Edwin Ray Guthrie: Habit-breaking
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1) Edwin Ray Guthrie was a behaviorist who performed a great deal of research in the area of habit-breaking. Choose a habit that people are commonly trying to break. Apply Guthrie's work on habit-breaking. What needs to be in place for someone to break a habit? Discuss the difficulty in breaking habits.
2) William Kaye Estes is considered a leading statistical learning theorist. He began his undergraduate work as a student of Skinner. Select a term from the list below to define and discuss. Provide a real life example for the term you selected.
array model
continuity-noncontinuity controversy
error factors
learning sets
learning to learn
paired associate learning
Markov process
probability matching
state of the system
stimulus sampling theory (SST).
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The solution discusses the behaviorist approaches of Edwin Ray Guthrie
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? Edwin Ray Guthrie was a behaviorist who performed a great deal of research in the area of habit-breaking. Choose a habit that people are commonly trying to break. Apply Guthrie's work on habit-breaking. What needs to be in place for someone to break a habit? Discuss the difficulty in breaking habits.
Guthrie (1934) asserted that when a satisfying action involves breaking up an action in progress it will destroy connection as readily as punishment. For instance, according to Guthrie, "In teaching a dog to sit up, tossing him reward morsels is ineffective...because of the satisfying character of the meat...the tossing of meat does nothing to avoid the behavior, often doing things to attain and preserve -not the -but the eating of it. " (p. 454). Guthrie theorized that what can be predicted is that influence of the stimulus action at the time of the satisfaction, or annoyance, which will be to re-establish whatever behavior was in evidence at the time.
Applied to habits, Guthrie (1939) postulated that habit- forming nature such as thumb sucking owes to the fact that the habit inhibits crying and cause excitement to diminish. Thus an association is made with the particular pattern that ...
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