Edwin Ray Guthrie

Edwin Ray Guthrie was an American behavioral psychologist, born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1886 and died in 1959, who began his career in mathematics and philosophy and spent most of it at the University of Washington, where he became a full professor and later professor emeritus of psychology. He is best known for his work on stimulus-response association, described variously as one-trial theory, non-reinforcement and contiguity learning, which held that a combination of stimuli that has accompanied a movement tends to be followed by that movement when it recurs. He acknowledged rewards but did not think them necessary for learning, and argued that organisms learn habits and skills through movement-produced stimuli. With Stevenson Smith, who founded the University of Washington psychology department in 1917, he wrote Chapters in General Psychology in 1921. His peers called his ideas simple because he described complex ideas in simple terms.