Associationism

Synonyms

Association psychology; Association theory

Definition

“Associationism” can refer to a well-defined historical tradition or, more controversially, to a range of approaches influenced by the former. The historical tradition, developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century mainly by British philosophers, appealed to the association of mental contents with one another to explain the nature of human thought and knowledge. Current forms of associationism assume that complex psychological units are built from simpler elements on the basis of experience and through a process (“association”) that is both general across domains and structure-independent. This process is typically sensitive to coincidences, correlations, or statistical dependencies among events, and the psychological units formed on its basis come to reflect such dependencies.

Theoretical Background

The philosophical tradition of associationism can be traced back to Aristotle, but it developed mainly from the...