Joy Paul Guilford: biography of this American psychologist

Joy Paul Guilford was an American psychologist, considered by many to be one of the greatest exponents in factor analysis when it comes to tackling the complex field of individual differences and personality.

He is well known for his psychometric studies addressing intelligence and, in a very original way, creativity. His vision of intelligence was contrary to that of most psychologists of his time, who saw it as something unitary.

He knew how to value human diversity, and tried to find out how it could be explained. In addition, he argued that traditional IQ tests did not know how to best assess skills that were not recurrent within the school environment.

Today we are going to talk about the life and theory of one of the great thinkers of the 20th century throughout this short biography of Joy Paul Guilford, who also had a working life characterized by working in various universities and serving his country during World War II.

• Related article: "Guilford's Intelligence Theory"

Biography of Joy Paul Guilford

Joy Paul Guilford was born on March 7, 1897, in Marquette, Nebraska. From a young age he showed interest in individual differences, observing how the members of her family showed differences in different abilities. When he was about to graduate from the University of Nebraska, he began working as an assistant in the department of psychology.

While graduating from Cornell University between 1919 and 1921, she studied under Edward Titchener, a person to whom the credit is owed for having founded the first psychological laboratory in the United States. United. While he was at that university, Guilford administered intelligence questionnaires to children, in addition to working as a director at the university psychological clinic.

J. P. Guilford went back to work at another university between 1927 and 1928, specifically the one in Kansas, but he changed his job to He eventually became hired as an associate professor at the university of his native Nebraska, working from 1928 to the 1940.

During the Second World War (1939-1945) He worked in the Psychological Research Unit of the US Air Force, at Santa Ana Air Force Base, California. It was during the conflict that he began working at the University of Southern California, participating in a project on soldier skills. His goal was to select those with the best skills to handle combat aircraft.

After ending the conflict he continued to work in California, continuing his research on intelligence questionnaires. He also focused on aspects that traditionally had not been treated with due importance: divergent thinking and creativity. He was there working until he left university research in 1967. J. P. Guilford passed away on November 26, 1987, in Los Angeles, California.

Work and theory on intelligence

From a young age, Guilford's greatest interest was individual differences. His work focused on how people were different both in aspects related to intelligence and creativity..

Even in the middle of the 20th century there was a more or less accepted idea that differences in intellectual performance implied that there were people with better and worse abilities, and that group characteristics such as race, ethnicity or sex influenced it.

Given that there was a vision of intelligence as something unitary, it was even considered that the person who scored low on an IQ questionnaire was simply not worth it. Although this vision may seem very exaggerated, the truth is that there were not a few researchers who defended it.

Guilford, More than seeing individual differences as something negative, he knew how to value them and tried to observe what mechanisms could be behind that explained them. Furthermore, he tried to see how human intelligence manifested itself.

Divergent thinking

First, in the 1950s, Guilford raised the idea of ​​"divergent intelligence." This concept was formulated when he saw that creative people had a certain tendency to think in a way that was outside the norm or that solutions were proposed that were not what one would normally expect for the same problem. According to Guilford, the characteristics that this type of thinking presented are the following:

1. Fluency

Ability to produce multiple ideas or solutions to a problem in a short period of time.

2. Flexibility

Ability to propose different approachess for a specific problem.

3. Originality

Being able to produce new ideas, something different from what is already known.

4. Elaboration

Ability to develop, expand and present ideas in an interesting way, making the most of them.

Criticisms of intelligence tests

According to Guilford, traditional IQ questionnaires did not favor divergent thinking. He considered that they focused only on those skills that were useful in the school curriculum at the time. Given the Numerical and visuospatial abilities prevailed over creativity, it could be the situation that a person was bad at mathematics but very good at artistic drawing, but was considered unintelligent.

That is why during the years that he worked at the University of Southern California he developed several questionnaires to be able to measure the intellectual abilities of creative people.

• You may be interested: "Types of intelligence tests"

Laying the foundations of multiple intelligence

During the first half of the 20th century, there was the idea that intelligence was something unitary, which can be defined with a single parameter. This was the concept of intelligence that Charles Spearman had, shown with his idea of ​​the g factor or general intelligence.

Guilford did not think so, and he considered intelligence to consist of various intellectual abilities that differ from person to person. Starting from this idea, he proposed a three-dimensional or cubic model, in which he explained in more detail his vision of how human intelligence was composed.

The 3 dimensions of the model are explained below in addition to detailing its components

Mental operations

This dimension originally only had 5 components, since "Coding" and "Memory" constituted a single factor, called "Memory".

1. Cognition

Understand, understand, discover and be aware of the information.

2. Memory

It includes encoding and remembering information.

3. Divergent production

Generate multiple solutions for the same problem.

4. Convergent production

Deduce a single solution to a problem.

5. Evaluation

The ability to judge whether an answer / solution is appropriate, consistent and valid for the problem posed.

Contents

This category contains these items:

1. Figurative

Information that comes in the form of pictures or that is not verbalized. Includes auditory and visual content.

2. Symbolic

Symbols that have meaning: numbers, letters ...

3. Semantics

Information that is captured through words and phrases, both in oral, written or thought mode.

4. Behavioral

That which is interpreted from the behavior of others. The content dimension originally had four factors, but in later revisions “figurative” it was divided into “auditory” and “visual”.

Productive

They contain these elements:

1. Units

They represent the smallest items of information that can be captured.

2. Lessons

Sets of items that share attributes.

3. Relations

They are the connections between the items, either because they are associated or antagonistic.

4. Systems

Organized items that interact among them.

5. Transformations

All the changes that the knowledge that one has undergoes.

6. Implications

Inferences and predictions that can be made based on the knowledge you have.

Legacy

Guilford, along with Thurstone, was one of the first psychologists to consider that the idea of ​​intelligence was not a unitary conceptIn other words, it could not be described with a single score, but with taking into account several factors that each represented sets of interrelated skills.

Today, thanks to the development of sciences that were poorly developed in Guilford's time, such as psychology development, neurology and artificial intelligence, have shown that intelligence and, in terms general, the mind is built from the interaction of various neurological modules relatively independent.

Over time, the ideas of J. P. Guilford have been revised and some of his findings on the theory of multiple intelligences have been updated. Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner are clear examples of this update. However, no one doubts that Guilford was the one who planted the seed on the idea that the intelligence is something that has several components, and that not all of us are intelligent of the same way.

Bibliographic references:

• Guilford, J.P. (1967). Joy Paul Guilford. A history of psychology in autobiography. 5. 169-191.
• Guilford, J.P. (1936) Psychometric Methods. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
• Guilford, J.P. (1939) General psychology. New York, NY: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.
• Guilford, J.P. (1950) Creativity, American Psychologist, Volume 5, Issue 9, 444–454.
• Guilford, J.P. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence.
• Guilford, J.P. & Hoepfner, R. (1971). The Analysis of Intelligence.
• Guilford, J.P. (1982). Cognitive psychology's ambiguities: Some suggested remedies. Psychological Review, 89, 48–59.