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Edwin Ray Guthrie
Edwin Ray Guthrie (/ˈɡʌθri/; January 9, 1886 – April 23, 1959), a behavioral psychologist, began his career in mathematics and philosophy in 1917. He spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he was a full-time professor and later became an emeritus professor in psychology.
Guthrie is best known for his works regarding stimulus–response association, which has been variously described as one-trial theory, non-reinforcement, and contiguity learning.
He theorized:
Guthrie's works and theories were described as "simple" by his peers, referring to how he described complex ideas in simple terms. Critics of Guthrie have considered his teaching style defective, mistaking "incompleteness for simplicity".
Guthrie was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to a father who owned a store selling pianos and bicycles, and a mother who was a school teacher. He remarked that his theories got an early start when he and a friend read Darwin's Origin of Species and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals while they were both in eighth grade.[citation needed] Guthrie graduated at the age of 17, after writing a senior thesis that argued that religion and science were trivial to the expression of Absolute Truth. Guthrie received the title of lay reader in his local Episcopal Church while pursuing a philosophy degree from the University of Nebraska. He credited the university with helping him pursue his varied interests because "the university had none of the present requirements of required courses and set curricula...This freedom made possible the inclusion of courses in both Latin and Greek which had been begun in high school; mathematics through calculus."
While Guthrie was going to graduate school, he was the only student in a seminary taught by Wilhelm Wundt's protégé Harry Kirke Wolfe, where they debated the philosophy of science. Guthrie later characterized the classes that he took for his degree as philosophy courses that "took much interest in issues that would now be recognized as psychological". His focus upon a theoretical approach to psychology as opposed to an experimental research approach can be found in his account of his single experimental psychology course which he described as "a research course under Bolton devoted a winter to observations with an aesthesiometer on the limen of twoness, and served to quench [my] interest in psychophysics, which was the chief preoccupation of psychological laboratories then".
His professional psychology career did not start in full until he met Stevenson Smith, who founded the psychology department at the University of Washington in 1917. Guthrie and Smith helped write Chapters in General Psychology in 1921. This book and work with Smith, focused on Guthrie's continuing psychological works towards how exactly learning works and what affects a person's capability of learning. He and his wife, Helen MacDonald, traveled to France where they met Pierre Janet. Janet's writing influenced Guthrie's thinking, so much that Guthrie and his wife translated Janet's Principles of Psychology together. Guthrie added to Janet's writings an objective theory of learning.
Guthrie's theories went against those of Thorndike's classical conditioning and Skinner's operant conditioning due mainly to Guthrie's insistence that their "desire for results of immediate practical applications" led to their theories being wrong. Guthrie's learning theory is called one-trial learning and he developed it with Smith at the University of Washington. Guthrie and Smith's theory states that all learning is done within a single exposure to a situation. Guthrie admitted that his own theory required the assumption that people react to a given situation the same way so long as it is still effective. Guthrie's more ambiguous theories and assumptions were put into more understandable terms after his death. These notes focused upon the following three principles:
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Edwin Ray Guthrie
Edwin Ray Guthrie (/ˈɡʌθri/; January 9, 1886 – April 23, 1959), a behavioral psychologist, began his career in mathematics and philosophy in 1917. He spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he was a full-time professor and later became an emeritus professor in psychology.
Guthrie is best known for his works regarding stimulus–response association, which has been variously described as one-trial theory, non-reinforcement, and contiguity learning.
He theorized:
Guthrie's works and theories were described as "simple" by his peers, referring to how he described complex ideas in simple terms. Critics of Guthrie have considered his teaching style defective, mistaking "incompleteness for simplicity".
Guthrie was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to a father who owned a store selling pianos and bicycles, and a mother who was a school teacher. He remarked that his theories got an early start when he and a friend read Darwin's Origin of Species and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals while they were both in eighth grade.[citation needed] Guthrie graduated at the age of 17, after writing a senior thesis that argued that religion and science were trivial to the expression of Absolute Truth. Guthrie received the title of lay reader in his local Episcopal Church while pursuing a philosophy degree from the University of Nebraska. He credited the university with helping him pursue his varied interests because "the university had none of the present requirements of required courses and set curricula...This freedom made possible the inclusion of courses in both Latin and Greek which had been begun in high school; mathematics through calculus."
While Guthrie was going to graduate school, he was the only student in a seminary taught by Wilhelm Wundt's protégé Harry Kirke Wolfe, where they debated the philosophy of science. Guthrie later characterized the classes that he took for his degree as philosophy courses that "took much interest in issues that would now be recognized as psychological". His focus upon a theoretical approach to psychology as opposed to an experimental research approach can be found in his account of his single experimental psychology course which he described as "a research course under Bolton devoted a winter to observations with an aesthesiometer on the limen of twoness, and served to quench [my] interest in psychophysics, which was the chief preoccupation of psychological laboratories then".
His professional psychology career did not start in full until he met Stevenson Smith, who founded the psychology department at the University of Washington in 1917. Guthrie and Smith helped write Chapters in General Psychology in 1921. This book and work with Smith, focused on Guthrie's continuing psychological works towards how exactly learning works and what affects a person's capability of learning. He and his wife, Helen MacDonald, traveled to France where they met Pierre Janet. Janet's writing influenced Guthrie's thinking, so much that Guthrie and his wife translated Janet's Principles of Psychology together. Guthrie added to Janet's writings an objective theory of learning.
Guthrie's theories went against those of Thorndike's classical conditioning and Skinner's operant conditioning due mainly to Guthrie's insistence that their "desire for results of immediate practical applications" led to their theories being wrong. Guthrie's learning theory is called one-trial learning and he developed it with Smith at the University of Washington. Guthrie and Smith's theory states that all learning is done within a single exposure to a situation. Guthrie admitted that his own theory required the assumption that people react to a given situation the same way so long as it is still effective. Guthrie's more ambiguous theories and assumptions were put into more understandable terms after his death. These notes focused upon the following three principles: