Mentalism (psychology)

In psychology, mentalism refers to those branches of study that concentrate on mental perception and thought processes, like cognitive psychology. This is in opposition to disciplines, such as behaviorism, that see psychology as a structure of causal relationships to conditioned responses and seek to prove this hypothesis through scientific methods and experimentation.

John Kihlstrom defines mentalism as the belief that mental states are to action as cause is to effect—that mental states cause action.