On what grounds did Gestalt psychologists criticize behaviorism?
The Gestalt psychology was a movement which cropped up in Germany in 1912. This theory proposes that entirety is more important than the individual tendencies. The perception of a visual scene as a whole helps in finding order and unity, among the unrelated parts. It considers learning process as a whole, not just the external stimulus response. According to this philosophy, the whole of an experience has more significance rather than the individual parts.
The behaviorist theory came up in the United States. It treated psychology as a science, where the theories are required to be supported, by giving empirical data. Psychology was treated objectively, where behavior of a being is based only on observation. It is not influenced by internal events. The behaviorist always viewed psychology as Newtonian science. They were not in agreement with the concept of consciousness.
Gestalt psychologists were not in agreement with the reductionistic attitude of the behaviorist school of thought. Behaviorism did not take into account the internal consciousness like emotions and thinking. It was only concerned with what can be observed. Gestalts opposed this view, rendering such a development of psychology as useless. They believed by eliminating consciousness, psychology was reduced to a mere study, involving collection of animal research data.