Thorndike and Watson: A Historical Overview

Edward Lee Thorndike is known for his contributions to comparative, educational and animal psychology. He was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts in 1874. William James’s “Principles of Psychology” sparked Thorndike’s interest in the field and after graduating from Wesleyan University he enrolled at Harvard hoping to study under James. Initially Thorndike was interested in conducting research on children, however, he ended up developing projects that examined learning in animals. At Harvard he studied maze learning in chicks.

He did not complete his studies at Harvard. He studied under James Cattell, and continued his animal research at Columbia University. There he switched from chicks to cats and dogs and studied their behavior in his self-designed “puzzle boxes.” It was at Columbia that he came up with his famous “Law of Effect.” He felt the only way to understand learning is through an experimental approach. This was a radical move away from the way psychology was being interpreted at the time, based a great deal on introspection and attributes difficult to quantify.

After graduating from Columbia, Thorndike returned to his study of educational psychology. He taught briefly at the College for Women of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, and then he became an instructor at Teachers College at Columbia University where he remained until his retirement. There he continued his work on human education, learning and mental testing (Reinmeyer, Muskingum 2004). In 1912 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. In 1934 Thorndike became the only social scientist to head the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He retired in 1939, but continued to work until his death in 1949 (Reinmeyer, Muskingum 2004).

Thorndike is most known for his work with animals. In his experiments with his “puzzle boxes” instrumental conditioning was demonstrated. Animals are prompted to make a response to a stimulus, if the response is rewarded the behavior is learned. However, if the response is not rewarded or is punished the response gradually extinguishes.

Thorndike placed hungry cats “in enclosures (puzzle boxes) from which they could escape by pulling on a cord, pressing a lever or stepping on a platform. Food was placed outside the puzzle box in sight, and each cat’s behavior was observed (Thorndike, 1898, Psi Cafe 2004).” Thorndike observed that cats obtained food by means of “trial and error.” Once the cats figured out how to escape the box and attain food, they no longer engaged in “trial and error” behaviors and achieved the goal quicker than before. Thorndike studied the time it took cats to escape on successive trials. He found that with each successive trial the cats were in the box a shorter amount of time (Reinmeyer, Muskingum 2004). “From this, the animal did not merely realize what it had to do to escape, but the connection between the animal’s situation and the response that gradually freed him was stamped in (Reinmeyer, Muskingum 2004).”

Thorndike’s theory of “connectionism” explains the concept of learning without considering unobservable internal states. According to connectionism theory, “learning is the result of associations forming between stimuli and responses. Associations are weakened or strengthened by the nature and frequency of stimulus-response (S-R) pairings (Psi Café, 2004).” Thorndike’s theory includes three primary laws: the law of effect, the law of readiness, the law of exercise, and the spread effect.

According to his law of effect, Thorndike alluded that certain stimuli and responses become dissociated or connected to each other based on whether responses were ignored, punished, or rewarded. Thorndike concluded that animals learn only by trial and error, or reward and punishment. He ascribed his findings in the puzzle box experiment to the larger world, as an explanation of how learning occurs. According to Thorndike, intelligence is the ability to form connections, and connections are formed and strengthened in relation to his law of effect. Thorndike studied animal behavior, not animal consciousness, for the sole purpose of controlling behavior (Reinmeyer, Muskingum 2004).

“The law of readiness states that a series of responses can be chained together to satisfy some goal, which will result in annoyance if blocked. The law of exercise states that connections become strengthened with practice and weakened when practice is discontinued.” Thorndike also included the concept of “spread effect,” which occurs when rewards affect not only the connection that produced them but temporally adjacent connections as well (Psi Café, 2004). To illustrate, these laws were all incorporated in Thorndike’s puzzle box experiment. After trial and error, cats came to associate pressing a lever, or pulling a cord (S) with a door opening (R), which led to a reward: escape and food. The S-R pairing happened a number of times (law of exercise), a reward was attained (law of effect), and a single sequence was formed (law of readiness) (Psi Café, 2004).

Connectionism theory suggests that in order for learning to be transferred from one situation to another that identical elements must exist in the original and new learning situations. The connectionism theory later came to include the concept of belongingness. Based in part in Gestalt principles, if a person perceives stimuli or responses go together, a connection will be formed. Thorndike meant for connectionism to be a general theory, applicable to animals and humans. He was particularly interested in seeing its application to education including mathematics, spelling, reading, and measurement of intelligence (Psi Café).

During the 1920s, Thorndike developed an intelligence test, the CAVD, which measured completion, arithmetic, vocabulary and directions tests. He wanted to measure intelligence on an absolute scale. The design of the CAVD became the foundation for modern intelligence tests. He influenced Wechsler. Standardized tests of the time measured only “abstract intelligence,” Thorndike sought an instrument that would measure abstract, mechanical and social intelligence. “Mechanical intelligence is the ability to visualize relationships among objects and understand how the physical world works. Social intelligence is the ability to function successfully in interpersonal situations (Psi Café 2004).” Thorndike’s multi-factored approach to intelligence led to great debate with Charles Spearman, who proposed a single general intelligence factor ‘g.’

Thorndike was a pioneer in psychology. He steered the field away from unobservable internal states. He instead focused on the measurable and observable, leading us toward behaviorism.

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of ancestors (Watson, 1930).” In the 19^th century more emphasis was placed on the need for empirical observation and measurement in the study of psychology. By the 20^th century psychology came to be defined as the science of behavior. During this time John Broadus Watson would become the founder of “behaviorism (Psi Café 2004).”

John Broadus Watson was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1878. He came from a divided household: his mother was very religious and his father was not. His father had extramarital affairs and left them. In his adolescence, Watson was a bit of a juvenile delinquent. At the age of fifteen he attended Furman University. He earned a master’s degree at Furman by age 21, and then continued his studies at the University of Chicago. There he became interested in comparative psychology and studied animals. He studied the relation between behavior in white rats and nervous system growth (Watson, Muskingum 2004). He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1903, and left in 1907 for a position at Johns Hopkins.

At Hopkins, Watson studied experimental psychology. He came to believe that “the prediction and control of behavior” was the primary goal of psychology. Watson was influenced a great deal by the Russian psychologists of the time: Bechterev, Sechenov, and Pavlov. Like them he was a positivist, “they believed in studying only the things which can be directly experienced (Psi Café 2004).” Watson, like the Russians and Thorndike, focused on a stimulus-response relationship in studying behavior. For Watson, however, the term ‘stimulus’ could be a general environmental situation or some internal condition of the organism.

During his 1913 lecture entitled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it,” Watson suggested that introspection and consciousness be eliminated from the study of psychology. He proposed an objective view of psychology called “behaviorism,” which would later become the study of actions and the ability to predict and control those actions. Watson’s ideas were very radical for psychology during his time. He left the study of animals and moved to studying human behaviors and emotions. “He wanted to develop techniques that would allow him to ‘condition and control the emotions of subjects’ (Watson, Muskingum 2004).” Watson came up with ‘the Little Albert Experiment.’

Watson states that behaviorism is the scientific study of human behavior. Behaviorists must first observe behavior and make predictions, then determine causal relationships. Watson defined all behavior in relation to the S-R model. He felt introspection and consciousness were insignificant because neither is open to experimental treatment and their elimination removes subjectivity from psychology. Watson backed the position that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals should be considered as being “equally essential to a general understanding of behavior.”

“Watson theorized that children have three basic emotional reactions: fear, rage, and love. He wanted to prove that these three reactions could be artificially conditioned in children (Watson, Muskingum 2004).” In 1920 in his famous investigation, Watson and his graduate assistant Rosalie Raynor conducted a conditioning experiment with an eleven-month-old baby named Albert. The experiment conditioned Albert’s fear reaction to white, fury objects.

At the beginning of the experiment Albert did not fear many objects, and he would often reach for the white rat. “Watson applied two principles to the experiment: 1) emotional responses are conditioned to various stimuli as a result of pairings that occur between conditioned stimuli such as distinctive sounds, smell, sights, or love and anger, 2) emotional responses can spread to stimuli to which they have not been conditional, but that resemble the conditioned stimuli (Psi Café 2004).” After only seven pairings of the white rat with a loud clanging noise, Albert had become very frightened of the rat. When Albert was tested a few days after this occurrence, he was not only afraid of the rat, but also of a white rabbit, and a seal coat. Prior to the experiment he had played comfortably with the aforementioned objects. Albert’s fear of the other objects is referred to as “transfer” or “spread.” Unfortunately, Albert remained conditioned to fear white, fury objects all of his life. This kind of study would be unethical today.

Application of Watson’s theory results in rigid prescriptions for child-rearing, and education, as well as for training and control in the military and industry. Watson’s theory claims that people’s behavior can be controlled by manipulating stimulus and response events: “Don’t kiss and cuddle our children; shake their hands, and then arrange their environments so that the behaviors you desire will be brought under the control of the appropriate stimuli (Watson) (Watson, Psi Café 2004).”

Watson was asked to resign from John Hopkins because of a sex scandal. He was having an affair with a graduate student, Rosalie Raynor. He divorced his first wife, whom he had met at the University of Chicago, and married Rosalie. He had two more children with Rosalie. After Hopkins Watson became interested in advertising. He hoped to use behaviorism to improve the effects of advertising on consumers. He worked at a few ad agencies, becoming an ambassador and the vice president of one in particular. After Hopkins most of his articles and publications could only be found in popular magazines. In 1958, having been retired from advertising a little over ten years, John Broadus Watson burned all of his unpublished works and died a short time after (Watson, Psi Café 2004).

Both Watson and Thorndike changed the face of psychology, moving away from mentalism and giving attention to simplistic, overt behaviors. They both can be considered the founding fathers of behaviorism. Some argue that their theories are too general or too simplistic. Nevertheless, their work opened a new avenue of discussion in psychology that did not exist before.

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