Edwin Ray Guthrie: biography of a pioneer in behavioral psychology.

We review the life and work of one of the leading representatives of behavioral psychology.

Edwin Ray Guthrie (1886 - 1945) was an American mathematician, philosopher and psychologist who developed important theories for the behaviorist tradition of the 20th century. Among other things, Guthrie's proposals impacted learning theories and habit modification interventions.

Below is a biography of Edwin Ray Guthrie and some of his major contributions to behaviorism.

Edwin Ray Guthrie: biography of the American behaviorist

Edwin Ray Guthrie was born on January 9, 1886 in Lincoln City, Nebraska. He was the son of a teacher and a business manager, as well as one of five siblings. He majored in mathematics and later in philosophy and psychology at the University of Nebraska.

In 1912 he obtained a doctorate in symbolic logic at the University of Pennsylvania, and two years later he joined the University of Washington, where he developed most of his professional career as a psychologist, until 1956, when he retired permanently.Two years later he joined the University of Washington, where he developed most of his professional career as a psychologist, until 1956, when he retired definitively.

By the 1930s, Ray Guthrie was already one of the most renowned psychologists in the United States. He had been trained under the tutelage of the neuropsychologist Stevenson Smith, from whom he had learned comparative research methods applied to psychology, as well as the functionalism of the American tradition.

He was also trained in the most representative theories of the clinical practice of the time. In fact, in the same decade, together with his wife, Helen M. Guthrie, he translated important works for psychotherapy, such as the book Principles of Psychotherapy by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, whom they met during a trip to France.

His approach was behaviorist and, given that his previous training had been in the exact sciences, Guthrie was convinced that it was possible to develop an objective scientific method for studying the mind and intervening in behavior. Likewise, because of his training in philosophy, much of his theoretical development was informed by principles of the latter discipline. Among other things, he developed a principle of association, through which he saw the possibility of linking his theory of learning with contemporary research.

Along the same lines, he developed a system of teaching evaluation in university faculties, which made evaluations more accessible to teachers and students, but also to administrators responsible for salary adjustments, promotions and hiring.

In 1945, Ray Guthrie was named president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1958 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation in the United States. Edwin Ray Guthrie died on April 23, 1959 in Seattle, Washington, of cardiac arrest.

Ray Guthrie's principle of association

Guthrie's theory of association is based on the idea that contiguity is what makes learning possible.. In other words, we learn thanks to the proximity between two elements, which in this case are the stimulus and the response. But, unlike classical operant behaviorism, for Guthrie, behaviors are not so much responses as movements. The latter are the largest response units and the ones that need to be analyzed if we want to modify behaviors.

Contiguity is established when the set of elements that characterize a stimulus is accompanied by a movement. Guthrie observed that, in the face of similar elements, the sequence of movement occurred again, which eventually generates a pattern or chain of discrete movements triggered by stimulus cues, which is what he defined as "learning".

Contributions and differences with operant conditioning

For the behaviorist psychology that had been developing up to that time, one of the indispensable conditions for generating a pattern or chain of discrete movements provoked by stimulus signals, which he defined as "learning, one of the indispensable conditions for generating learning is the presence of a reinforcer, either positive or negative.. This reinforcer makes it possible for a response to be associated with any stimulus. Moreover, for this association to be established as a pattern of behavior, it had to be repeated on several occasions.

What Guthrie argued was that this was not necessarily the case. For him, the association could be made by the incidental (non-repetitive) interaction between a stimulus and the response. Put another way, for Guthrie, a pattern of behavior can be fixed from a single trial.

But this did not mean that people acquire complex behaviors by performing them only once. What he suggests is that from the first time there is contact between a stimulus and a response, we exert a series of body movements that become associated. These are repeated in the face of similar events and are subsequently transformed into complex behaviors.

On habit modification

Edwin Ray Guthrie argued that the main thing was not the reinforcer, in fact, learning did not necessarily have to be achieved by rewarding behaviors. In the same sense, the key to modifying behaviors, and specifically habits, is to generate new associations..

It would be a matter of detecting the primary signals (those associated with the first interaction between the stimulus and the response), and implementing different behavioral acts, i.e. other responses.

Bibliographical references:

• Clarck, D. (2005). From philosopher to psychologist: the early career of Edwin Ray Guthrie, J.r History Psychology, 8(3): 235-254.
• Edwin Ray Guthrie (2018). New World Encyclopedia. Retrieved September 21, 2018. Available at http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edwin_Ray_Guthrie
• Edwin Ray Guthrie (2018). Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved September 21, 2018. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edwin-Ray-Guthrie