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In psychology, mentalism is an umbrella term that refers to those branches of study that concentrate on mental perception and thought processes, in other words, consciousness, like cognitive psychology. This is in opposition to disciplines, such as most notably behaviorism, that believe the study of see psychology should focus on as a the structure of causal relationships to conditioned responses, that is to say behaviors, and seek to prove this hypothesis through scientific methods and experimentation. Over the course of the history of psychology, mentalism and behaviorism have clashed, with one or the other representing the dominant paradigm of psychological investigation.

Classical Mentalism
Mentalism dates back to the very founding of the field. "Classical Mentalism", as it is sometimes called, tied together many differing schools of psychological thought from the beginning, and introspective techniques were the norm when it came to research, making psychology an inherently subjective field. Prominent figures ranged from Edward Titchener to William James; despite Titchener being a Structuralist and James being of the Functionalist school of thought, both agreed on one thing: consciousness was indisputably the subject matter of psychology.

Behaviorism Takes Over
Concurrently thriving alongside mentalism since the inception of psychology was the idea of behaviorism, but it was not until 1913, when psychologist John B. Watson published his article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" that it began to steal the spotlight from classical mentalism. Watson's ideas sparked a paradigm shift in the world of psychology, leading to the objective and experimental study of human behavior, rather than subjective, introspective study of human consciousness--the study of which was seen as impossible to truly do, and the focus on it to that point had only been a hindrance to the field reaching its full potential. Behaviorism would go on to be the dominant force driving psychological thought, and was advanced by the work of other luminaries such as B.F. Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, and Edward Thorndike.

The New Mentalism
The reign of behaviorism was not to last, however. While it remains a thriving, vibrant field to this day, a scathing review of B.F. Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" by Noam Chomsky in 1959 heralded a shift back focusing on consciousness in psychology with the beginning of the "cognitive revolution". Critical to the successful revival of the mind or consciousness as the primary focus of study in psychological inquiry were advances in the computer sciences and neurosciences, which allowed for brain mapping and the information processing model of brain function to flourish. At last, mentalism had an objectively experimental way to study the mind, effectively nullifying the main criticism that led to its downfall half a century earlier.

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