1. a movement considered to be the first school of psychology as a science, independent of philosophy. Usually attributed to Wilhelm Wundt, but probably more strongly and directly influenced by Edward Bradford Titchener, structuralism defined psychology as the study of mental experience and sought to investigate the structure of such experience through a systematic program of experiments based on trained introspection. Also called structural psychology.

2. a movement in various disciplines that study human behavior and culture that enjoyed particular currency in the 1960s and 1970s. The movement took its impetus from the radically new approach to linguistic analysis pioneered by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Against the prevailing historical and comparative approaches, Saussure maintained that a language is a closed system that must be approached through the detail of its internal structure; linguistic signs (written or spoken words) acquire meaning not through their relationships to external referents but through their structural relationships to other signs in the same system (see arbitrary symbol). The meaning of any particular use of language is therefore grounded in the total abstract system of that language, which is largely defined by a pattern of functional contrasts between elements (see binary feature; minimal pair). The structuralist model of language was extended to cover essentially all social and cultural phenomena, including human thought and action, in the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). For structuralists in anthropology and the other social sciences, there is a connection between the events of the lived world and a deeper structure of abstract relationships and ideas that provides meaning to the events. Structuralist explanations play down individual autonomy and agency, positivistic science, and linear-time causation in favor of explanations in terms of structural and systemic influences operating in the present to produce rule-governed behavior, the true nature of which can be revealed as the underlying structures are revealed. In the 1960s, structuralist ideas exerted a major influence on literary studies; they also provided a basic intellectual framework for the new field of semiotics, which studies the ways in which verbal and nonverbal signs acquire meaning within particular codes of signification. During subsequent decades, structuralism increasingly gave way to poststructuralism.