CONCEPT
Constructivism (Bruner)
Bruner's foundational thesis — demonstrated in the 1947 New Look perception studies — that human beings do not passively receive the world but actively construct their experience through existing cognitive categories. The principle that makes the distinction between acts of meaning and acts of production consequential.
In 1947, Bruner and Leo Postman showed subjects altered playing cards — a red six of spades, a black four of hearts. The subjects could not see the anomalies because their minds had no category to accommodate them. The experiment established that perception is not reception but construction: every act of perception matches incoming sensory data against existing frameworks and produces an interpretation. The mind is not a camera but an architect. This principle drove Bruner's career and has a corollary that is less often stated: if the mind constructs understanding rather than receiving it, the process of construction is not incidental to the understanding — it is constitutive of it. The understanding built through active engagement with difficulty is a different kind of understanding than information delivered whole.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The New Look studies were radical in 1947. Behaviorism still dominated American psychology,