Edwin Guthrie

Modified: 2025-02-09 6:37 AM CST

• Edwin Guthrie (1886-1959)
• Biography
  • Nebraskan
  • University of Pennsylvania PhD
  • Served in Army in World War I and World War II
  • Met Pierre Janet in France
    • Guthrie and his wife translated Janet's text: Principles of Psychology
  • Worked at University of Washington nearly all of his academic career
  • APA President in 1945
  • Won the APF (not APA, fyi) Gold Medal in 1958
  • Published The Psychology of Learning (1935, 1952)
  • Focused on practical applications of learning
  • Not much of an experimentalist
  • He and Horton did a large experiment with cats looking at their escape behavior in a Thorndikian style puzzle box
    • The cats showed individualized stereotypic escape responses
• Guthrie's Law of One-Shot Learning: Organisms will repeat the same behavior in the same situation
  • 1. What the Law Means
    • Learning happens in one trial
  • 2. One-Shot Learning
    • Learning is a connection between a stimulus and a response (S-R learning, remember this!)
• Practice
  • Practice makes it possible to make a response in different situations (think of hitting a golf ball)
  • Classical conditioning takes many trials because the situation varies
• Movement Produced Stimuli (MPS)
  • Learning involves associating a response to a combination of stimuli
  • Responses are sequences of actions
    • hearing a metronome involves a number of actions: the head turns, the eyes focus, the body re-orients
    • In turn, each of those actions creates new stimuli constantly
    • These new stimuli are movement produced stimuli (MPS)
    • Think of athletic skills, they are learned, chained sequences of actions
• Habits
  • Stereotyped, predictable response patterns
  • Each component of the habit was learned in one trial
  • Sometimes habits are replaced
• Forgetting
  • New learning replaces old learning
  • Forgetting is not what happens
• Reward and Punishment
  • Rewards do not change strength of connection between stimulus and response
  • Instead, rewards and punishments change the stimulus
• Practical Applications of Guthrie's Theory: Forming and Breaking Habits
  • Interested in practical applications
  • Animals and people can only learn things they can already do (e.g., I can't teach you to fly like a bird.)
  • Old responses are not forgotten, they are replaced
  • Think of smoking, many stimuli are associated with smoking: waking up, finishing a meal, waiting for a bus, hanging around with another smoker
  • Guthrie describe three methods to break or alter habits, all are similar in that they inhibit the habit and substitute another response
    • 1. The Fatigue Technique
      • Also called flooding
      • Keep presenting the stimulus until the organism is so tired that it no longer makes the old response.
      • The new response replaces the old one
      • Guthrie: breaking a horse by sitting on it until it quits bucking
      • Fear of speaking in public?
        • Make person speak until no longer afraid
    • 2. The Threshold Technique
      • Slowly build up to the critical stimulus
      • Also used for breaking horses
      • Good example of human tolerance for change: L.A. freeways
        • You live in LA, you never notice how freeways have become bigger and more crowded
        • You used to live in LA 30 years ago, and you move back AHHHHH, you say
    • 3. The Method of Incompatible Stimuli
      • Present the stimulus under conditions where response is impossible..
      • Tying a horse to a post and mounting it (horse can't buck)
    • 4. Human Illustrations
      • Systematic desensitization or counterconditioning is similar to Guthrie's threshold technique
      • Snake example of counterconditioning: Logoly Park, Playground, Path, Building, Lobby, Snake Room
    • 5. You like pastries too much
      • Fatigue method--eat pastries until you cannot stand them
    • 6. Match lighting
      • Child lights matches in house, parents buy 750 matches and make child light each one and blow it out over a three-day period
      • I did this to one of my children when he was in high school
      • Caught him lighting a match in the house
      • Went to Walmart, bought three packs of kitchen matches
      • He had to light matches (outside, fyi) for a week until he was not longer interested in doing it again
• Guthrie's One-Shot Learning:   An Appraisal
  • No mental states
  • Close examination of stimuli and responses
  • Practical
  • The two variables, stimulus and response, are only defined in terms of each other

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