Edward Thorndike

Edward Thorndike was an American psychologist who is known for the law of the effect and the study of the animal learning. He was an early figure of the behaviourism and the educational psychology.

Early Life and Education

Thorndike was born in 1874 in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. His father was a Methodist minister and the family moved frequently.

He studied at Wesleyan University and at Harvard University. He took his doctorate at Columbia University in 1898 with the study of the animal intelligence.

He taught at the Teachers College of Columbia University for most of his career. He also studied the measurements of the intelligence and the testing.

The Animal Learning and the Law of Effect

Thorndike designed the puzzle boxes to study the learning of the cats. The cats learned to escape by the trial and the error.

He formulated the law of the effect. The law holds that the responses that are followed by the satisfaction are strengthened and the others are weakened.

He formulated the law of the exercise and the law of the readiness. The laws described the conditions of the learning.

He published the book Animal Intelligence in 1911. The work is regarded as the foundation of the experimental study of the learning.

The Educational Psychology

Thorndike applied the psychology to the education. He studied the measurement of the intelligence and the achievement.

He developed the tests and the scales for the educational measurement. The work influenced the development of the standardised testing.

He wrote the books on the educational psychology and the learning. The works include the three-volume Educational Psychology.

He argued for the transfer of the learning and the importance of the practice. The views influenced the curriculum and the teaching.

The Legacy

Thorndike served as the president of the American Psychological Association in 1912. He was one of the most prolific of the psychologists.

He died in 1949 in Montrose, New York. He was one of the most influential of the psychologists of the twentieth century.

His work founded the study of the animal learning and the educational psychology. The law of the effect anticipated the operant conditioning of Skinner.

He is regarded as one of the founders of the behaviourism. His work continues to be studied and applied.

The Law of Effect and Instrumental Learning

Thorndike's central principle was the law of effect: of the various responses an animal makes in a situation, those followed by a satisfying state of affairs become more strongly connected to that situation, while those followed by discomfort are weakened. He arrived at this law by observing cats escaping from puzzle boxes and noting that solutions became faster with practice. Unlike Pavlov, who studied responses elicited by stimuli, Thorndike was studying responses emitted by the organism and strengthened by their consequences — the prototype of operant conditioning.

His earlier experimental reports, including Animal Intelligence (1898) and the Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies (1911), are the founding documents of comparative psychology. Thorndike insisted on quantitative data, on careful control of the animal's environment, and on the comparison of learning across species. He introduced the learning curve, plotting trials against time, as the standard way of representing the acquisition of a skill, and his curves are still used in educational research today.

Modern research has revised the law of effect in important ways. Thorndike initially believed that reinforcement stamped in the connection between stimulus and response, an axiom later challenged by evidence that animals can learn about the relationship between response and outcome and by Tolman's demonstration of latent learning. Yet the basic insight — that behaviour is shaped by its consequences — remains the foundation of operant conditioning and of the theory of reinforcement learning used in artificial intelligence.

Connectionism and Educational Transfer

Thorndike developed an associationist theory he called connectionism: all learning, he argued, consists of the formation and strengthening of bonds between situations and responses. He investigated the strength of these bonds with statistical methods he helped to invent, and he applied the resulting model to the psychology of school learning. The theory is mechanistic and reductionist, reducing thought to the interaction of stimulus-response connections, yet it had the virtue of generating testable predictions and measurable outcomes.

The most consequential educational finding was that transfer of training is far narrower than had been believed. In The Psychology of Arithmetic (1922) and other works, Thorndike showed that learning Latin does not automatically improve reasoning in other subjects, nor does memorising one kind of material strengthen general memory. Skills transfer only when the new task shares identical elements with the trained task. This finding, based on extensive measurement, demolished the doctrine of formal discipline that had shaped school curricula for centuries.

Alongside his own work, Thorndike applied his methods to practical problems. He studied the measurement of intelligence, the prediction of school success, handwriting and spelling, and the design of dictionaries for schoolchildren. His insistence that educational decisions should rest on measurement anticipated the fields of educational psychology and psychometrics, and his papers helped establish the notion of quantitative educational research in the United States and beyond.

Intelligence, Testing and the Legacy

Thorndike made important contributions to the study of individual differences. He introduced the concept of the correlation between traits, developed the first widely used scale for measuring handwriting quality, and laid groundwork for modern intelligence testing. He also formulated an early version of what he called social intelligence and, more influentially, defined intelligence as the power of good responses from the point of view of truth or fact, treating it as a measurable set of abilities rather than a mysterious essence.

During the First World War Thorndike served on committees that developed group tests for the classification of recruits; these tests, with all their flaws and cultural biases, were a landmark in the application of psychology to public policy. He also wrote on the psychology of war, crime and advertising, and he served as president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He founded the journal Psychological Review with James McKeen Cattell.

Thorndike's legacy ranges across several fields. His law of effect is the parent of operant psychology; his connectionism is an ancestor of learning theory and of connectionist models in cognitive science; his educational measurements underpin the testing industry. He was a major figure in the transfer of psychology from a philosophical to an empirical discipline, and among the most cited psychologists of his generation. Although many of his specific claims have been superseded, the empirical programme he launched endures.

See also

• Law of effect
• Behaviorism
• Educational psychology
• Animal learning