J. P. Guilford

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Joy Paul Guilford (born March 7, 1897 – died November 26, 1987) was an American psychologist, one of the leading American exponents of factor analysis in the assessment of personality. He is well remembered for his psychometric study of human intelligence and creativity.

Life

Joy Paul Guilford was born in Marquette, Nebraska. His interest in individual differences started in his childhood, when he observed the differences in ability among the members of his own family. As an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska, he worked as an assistant in the psychology department.

While in graduate school at Cornell University, from 1919 to 1921, he studied under Edward Titchener. He conducted intelligence testing on children. During his time at Cornell, he also served as Director of the University's psychological clinic.

From 1927 to 1928, Guilford worked at the Universities of Kansas, after which he became Associate Professor at University of Nebraska, remaining at the University from 1928 to 1940. In 1940 he was appointed a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, where he stayed until 1967.

During World War II, Guilford worked for the US Air Force Psychological Research Unit, as the Director of Psychological Research #3 at Santa Ana Army Air Base. He formed the Aptitude Project at the University of Southern California, and worked on the selection and ranking of aircrew trainees.

After the war, Guilford continued to work on the intelligence tests, focusing particularly on divergent thinking and creativity. He designed numerous tests that measured creative thinking.

Guilford retired from teaching in 1967, but continued to write and publish. He died on November 26, 1987 in Los Angeles, California.

Work

Throughout his whole career Guilford was interested in individual differences in people. He was best known for his work in intelligence and creativity.

Divergent thinking

Guilford first proposed the concept of divergent thinking in 1950s, when he noticed that creative people tend to exhibit this type of thinking more than others. He thus associated divergent thinking with creativity, appointing it several characteristics:

  1. fluency (the ability to produce great number of ideas or problem solutions in a short period of time);
  2. flexibility (the ability to simultaneously propose a variety of approaches to a specific problem);
  3. originality (the ability to produce new, original ideas);
  4. elaboration (the ability to systematize and organize the details of an idea in a head and carry it out).

Guilford believed that standard intelligence tests do not favor divergent thinking, working better for convergent thinkers. He said that " . . . [o]rdinary IQ scales assess only a limited number of . . . [one's abilities], usually those most important for learning in school . . . [and one ] may be high in some, medium in others, and low in still others" (Way Beyond the IQ, p. 13).

During his tenure at the University of Southern California, he devised several tests to measure intellectual ability of creative people. Many of those ARP divergent thinking tests are being adapted for the use in schools and other similar settings to measure the ability of gifted students in placing them in special programs.

Guilford's structure of the intellect

Building upon the views of L. L. Thurstone, Guilford rejected Charles Spearman's view that intelligence could be characterized in a single numerical parameter and proposed that three dimensions were necessary for accurate description:

  • Content
  • Operations
  • Productions

Guilford proposed a three-dimensional cubical model to explain his Theory of the Structure of the Intellect. According to this theory, an individual's performance on an intelligence test can be traced back to the underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence.

Guilford argued that intelligence consists of numerous intellectual abilities. He first proposed a model with 90, then 120, and finally 150, independently operating factors in intelligence. These factors (abilities) were then organized along three dimensions - Operations, Content, and Products.

The Operation Dimension

This is made up of five kinds of operations or general intellectual processes:

  1. Cognition - The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware.
  2. Memory - The ability to recall information.
  3. Divergent Production - The process of generating multiple solutions to a problem
  4. Convergent Production - The process of deducing a single solution to a problem.
  5. Evaluation - The process of judging whether an answer is accurate, consistent, or valid.

The Content Dimension

It includes the broad areas of information in which operations are applied. It is divided into four categories:

  1. Figural - Includes all that is non-verbal or pictorial.
  2. Symbolic - Includes verbal thinking and communication.
  3. Semantic - Comprises information organized as symbols or signs that have no meaning by themselves, e.g. numbers and letters of the alphabet.
  4. Behavioral - Includes all the behavioral-psychological acts of an individual.

The Product Dimension

As the name suggests, this dimension contains results of applying particular operations to specific contents. There are six kinds of products, they are:

  1. A Unit - It represents a single item of information.
  2. A Class - Is a set of items that share some attributes.
  3. A Relation - Represents a connection between items or variable.
  4. A System - Is an organization of items or networks with interacting parts.
  5. A Transformation - Changes in an item's attributes, eg: Reversing the order of letters in a word.
  6. An Implication - Is an expectation or prediction.

Therefore, according to Guilford there are 5 x 4 x 6 = 120 intellectual abilities or factors. Each ability stands for a particular operation in a particular content area resulting in specific product.

Guilford later modified his model of the intellect, replacing the figural category within the Content Dimension with Auditory and Visual Content categories. As a result of the change in the Content Dimension to 5 categories, the overall number of intellectual abilities increased to 5 x 5 x 6 = 150 categories.

Legacy

Guilford was one of the first psychologists, together with L. L. Thurstone, who perceived intelligence not as a unitary concept, which could be captured in a single score, but as a set of possibly independent factors. The modern research from different fields, such as developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurology, shows that the mind consists of several independent (albeit interdependent) modules or "intelligences." Although his theory of 150 intelligence factors has been superseded by more developed theories of multiple intelligence (most notably by those of Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner), Guilford left significant mark on the research in intelligence in general. Many tests that are still used in modern intelligence testing were modified and developed under his guidance.

Publications

  • Guilford, J.P. 1939. General psychology. Van Nostrand
  • Guilford, J.P. 1950. Creativity, American Psychologist, 5, 444-454.
  • Guilford, J.P. 1954. Psychometric Methods. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 0070251290
  • Guilford, J.P. 1956. A factor-analytic study of verbal fluency: Studies of aptitudes of high-level personnel. University of Southern California
  • Guilford, J.P. 1956. Fourteen dimensions of temperament. American Psychological Association.
  • Guilford, J.P. 1959. Traits of creativity. In H.H. Anderson (Ed.), Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 142-161). Harper and Row
  • Guilford, J.P. 1967. The Nature of Human Intelligence. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 0070251355
  • Guilford, J.P. 1968. Intelligence, Creativity and their Educational Implications. Robert R. Knapp
  • Guilford, J.P. 1971. Analysis of Intelligence. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 0070251371
  • Guilford, J.P. 1977. Way beyond the IQ. Creative Education Foundation. ISBN 0930222016
  • Guilford, J.P. 1980. Intelligence education is intelligent education. International Society for Intelligence Education. ISBN 4924416010
  • Guilford, J.P. 1982. Cognitive psychology's ambiguities: Some suggested remedies. Psychological Review, 89, 48-59.
  • Guilford, J.P. & Fruchter, B. 1973. Fundamental Statistics in Psychology and Education. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 0070251487

References
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External links

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