Joy Paul Guilford (March 7, 1897 – November 26, 1987) was an American
psychologist
A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...
best remembered for his
psychometric
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...
study of human
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
, including the distinction between
convergent and
divergent production.
Developing the views of
L. L. Thurstone
Louis Leon Thurstone (29 May 1887 – 29 September 1955) was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contr ...
, Guilford rejected
Charles Spearman
Charles Edward Spearman, FRS (10 September 1863 – 17 September 1945) was an English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on mod ...
's view that intelligence could be characterized in a single numerical parameter. He proposed that three dimensions were necessary for accurate description: operations, content, and products. A ''
Review of General Psychology
''Review of General Psychology'' is the quarterly scientific journal of the American Psychological Association Division 1: The Society for General Psychology. The journal publishes cross-disciplinary psychological articles that are conceptual, th ...
'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Guilford as the 27th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Career
Guilford graduated from the
University of Nebraska
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
before studying under
Edward Titchener
Edward Bradford Titchener (11 January 1867 – 3 August 1927) was an English psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the min ...
at
Cornell
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
. Guilford was elected a member of the
Society of Experimental Psychologists
The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), originally called the Society of Experimentalists, is an academic society for experimental psychologists. It was founded by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1904 to be an ongoing workshop in which memb ...
in 1937, and in 1938 he became the third president of the Psychometric Society, following in the footsteps of its founder
Louis Leon Thurstone
Louis Leon Thurstone (29 May 1887 – 29 September 1955) was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his cont ...
and of
Edward Thorndike
Edward Lee Thorndike (August 31, 1874 – August 9, 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory o ...
, who held the position in 1937. Guilford held a number of posts at Nebraska and briefly at the
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...
. In 1941 he entered the U.S. Army as a Lieutenant Colonel and served as Director of Psychological Research Unit No. 3 at
Santa Ana Army Air Base
Santa Ana Army Air Base (SAAAB) was a World War II-era air base located near Santa Ana, California. The air base was decommissioned in 1946, and part of the land was annexed by Costa Mesa in 1953. The air base was used for basic training, alth ...
. There he worked on the selection and ranking of aircrew trainees as the Army Air Force investigated why a sizable proportion of trainees were not graduating.
Promoted to Chief of the Psychological Research Unit at the U.S. Army Air Forces Training Command Headquarters in Fort Worth, Guilford oversaw the
Stanine
Stanine (STAndard NINE) is a method of scaling test scores on a nine-point standard scale with a mean of five and a standard deviation of two.
Some web sources attribute stanines to the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Psychometric leg ...
(Standard Nine) Project in 1943, which identified nine specific intellectual abilities crucial to flying a plane. (''Stanines'', now a common term in educational psychology, was coined during Guilford's project). Over the course of World War II, Guilford's use of these factors in the development of the two-day Classification Test Battery was significant in increasing graduation rates for aircrew trainees.
Discharged as a full colonel after the war, Guilford joined the Education faculty at the University of Southern California and continued to research the factors of intelligence. He published widely on what he ultimately named the Structure of Intellect theory, and his post-War research identified a total of 90 discrete intellectual abilities and 30 behavioral abilities.
Guilford's 20 years of research at Southern California were funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Education of the former Health, Education and Welfare Department, and the Office of Naval Research. Although Guilford's subjects were recruits at the Air Force Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, the Office of Naval Research managed this research.
Guilford's post-war research led to the development of classification testing that, modified in different ways, entered into the various personnel assessments administered by all branches of the U.S. Armed Services. So generally speaking, all U.S. Military qualifying exams of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s descended from Guilford's research.
Structure of Intellect theory
According to Guilford's Structure of Intellect (SI) theory (1955), an individual's performance on intelligence tests can be traced back to the underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence. SI theory comprises up to 180 different intellectual abilities organized along three dimensions: operations, content, and products.
The Structure of Intellect Theory advanced by Guilford was applied by
Mary N. Meeker for educational purposes.
Operations dimension
SI includes six operations or general intellectual processes:
#
Cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
- The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information
#Memory recording - The ability to encode information
#
Memory retention
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
- The ability to recall information
#Divergent production - The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity
#Convergent production - The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving
#Evaluation - The ability to judge whether or not information is accurate, consistent, or valid
Content dimension
SI includes four broad areas of information to which the human intellect applies the six operations:
#Figural - Concrete,
real world information, tangible objects, things in the environment - It includes A. visual: information perceived through sight, B. auditory: information perceived through hearing, and C.
kinesthetic
Proprioception ( ), also referred to as kinaesthesia (or kinesthesia), is the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. It is sometimes described as the "sixth sense".
Proprioception is mediated by proprioceptors, mechanosensory neurons ...
: information perceived through one's own physical actions
#Symbolic - Information perceived as symbols or signs that stand for something else, e.g., Arabic numerals, the letters of an alphabet, or musical and scientific notations
#
Semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
- Concerned with verbal meaning and ideas - Generally considered to be abstract in nature.
#
Behavioral
Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as well ...
- Information perceived as acts of people (This dimension was not fully researched in Guilford's project. It remains theoretical and is generally not included in the final model that he proposed for describing human intelligence.)
Product dimension
As the name suggests, this dimension contains results of applying particular operations to specific contents. The SI model includes six products in increasing complexity:
#Units - Single items of knowledge
#Classes - Sets of units sharing common attributes
#Relations - Units linked as opposites or in associations, sequences, or analogies
#Systems - Multiple relations interrelated to comprise structures or networks
#Transformations - Changes, perspectives, conversions, or mutations to knowledge
#Implications -
Prediction
A prediction (Latin ''præ-'', "before," and ''dicere'', "to say"), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge. There is no universal agreement about the exact ...
s,
inference
Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in ...
s, consequences, or
anticipation
Anticipation is an emotion involving pleasure or anxiety in considering or awaiting an expected event. Anticipatory emotions include fear, anxiety, hope and trust. When the anticipated event fails to occur, it results in disappointment (if posi ...
s of knowledge
Therefore, according to Guilford there are 5 x 5 x 6 = 150 intellectual abilities or factors (his research only confirmed about three behavioral abilities, so it is generally not included in the model). Each ability stands for a particular operation in a particular content area and results in a specific product, such as Comprehension of Figural Units or Evaluation of Semantic Implications.
Guilford's original model was composed of 120 components (when the behavioral component is included) because he had not separated Figural Content into separate Auditory and Visual contents, nor had he separated Memory into Memory Recording and Memory Retention. When he separated Figural into Auditory and Visual contents, his model increased to 5 x 5 x 6 = 150 categories. When Guilford separated the memory functions, his model finally increased to 180 factors.
Criticism
Various researchers have criticized the statistical techniques used by Guilford. According to Jensen (1998), Guilford's contention that a ''g''-factor was untenable was influenced by his observation that cognitive tests of U.S. Air Force personnel did not show correlations significantly different from zero. According to one reanalysis, this resulted from artifacts and methodological errors. Applying more robust methodologies, the correlations in Guilford's data sets are positive. In another reanalysis, randomly generated models were found to be as well supported as Guilford's own theory.
Guilford's Structure of Intellect model of human abilities has few supporters today. Carroll (1993) summarized the view of later researchers:
:"Guilford's SOI model must, therefore, be marked down as a somewhat eccentric aberration in the history of intelligence models. The fact that so much attention has been paid to it is disturbing to the extent that textbooks and other treatments of it have given the impression that the model is valid and widely accepted, when clearly it is not."
Selected bibliography
*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
''The Nature of Human Intelligence'' is a 1967 book by the American psychologist J. P. Guilford on human intelligence
Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of moti ...
''.
*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.
*(1969). Guilford's Structure of Intellect Model: Its Relevance for the Teacher Preparation Curriculum. ''Curriculum Theory Network,'' (3), 47–64.
Notes
See also
*
Barberpole illusion
The barberpole illusion is a visual illusion that reveals biases in the processing of visual motion in the human brain. This visual illusion occurs when a diagonally striped pole is rotated around its vertical axis (horizontally), it appears as th ...
References
* Carroll, J. B. (1993). ''Human Cognitive Abilities''. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
* Jensen, A. R. (1998). ''The ''g'' Factor: The Science of Mental Ability''. Westport, CT: Praeger.
* Mackintosh, N. J. (1998). ''IQ and Human Intelligence.'' Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
External links
The structure of intellectNational Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guilford, J. P.
1897 births
1987 deaths
20th-century American psychologists
Creativity researchers
Intelligence researchers
University of Nebraska–Lincoln alumni
Cornell University alumni
Presidents of the American Psychological Association
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
People from Hamilton County, Nebraska