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

Next we will see a biography of Edwin Ray Guthrie and some of his main contributions to behaviorism.

Edwin Ray Guthrie: biography of the American behaviorist

Edwin Ray Guthrie was born on January 9, 1886 in the city of Lincoln, 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 much of his professional career as a psychologist, until 1956, when he retired permanently.

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

He was also trained in the most representative theories of clinical practice of the time. In fact, in the same decade he translated, together with his wife, Helen M. Guthrie, 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 behavioural, and since his previous training had been in the exact sciences, Guthrie was convinced that it was possible to develop an objective scientific method to study the mind and intervene in behaviour. Also, because of his background in philosophy, much of his theoretical development was grounded in the 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, it developed a system for evaluating teaching 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 appointed 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 from a heart attack.

Ray Guthrie’s Principle of Partnership

Guthrie’s theory of association is based on the idea that it is contiguity that makes learning possible . That is, we learn thanks to the closeness between two elements, which in this case are the stimulus and the response. But, unlike classic operant behaviourism, for Guthrie, behaviours are not so much responses as movements. The latter are the largest units of response and those that must 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, when faced with similar elements, the movement sequence occurred again, which finally generates a pattern or chain of discrete movements caused by stimulus signals, which is what he defined as “learning”.

Contributions and differences with operant conditioning

For the behavioural psychology that has been developing until now, one of the indispensable conditions for generating learning is the presence of a reinforcer, whether positive or negative . This reinforcer makes it possible for a response to be associated with any stimulus. Furthermore, for such an association to be established as a pattern of behaviour it had to be repeated on several occasions.

What Guthrie argued is that this wasn’t necessarily so. For him, the association could be made through the incidental (non-repetitive) interaction between a stimulus and the response. In other words, for Guthrie, a pattern of behavior can be established from a single trial.

But this did not mean that people acquire complex behaviors by performing them only once. What it suggests is that from the first time there is contact between a stimulus and a response, we exercise a series of body movements that become associated. These are repeated when faced with similar events and are later 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 modify behaviors, and specifically habits, is to generate new associations .

The aim would be to detect the primary signals (those associated with the first interaction between stimulus and response), and to implement different behavioural acts, i.e. other responses.

Bibliographic 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