GUTHRIE, EDWIN R. (1886-1959)

Edwin Ray Guthrie, a distinguished psychologist, spent most of his professional career at the University of Washington, where he served as an instructor in philosophy from 1914 to 1918 and as an assistant professor for a year before he joined the department of psychology as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1925 and was made a professor in 1928. During World War II he served in Washington, DC, as chief (civilian) consultant to the overseas branch of the general staff in 1941, and as chief psychologist of the overseas branch of the Office of War Information in 1942. Upon his return to the University of Washington, he was named dean of the graduate school from 1943 until he reached retirement age in 1951. He was honored by having a campus building named for him while he was still alive. Among his other honors was an honorary LLD. from his alma mater, the University of Nebraska, where he had received his A.B. in 1907, his A.M. in 1910, and his Ph.D. in 1912 (under Edgar A. Singer, a philosopher whom he much admired and whose views continued to influence his thinking). In 1945, the year he received the LLD, Guthrie was elected president of the American Psychological Association. In 1958, the year before his death, he received the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation, awarded for "outstanding lifetime contribution to psychology."

Guthrie was born December 9, 1886, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the eldest of five children of Edwin R. Guthrie and Harriett Pickett Guthrie. His father, the son of a clergyman, managed a piano store; his mother, the daughter of a newspaperman, taught elementary school prior to her marriage. In 1920 Edwin married Helen Macdonald, who helped him translate Pierre Janet's Principles of Psychotherapy (1924). Their son, Peter M. Guthrie (b. 1926), followed in his father's footsteps and became a professor of psychology (and department head) at Carleton College.

Although Guthrie had already published two short philosophical papers in the Midwest Quarterly, his first major publication was his Ph.D. dissertation on Bertrand Russell, which appeared as a monograph (Guthrie, 1915). Once he became a psychologist, he published chiefly in outlets for psychology, although some aspects of his psychological work appeared in Journal of Philosophy (e.g., Guthrie, 1924) and in a collection of philosophical essays (Guthrie, 1942). In other words, he never forgot his affiliation with philosophy. Because of his primary interest in learning and motivation, he had a scientific interest in education (Guthrie, 1945, 1949, 1959a; Guthrie and Powers, 1950).

Guthrie's philosophy mentor, Edgar Singer, had written an article titled "Mind as an Observable Object" (Singer, 1911). His point of view prepared Guthrie for a behaviorist orientation prior to American psychologist John B. Watson's announcement of behaviorism (Watson, 1913). It was not too surprising, therefore, that his early text General Psychology in Terms of Behavior, written in collaboration with Stevenson Smith, his senior colleague and friend at the University of Washington (Smith and Guthrie, 1921), should have stressed behavior and introduced to a wider audience the type of conditioning as an interpretation of learning that was carried on particularly by Guthrie (e.g., Guthrie, 1930, 1960). At least among later students at the University of Washington, the theory was known as Guthrie's, whatever role Smith may have played earlier.

Guthrie's students became imprinted with this theory, and its influence upon them is recalled to this day. Guthrie developed his theory through a charming writing style, with an emphasis upon convincing examples rather than experimental demonstration. The most convincing experimental demonstration took place many years after the theory was first announced (Guthrie and Horton, 1946), and eleven years after the first edition of his Psychology of Learning (1935).

Much of American psychology had long emphasized learning as a fundamental psychological process. What humans are competent to do or learn may be considered a combination of what one is born with and the capacities that develop as a matter of natural growth processes. Children learn to crawl before they learn to walk, and healthy children require little instruction to achieve this skill. Other things they have to learn with assistance. While there is doubtless some natural tendency to babble and hence to speak, in order to speak the artificial language that their home environment demands, children obviously have to learn the words that they hear and gradually to understand and talk in sentences. So the problem for the psychology of learning is how they acquire speech, reading, writing, and arithmetic. These cannot be entirely inborn, although one child may have more potential—that is, may be brighter—than another and hence a more accomplished learner.

One of the early and persistent theories of learning was known as the doctrine of association: that one word (or one idea) became associated with another, just as the name becomes associated with the object named or a skilled action becomes associated with the task performed, as when a hammer is used to pound a nail. There developed theories of how such associations came about. One widespread theory assumed that there were three laws of association: the laws of similarity, contrast, and contiguity. These are familiar enough. Many animals are four-footed, so the child easily learns to group a cat, a dog, and a cow as animals through their similarities. At first the class is narrow, and the first lamb observed may be thought to be a different kind of dog. But associations get to be corrected, both by discrimination and by generalization over a wider range. A fish and a duck do not at first seem to be like other animals—at least they do not have four feet—but they are alive and breathe and move about, and similarities such as these permit them eventually to be included as animals.

The law of contrast operates in a corresponding way, and the child soon learns that day contrasts with night, up with down, and large with small. Thus the contrasting pairs become associated, and one may suggest the other: day-night, up-down, large-small, and many other such pairs.

The third law of association in this scheme is that things that occur together—that is, in contiguity—become associated. Hence a color name may suggest an object often of that color—a red apple or a red tomato, or the contiguity may be more emphasized, as in an orange orange, where name and object are kept together.

Another idea that entered into early learning theory was that the consequences of an act, either pleasurable or painful, would affect the associations formed, as in "The burned child fears the fire" or "Nothing succeeds like success."

This kind of theory was further extended by assuming that a child would develop certain preferences (hence activities to be enjoyed) and also some annoyances (to be avoided). These were elaborated into theories of motivation—how one's goals affect what one does, and how they are tied to theories of learning based on the sensible notions that humans learn what affords pleasure by satisfying their own wants, and that one hesitates to learn tasks that lead to results that one dislikes.

The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov introduced the idea of a conditioned reflex (CR). The standard experiment was to present a conditioned stimulus (CS) to a dog—say the turning on of a light. This was indifferent to the dog in that it did not start the flow of saliva, which was to become the conditioned reflex (CR). Following the CS, the flow of saliva was produced as an unconditioned reflex (UR) by a natural unconditioned stimulus (US), such as some meat powder in a dish accessible to the dog and attached to an apparatus designed to measure the flow of saliva. After the two stimuli, CS and US, were repeated several times, the CS would yield the original UR as a newly learned CR. It is easy to see that the CR can also be described as a form of associative learning, but the experimental setting in which it was achieved gave rather good controls over some circumstances favorable to learning.

It soon became clear that all that gets conditioned is not simple reflexes, such as the salivary reflex to food in the mouth, and many psychologists began talking about conditioned responses instead of conditioned reflexes (Hilgard and Marquis, 1940). This is where Guthrie came in. He had some disagreements with Pavlov, and offered his own interpretation of conditioning.

Guthrie proposed to reduce the laws of association (and the other theories of learning) to a single law of association by contiguity. He pointed out that similarity and contrast were effective only because of their occurrence together, and then interpreted the other theories of motivated learning and of conditioned response by his one principle appropriate to all instances of learning: "A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement." (Note that Guthrie does not limit the stimulating condition to a single stimulus [S], nor the movement to a precise reflex as a response [R].) A slight revision was introduced later, to give some credit to attentive processes. Guthrie suggested that his basic law might alternatively be stated as follows: "What is being noticed becomes a signal for what is being done" (Guthrie, 1959b).

A second statement is needed before his theory can be understood: "A stimulus pattern gains its full associative strength on its first pairing with a response." This is a remarkably parsimonious basic theory. Guthrie elaborated it to explain many puzzling problems of learning and forgetting.

Learning with repetition leads to the usual "learning curve" because a skilled response becomes conditioned to a variety of cues, so that as learning proceeds, the proportion of cues—internal and external—that have become conditioned, each on a single trial, increases the probability that the intended responses will occur, but a limit is approached as nearly all the cues become conditioned.

Guthrie gave a cogent analogy of how the probability model works. He told of an artist whose meager income derived sporadically from the sale of his pictures. In order not to live beyond his means, he converted his cash to dimes that he scattered about the messy floor of his studio. When he needed money for a meal, he could at first easily find enough dimes; but as the dimes became used up, it was harder and harder to find more than enough for a very modest meal. The difficulty became greater and greater as the dimes were used up, but by diligent searching he could find enough to keep him going until he made another sale.

Much later, Estes (1950) developed a stimulus-sampling mathematical theory of learning that followed much the same logic of one-trial learning leading to higher achievement as stimuli were assimilated to response, but again approaching an asymptote after most available stimuli had been used up.

Guthrie's theory was given a more formal statement by his student V. W. Voeks (1950), and in the area of learning theory and experimentation others of his students have shown the direct influence of what they learned from him (e.g., Sheffield, 1961).

See also:REPETITION AND LEARNING

Bibliography

Estes, W. K. (1950). Toward a statistical theory of learning. Psychological Review 57, 94-107.

Guthrie, E. R. (1915). The paradoxes of Mr. Russell: With a brief account of their history. Lancaster, PA: New Era Printing.

—— (1924). Purpose and mechanism in psychology. Journal of Philosophy 21, 673-682.

—— (1930). Conditioning as a principle of learning. Psychological Review 37, 412-428.

—— (1942). Conditioning: A theory of learning in terms of stimulus, response, and association. Yearbook, National Society for the Study of Education 41 (part 2), 17-60.

—— (1945). The evaluation of faculty service. Bulletin, American Association of University Professors 31, 255-262.

—— (1949). The evaluation of teaching. Educational Record 30, 109-115.

—— (1959a). The state university: Its function and its future. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

—— (1959b). Association by contiguity. In S. Koch, ed., Psychology: A study of a science, Vol. 2, pp. 158-195. New York: McGraw-Hill.

—— (1935; reprint 1960). The psychology of learning, rev. edition. Gloucester, MA: Smith.

Guthrie, E. R., and Horton, G. P. (1946). Cats in a puzzle box. New York: Rinehart.

Guthrie, E. R., and Powers, F. F. (1950). Educational psychology. New York: Ronald Press.

Hilgard, E. R., and Marquis, D. G. (1940). Conditioning and learning. New York: Appleton-Century.

Janet, P. (1924). Principles of psychotherapy, trans. H. M. Guthrie and E. R. Guthrie. New York: Macmillan.

Sheffield, F. D. (1961). Theoretical considerations in the learning of complex sequential tasks from demonstration and practice. In A. A. Lumsdaine, ed., Student expectations in programmed instruction, pp. 13-32. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.

Singer, E. A. (1911). Mind as an observable object. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method 8, 180-186.

Smith, S., and Guthrie, E. R. (1921). General psychology in terms of behavior. New York: Appleton.

Voeks, V. W. (1950). Formalization and clarification of a theory of learning. Journal of Psychology 30, 341-362.

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review 20, 158-177.

Ernest R.Hilgard