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 of factor analysis when addressing 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 view of his intelligence was contrary to that of the majority of 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. Furthermore, he maintained that traditional IQ tests did not know how to most adequately 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 brief biography of Joy Paul Guilford who also had a working life characterized by working at several universities and serving his country during World War II.
Joy Paul Guilford was born on March 7, 1897 in Marquette, Nebraska. From a young age he showed interest in individual differences, observing how his family members showed differences in different abilities. When she was about to graduate from the University of Nebraska, she began working as an assistant in the psychology department.
While graduating from Cornell University, between 1919 and 1921, he studied under the direction of Edward Titchener, a person who is credited with founding the first psychological laboratory in the United States. While at that university, Guilford administered intelligence questionnaires to children in addition to working as director of the university psychological clinic.
JP Guilford went to work again at another university between 1927 and 1928, specifically Kansas, but changed his job to finally be hired as an associate professor at the university in his native Nebraska, working from 1928 to 1940.
During World War II (1939-1945) He worked in the Psychological Research Unit of the US Air Force, at the Santa Ana Air Base, in California. It was during the conflict that he began working at the University of Southern California, participating in a project on soldier skills. The objective was to select those who had the best skills to handle combat planes.
After ending the conflict continued working in California, continuing his research on intelligence questionnaires It also focused on aspects that had not traditionally been treated with due importance: divergent thinking and creativity. He was there working until he left university research in 1967. JP Guilford died on November 26, 1987, in Los Angeles, California.
Work and theory on intelligence
From a young age, Guilford’s greatest interest was in individual differences. His work focused on how people were different in both 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 this.
Given that there was a vision of intelligence as something unitary, it was considered that a person who scored low on an IQ questionnaire was simply not worthy. Although this view may seem very exaggerated, the truth is that there were many researchers who defended it.
Guilford, Rather than seeing individual differences as something negative, he knew how to value them and tried to observe what mechanisms could be behind them to explain them Furthermore, he tried to see how human intelligence manifested itself.
Divergent thinking
Firstly, in the 1950s, Guilford raised the idea of “divergent intelligence.” He formulated this concept 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:
Ability to produce multiple ideas or solutions to a problem in a short period of time.
2. Flexibility
Ability to propose different approaches s for a specific problem.
3. Originality
Being able to produce new ideas something different from what is already known.
4. Preparation
Ability to develop, expand and present ideas in an interesting way, getting the most out of them
Criticisms of intelligence tests
According to Guilford, traditional IQ questionnaires did not encourage divergent thinking. He considered that they focused only on those skills that were useful in the school curriculum of the time. Given the numerical and visuospatial abilities took precedence over creativity the situation could arise that a person was bad at mathematics but very good at artistic drawing, but was considered unintelligent.
That is why during the years he worked at the University of Southern California he developed several questionnaires to measure the intellectual abilities of creative people.
Laying the foundations for multiple intelligence
During the first half of the 20th century, there was the idea that intelligence was something unitary, that it could be defined with a single parameter. This was Charles Spearman’s concept of intelligence, shown with his idea of the general intelligence factor.
Guilford did not think the same, and considered that intelligence consisted 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 “Encoding” and “Recollection” 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 a response/solution is appropriate, consistent and valid for the problem posed.
Information that comes in the form of drawings 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 whether 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” was divided into “auditory” and “visual.”
Productive
These contain these elements:
1. Units
They represent the smallest items of information that can be captured.
2. Classes
Sets of items that share attributes.
3. Relationships
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 one has undergoes.
6. Implications
Inferences and predictions that can be made based on the knowledge one has.
Legacy
Guilford, along with Thurstone, was one of the first psychologists to consider that the idea of intelligence was not a unitary concept that is, it could not be described with a single score, but rather by 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 developmental psychology, neurology and artificial intelligence, they have shown that intelligence and, in general terms, The mind is built from the interaction of several neurological modules relatively independent.
Over time, JP Guilford’s ideas have been revised and some of his discoveries 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 for the idea that intelligence is something that has several components, and that not all of us are intelligent in the same way.
