Understanding the “Abstract Attitude” in Conceptual Thinking

Some cognitive abilities feel so natural that we rarely stop to question how they work. You plan your week ahead, understand the rules of a game you’ve never played before, and group objects by what they have in common rather than just how they look. All of these rely on a specific mental capacity that psychologists call the abstract attitude – a concept that remains foundational to understanding how human cognition operates at its highest levels.

Where the concept came from 🔗

Kurt Goldstein, a German neurologist and psychiatrist, spent years working with brain-injured soldiers after World War I. What he observed was striking: patients with certain types of brain damage lost the ability to think in general terms. They could handle immediate, tangible situations but struggled to reason beyond what was directly in front of them. Goldstein collaborated with psychologist Martin Scheerer to formalize this observation, and in 1941 they published their landmark monograph on abstract and concrete behavior. Their work established that normal individuals can operate at two qualitatively different levels of cognition – abstract and concrete – while impaired individuals are often limited to concrete behavior only.

The abstract attitude, as Goldstein and Scheerer defined it, is not a single skill. It is a dynamic mental stance composed of eight distinct characteristics. Importantly, they did not consider these characteristics acquired or learned behaviors – they viewed them as capacity levels of the entire personality.

The eight characteristics of the abstract attitude 🔗

Goldstein and Scheerer outlined eight defining features of the abstract attitude. Together, they describe a mind capable of operating beyond what the senses immediately present.

1. Detachment from the outer world and inner experiences 🔗

The first characteristic is the ability to step back from direct sensory experience. The concrete attitude, by contrast, represents an inability to detach from the immediate sensory field – characterized by rigidity and an inability to generalize, where the individual reacts only to the stimulus currently in front of them. Abstract thinkers can override this pull, allowing them to engage with ideas independent of what they are currently perceiving.

2. Assuming a mental set 🔗

This refers to the capacity to adopt a deliberate cognitive framework before engaging with a problem. Rather than reacting impulsively, a person with a strong abstract attitude prepares their mind to approach the task in a purposeful way. In the Goldstein-Scheerer tests, this is directly assessed through tasks requiring respondents to sort items into categories according to abstract principles such as color, form, and material.

3. Verbalizing accounts of one’s actions 🔗

Abstract thinkers can articulate the reasoning behind their behavior. They do not just act – they can explain why they acted. This self-reporting capacity is tied to metacognition: the awareness of one’s own thought processes. Goldstein linked the loss of this capacity to aphasia – not as a simple loss of words, but as a dedifferentiation of language resulting from impaired abstraction.

4. Shifting reflectively from one aspect of a situation to another 🔗

This is cognitive flexibility – the ability to consciously redirect attention and switch perspectives when needed. This capacity for volitional mental set shifting allows for adaptable, non-rigid problem-solving when a situation demands a new approach. Without this ability, thinking becomes perseverative – stuck on one approach even when it is clearly not working.

5. Holding various aspects in mind simultaneously 🔗

Complex reasoning requires working memory – the ability to keep multiple elements active in the mind at once. MIT researchers studying the prefrontal cortex found that people with impaired abstract thinking often cannot coordinate multiple pieces of information simultaneously, even when the individual memory components remain intact. This is what makes abstract thought more than just simple recall.

6. Grasping the essential of a given whole 🔗

This characteristic involves identifying what matters most in a complex situation – extracting the core structure rather than being distracted by surface-level details. It requires the ability to break a whole into its parts, and then synthesize those parts back into a coherent understanding. When this ability is disrupted, individuals struggle to generalize solutions and fail to see relationships between new and previously encountered situations.

7. Abstracting common properties and forming hierarchic concepts 🔗

This is the ability to recognize shared features across different objects or events and group them under a common category. In the Goldstein-Scheerer Object Sorting Test, subjects must sort over thirty everyday objects into conceptual groups based on color, form, material, or use – and explain the basis of the sort. A person functioning concretely may arrange objects based on how they look together spatially, rather than identifying the abstract category that unites them.

8. Planning ahead ideationally 🔗

The final characteristic is forward-thinking – the ability to think about situations that do not yet exist, reason about possibilities, and act symbolically. Goldstein described this as treating objects and events as instances of a class, allowing deliberate planning and accounting for one’s actions. This maps closely onto what modern neuropsychology calls executive function – particularly planning, inhibitory control, and goal-directed behavior, all of which are housed primarily in the prefrontal cortex.

Abstract versus concrete: two ends of a spectrum 🔗

Goldstein and Scheerer did not see abstract and concrete thinking as opposites in a rigid binary. They described them as two levels of cognitive functioning that coexist in healthy individuals. Normal cognition involves moving fluidly between these levels depending on the demands of the situation. The transition away from purely concrete thinking in development typically begins around age 11 or 12, coinciding with the maturation of the prefrontal cortex and entry into what Piaget called the Formal Operational Stage.

When the abstract attitude is lost or impaired, the individual becomes what Goldstein called “stimulus-bound” – entirely at the mercy of immediate sensory input. As one MIT researcher described it, without abstract capacity, a person acts on whatever they see automatically, whether or not it serves their broader goals. This is not just an inconvenience – it fundamentally compromises the ability to manage relationships, work, and daily responsibilities.

The brain basis of abstract thinking 🔗

Research from MIT identified the prefrontal cortex as the region responsible for encoding abstract rules – determining the “rules of the game” without playing the game itself. This finding was significant because it reframed certain cognitive impairments previously attributed to memory loss as more likely being deficits in abstract thinking. Impairment of the abstract attitude is most prominently associated with frontal lobe damage, the brain region critical for executive functions and volitional control.

Abnormal functioning of the prefrontal cortex has been implicated in schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder – all conditions where cognitive flexibility and rule-based reasoning are demonstrably affected. Neuroimaging research has further shown that abstract thinking engages the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and regions of the default mode network – areas involved in integrating cognitive and affective information.

How the abstract attitude is assessed clinically 🔗

The Goldstein-Scheerer tests, first published in 1941, assess abstract thinking and concept formation through tasks involving copying colored designs, sorting items by category, and reproducing patterns from memory. They were designed specifically to diagnose neurological damage and to differentiate individuals capable of abstract reasoning from those limited to concrete responses.

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), which grew out of this same tradition, requires subjects to sort cards by hidden rules that change without warning. It directly assesses the ability to shift mental sets and inhibit perseverative responses – both hallmarks of the abstract attitude. Inability to adapt when the sorting rule changes is a classic indicator of concrete, stimulus-bound thinking.

Goldstein’s approach was notably qualitative rather than purely quantitative – he was more interested in the nature and pattern of a patient’s errors than in a numerical score. This clinical orientation influenced generations of neuropsychologists who recognized that what a patient does wrong tells you as much as what they do right.

Why the abstract attitude matters beyond the clinic 🔗

The abstract attitude is not just a clinical construct. It underlies many of the cognitive demands encountered in education, the workplace, and everyday problem-solving. Abstract thinking – understanding concepts like fairness or risk that are real but not tied to physical objects – is a core component of executive functioning, alongside working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. All of these develop throughout childhood and into early adulthood, following the maturation of the frontal lobes.

When someone struggles to understand figurative language, generalize a strategy to a new context, or think beyond the immediate situation, these difficulties often trace back to limitations in the abstract attitude. In children who have experienced brain injuries, these difficulties commonly include not understanding theoretical ideas, missing figurative language by interpreting it too literally, and failing to follow inferences in discussions or lessons. Recognizing these patterns allows clinicians and educators to target the specific cognitive capacities that underlie higher-order thinking.

What do you think? If the abstract attitude operates as a capacity of the whole personality rather than a single learnable skill, what does that suggest about how we design assessments for cognitive impairment? And considering that the prefrontal cortex continues developing into the mid-20s, how might a young adult’s abstract reasoning differ from that of someone in midlife – and should that difference be factored into how we interpret cognitive evaluations?

References

1. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/goldstein-kurt
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34231650/
3. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED289891.pdf
4. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/trm/abstract-attitude-2/
5. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095858683
6. https://news.mit.edu/2001/abstractthought
7. https://www.rch.org.au/kidsinfo/fact_sheets/Brain_injury_Reasoning_and_abstract_thinking/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions
9. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/trm/concrete-thinking/
10. https://news.mit.edu/2001/abstract-0718
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4014104/
12. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278262608000250
13. https://mindmotioncenters.com/what-is-executive-functioning-issues-diagnosis-treatments/