Constructivism (psychological school)

Constructivism, as a school of psychological thought, names a family of approaches found across different branches of psychology that share a common critique of earlier standard models, among them behaviorism's stimulus-reaction account of behavior and associationism's view of the mind as a passive system that merely copies the order of external reality. Against those models, constructivist psychologists hold that psychological phenomena, from physical actions to cognitive processes, are actively constructed anew each time from the body's current state, its context, available resources, and prior experience and habit, with behavior itself built through the selection and sequencing of actions, emotions and perceptions. The school traces its own principles to observations made within biology before the twentieth century, reflected in the theories of evolution and genetics and in the generative, ever-renewing nature of biological structures such as cells and organisms. Despite this lineage, the behaviorist picture of behavior as a passive reaction to stimuli has remained prominent within psychology into the present, a persistence the constructivist school regards as incompatible with its own principles.