Rubén Ardila
Colombian psychologist who promoted scientific psychology in Latin America
Colombian experimental psychologist who built psychology programmes, societies and journals in Latin America and helped spread the experimental analysis of behaviour. He founded the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología in 1969.
Why this person matters
Ardila helped create the institutional base of scientific psychology in Colombia and the region: university programmes, a journal and professional societies. Colleagues built that base with him, and his teaching texts were read in many Spanish-language courses.
Main contributions
Journals and societies
He founded the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología in 1969, for many years the only Colombian and Latin American journal included in ISI. He founded ALAMOC in 1975 and led the Sociedad Colombiana de Psicología from 1979 to 2002.
University programmes
He directed the psychology department at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1970, organised the psychology department at the Universidad de Los Andes in 1972, and created Colombia's first clinical psychology master's at the Universidad Santo Tomás in 1976.
Textbooks and behavioural synthesis
He wrote Psicología del Aprendizaje (1970), which passed 27 editions, and Experimental Synthesis of Behavior (1988), an integrative paradigm based on the experimental analysis of behaviour.
Context and limits
The biographical sources used here are an obituary and a reference article; they do not evaluate his research or his integrative paradigm. The doctorate is dated 1969 in the obituary, while one dissertation reference gives 1970. His Walden Tres (1979) is a utopian novel inspired by Skinner's Walden Two, not a research study.
In your introductory course
Learning.Appears in learning chapters through behaviour analysis and in the history of psychology in Latin America. Students may meet him as the author of a long-running Spanish-language learning textbook.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 6.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1964
Graduated in psychology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
- 1969
Completed a doctorate in experimental psychology at the University of Nebraska and founded the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología.
- 1975
Founded the Asociación Latinoamericana de Análisis y Modificación de la Conducta (ALAMOC).
- 1976
Created the first clinical psychology master's programme in Colombia at the Universidad Santo Tomás.
Sources
- Infocop, Obituario Rubén Ardila (1942-2025)Society or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Rubén ArdilaReference work. Reference article inspected.