our group had. Additionally, I also used the similarity law when I realized that my friends were standing in groups that were their colleges. Here, the college they went to would be the similar characteristic. Therefore, with this experience, I used the proximity and similarity law of Gestalt’s principles with my own life.

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