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 of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for educational psychology. He also worked on solving industrial problems, such as employee exams and testing.
Edward Thorndike
August 9, 1949 (aged 74)
Psychologist
4, including Frances
Thorndike was a member of the board of the Psychological Corporation and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1912.[1][2] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thorndike as the ninth-most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[3] Edward Thorndike had a powerful impact on reinforcement theory and behavior analysis, providing the basic framework for empirical laws in behavior psychology with his law of effect. Through his contributions to the behavioral psychology field came his major impacts on education, where the law of effect has great influence in the classroom.
Early life and education[edit]
Thorndike, born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts,[4] was the son of Edward R and Abbie B Thorndike, a Methodist minister in Lowell, Massachusetts.[5] Thorndike graduated from The Roxbury Latin School (1891), in West Roxbury, Massachusetts and from Wesleyan University (B.S. 1895).[4] He earned an M.A. at Harvard University in 1897.[4] His two brothers (Lynn and Ashley) also became important scholars. The younger, Lynn, was a medievalist specializing in the history of science and magic, while the older, Ashley, was an English professor and noted authority on Shakespeare.
While at Harvard, he was interested in how animals learn (ethology), and worked with William James. Afterwards, he became interested in the animal 'man', to the study of which he then devoted his life.[6] Edward's thesis is sometimes thought of as the essential document of modern comparative psychology. Upon graduation, Thorndike returned to his initial interest, educational psychology. In 1898 he completed his PhD at Columbia University under the supervision of James McKeen Cattell, one of the founding fathers of psychometrics.
In 1899, after a year of unhappy initial employment at the College for Women of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, he became an instructor in psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career, studying human learning, education, and mental testing. In 1937 Thorndike became the second President of the Psychometric Society, following in the footsteps of Louis Leon Thurstone who had established the society and its journal Psychometrika the previous year.
On August 29, 1900, he wed Elizabeth Moulton. They had four children, among them Frances, who became a mathematician.[7]
During the early stages of his career, he purchased a wide tract of land on the Hudson and encouraged other researchers to settle around him. Soon a colony had formed there with him as its 'tribal' chief.[8]
Criticism[edit]
Thorndike's law of effect and puzzle box methodology were subjected to detailed criticism by behaviorists and many other psychologists.[18] The criticisms over the law of effect mostly cover four aspects of the theory: the implied or retroactive working of the effect, the philosophical implication of the law, the identification of the effective conditions that cause learning, and the comprehensive usefulness of the law.[19]
Thorndike on education[edit]
Thorndike's Educational psychology began a trend toward behavioral psychology that sought to use empirical evidence and a scientific approach to problem solving. Thorndike was among some of the first psychologists to combine learning theory, psychometrics, and applied research for school-related subjects to form psychology of education. One of his influences on education is seen by his ideas on mass marketing of tests and textbooks at that time. Thorndike opposed the idea that learning should reflect nature, which was the main thought of developmental scientists at that time. He instead thought that schooling should improve upon nature. Unlike many other psychologist of his time, Thorndike took a statistical approach to education in his later years by collecting qualitative information intended to help teachers and educators deal with practical educational problems.[20] Thorndike's theory was an association theory, as many were in that time. He believed that the association between stimulus and response was solidified by a reward or confirmation. He also thought that motivation was an important factor in learning.[21] The Law of Effect introduced the relation between reinforcers and punishers. Although Thorndike's description of the relation between reinforcers and punishers was incomplete, his work in this area would later become a catalyst in further research, such as that of B.F. Skinner.[22]
Thorndike's Law of Effect states that "responses that produce a desired effect are more likely to occur again whereas responses that produce an unpleasant effect are less likely to occur again".[23] The terms 'desired effect' and 'unpleasant effect' eventually became known as 'reinforcers' and 'punishers'.[24] Thorndike's contributions to the Behavioral Psychology Society are seen through his influences in the classroom, with a particular focus on praising and ignoring behaviors. Praise is used in the classroom to encourage and support the occurrence of a desired behavior. When used in the classroom, praise has been shown to increase correct responses and appropriate behavior.[25] Planned ignoring is used to decrease, weaken, or eliminate the occurrence of a target behavior.[25] Planned ignoring is accomplished by removing the reinforcer that is maintaining the behavior. For example, when the teacher does not pay attention to a "whining" behavior of a student, it allows the student to realize that whining will not succeed in gaining the attention of the teacher.[25]
Beliefs about the behavior of women[edit]
Unlike later behaviorists such as John Watson, who placed a very strong emphasis on the impact of environmental influences on behavior,[26] Thorndike believed that differences in the parental behavior of men and women were due to biological, rather than cultural, reasons.[27] While conceding that society could "complicate or deform" [28] what he believed were inborn differences, he believed that "if we [researchers] should keep the environment of boys and girls absolutely similar these instincts would produce sure and important differences between the mental and moral activities of boys and girls".[29] Indeed, Watson himself overtly critiqued the idea of maternal instincts in humans in a report of his observations of first-time mothers struggling to breastfeed. Watson argued that the very behaviors Thorndike referred to as resulting from a "nursing instinct" stemming from "unreasoning tendencies to pet, coddle, and 'do for' others,"[30] were performed with difficulty by new mothers and thus must have been learned, while "instinctive factors are practically nil".[31]
Thorndike's beliefs about inborn differences between the thoughts and behavior of men and women included outdated arguments about the role of women in society. For example, along with the "nursing instinct," Thorndike talked about the instinct of "submission to mastery," arguing that because men are typically physically larger than women, "Women in general are thus by original nature submissive to men in general."[32] Although these opinions lack substantiating evidence, such beliefs were commonplace during this era and in many cases served to justify prejudice against women in academia (including entrance into doctoral programs, psychological laboratories, and scientific societies).[33]
Thorndike composed three different word books to assist teachers with word and reading instruction. After publication of the first book in the series, The Teacher's Word Book (1921), two other books were written and published, each approximately a decade apart from its predecessor. The second book in the series, its full title being A Teacher's Word Book of the Twenty Thousand Words Found Most Frequently and Widely in General Reading for Children and Young People, was published in 1932, and the third and final book, The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words, was published in 1944.
In the preface to the third book, Thorndike writes that the list contained therein "tells anyone who wishes to know whether to use a word in writing, speaking, or teaching how common the word is in standard English reading matter" (p. x), and he further advises that the list can best be employed by teachers if they allow it to guide the decisions they make choosing which words to emphasize during reading instruction. Some words require more emphasis than others, and, according to Thorndike, his list informs teachers of the most frequently occurring words that should be reinforced by instruction and thus become "a permanent part of [students'] stock of word knowledge" (p. xi). If a word is not on the list but appears in an educational text, its meaning only needs to be understood temporarily in the context in which it was found, and then summarily discarded from memory.
In Appendix A to the second book, Thorndike gives credit to his word counts and how frequencies were assigned to particular words. Selected sources extrapolated from Appendix A include:
Thorndike's influence[edit]
Thorndike contributed a great deal to psychology. His influence on animal psychologists, especially those who focused on behavior plasticity, greatly contributed to the future of that field.[34] In addition to helping pave the way towards behaviorism, his contribution to measurement influenced philosophy, the administration and practice of education, military administration, industrial personnel administration, civil service and many public and private social services.[11] Thorndike influenced many schools of psychology as Gestalt psychologists, psychologists studying the conditioned reflex, and behavioral psychologists all studied Thorndike's research as a starting point.[11] Thorndike was a contemporary of John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov. However, unlike Watson, Thorndike introduced the concept of reinforcement.[15] Thorndike was the first to apply psychological principles to the area of learning. His research led to many theories and laws of learning. His theory of learning, especially the law of effect, is most often considered to be his greatest achievement.[11] In 1929, Thorndike addressed his early theory of learning, and claimed that he had been wrong.[9] After further research, he was forced to denounce his law of exercise completely, because he found that practice alone did not strengthen an association, and that time alone did not weaken an association.[9] He also got rid of half of the law of effect, after finding that a satisfying state of affairs strengthens an association, but punishment is not effective in modifying behavior.[9] He placed a great emphasis on consequences of behavior as setting the foundation for what is and is not learned. His work represents the transition from the school of functionalism to behaviorism, and enabled psychology to focus on learning theory.[9] Thorndike's work would eventually be a major influence to B.F. Skinner and Clark Hull. Skinner, like Thorndike, put animals in boxes and observed them to see what they were able to learn. The learning theories of Thorndike and Pavlov were later synthesized by Clark Hull.[11] His work on motivation and attitude formation directly affected studies on human nature as well as social order.[11] Thorndike's research drove comparative psychology for fifty years, and influenced countless psychologists over that period of time, and even still today.
Accomplishments[edit]
In 1912, Thorndike was elected president for the American Psychological Association. In 1917 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[35] He was admitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1917.[36] He was one of the first psychologists to be admitted to the association. Thorndike is well known for his experiments on animals supporting the law of effect.[37] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1934.[38] That same year, Thorndike was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[39]
Opposition to Thorndike[edit]
Because of his "racist, sexist, and antisemitic ideals", amid the George Floyd protests of 2020, the Board of Trustees of Teachers' College in New York voted unanimously to remove his name from Thorndike Hall.[40]
