Thorndike's research paved the way for later behaviorist theories.
Movie shows Thorndike's research over the years.
Edward Lee Thorndike
From a religious household
Went to Wellesley College and left his religious upbringing behind
Read James' text and went to Harvard
Took courses with James (Münsterberg was back in Germany then)
Animal research (see movie) [add Thorndike video below]
Moved to Columbia, started working with cats in puzzle boxes (example: Rube Goldberg).
A few of Thorndike's puzzle boxes
Rube Goldberg (history) (Rube Goldberg (1883–1970) was an American cartoonist who drew incredibly convoluted and inane machines designed to accomplish simple tasks with great difficulty.)
Years later, his son (R. Thorndike, 1991, p. 145) wrote about his father’s mechanical ability, “if you look at pictures of the equipment that he used in his original animal experiments you realize that they would have shamed Rube Goldberg.”
Curve depicts the number of errors in escape over time.
Notice how the number of errors drops over time
Teaching Objective: Explain how many writers in the popular media reverse the meaning of “steep learning curve.” [In other words, a "steep learning curve" indicates rapid learning, a good thing in most instances. Today, too many use those words to indicate, wrongly, that learning is difficult. In reality, "a shallow learning curve" should be used instead to indicate difficult learning tasks.]
Lived long enough to see psychology grow from infancy until after World War II's boom years
Thorndike's personal biases led to the removal of his name from Thorndike Hall at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2020
The Board of Trustees wrote:
The Board of Trustees of Teachers College, Columbia University unanimously voted today to remove Edward L. Thorndike’s name from the building that has held his name since its dedication nearly 50 years ago. While Thorndike’s work was hugely influential on modern educational ideas and practices, he was also a proponent of eugenics, and held racist, sexist, and antisemitic ideas. They added that Teachers College was not erasing Thorndike’s name from its history, and that the former building plaque would be moved elsewhere on campus. The college’s history, they added, should be faced with honesty, bravery, and with humanity.
Kardas and Henley (2021) in a poster presented to the Association for Psychological Science added:
Turning to today’s larger issue, dealing with the non-professional aspects of the lives of historically prominent psychologists, we recommend the following strategy. Inspired by Simmons (2016) we endorse the search for a self-cure that stabilizes the history of psychology, reassembles the new revelations with the old, promotes care, and provides reparations where necessary. Morawski (2020) has it right when she states (p. 191), “Chronicling psychology’s historical trajectory affords a way to better see where the science is, where it is moving, and how it could have been or could be otherwise.” In other words, we believe our job is not to censor psychology’s past but, instead, it is to explain the past, and to demonstrate how the past led to the current state. We hope that a new, more ethical history of psychology results, one that does not dismiss the past but that shows how history, too, is capable of rewriting itself.
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