ABSTRACT
Edwin Ray Guthrie was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1886 and he earned both his bachelors and master’s degrees at the University of Nebraska. After completing his master’s degree in philosophy, he entered the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his degree there in 1912. He joined the philosophy department at the University of Washington in 1914 and served as an instructor for four years before taking time to serve in the military during World War I. Most learning theories can be thought of as attempts to determine the rules by which stimuli and responses become associated. Edwin Ray Guthrie felt that the rules that had been generated by theorists like Edward Thorndike and Ivan P. Pavlov were unnecessarily complicated, which he stated as follows: “A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement”.
