Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [159]
In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.4
Even the intricate tricks performed by pet dogs, Morgan said, could be explained in terms of reflexes and simple associative learning; there was no need to assume the existence in the animals of higher mental functions.
Jacques Loeb, a German-born biologist, went even further. During the 1890s, when he was teaching in the United States, he argued on the basis of wide-ranging evidence that a good deal of animal behavior consists of “tropisms,” a term he used for all involuntary responses of worms, insects, and even higher animals to stimuli. In his view, much or most animal behavior consists of such tropisms, the creature being no more than a stimulus-driven automaton.5
The implication of all this seemed clear to a growing number of psychologists: if human beings are related to animals, and if animal behavior can be explained without mentalist concepts, then part of human behavior—perhaps even all of it—can be, too. The answer to the intractable questions about the nature and operations of the mind might be utterly simple: mind does not exist, or if it does, it can be ignored, since it is not only unobservable but unnecessary to the explanation of behavior.
Behavior— overt, visible, indisputable action —that is the real subject of psychology, rather than memory, reasoning, will, and all the other unseen processes imagined by mentalist psychologists. Not conjectures and hypotheses about invisible functions, but laws derived from observable phenomena, such as the cat’s learning to escape from the puzzle box, could be the substance of a thoroughly objective and rigorously scientific psychology. Such was the thinking of many psychologists in the 1890s and the early 1900s, long before the word “behaviorism” had been coined or the theory’s tenets set forth.
Two Discoverers of the Laws of Behaviorism: Thorndike and Pavlov
The animal experiments mentioned above exemplify two different principles of behaviorism: the laws of natural learning (the chickens’ associating a particular color with the reward of the sweet-tasting corn, the cat’s associating a step on the treadle with escape and food), and the laws of conditioning (the dog’s salivating at the sound of the metronome, a stimulus artificially linked to the salivary reflex). These laws were discovered by two men of dissimilar backgrounds, training, and personality, one a brilliant and dedicated psychologist, the other a physiologist who was scornful of psychology and doubted that it could be regarded as a science.
The first was Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1947), a psychologist of such catholic and diverse interests that some historians have classified him as a functionalist, others as a behaviorist, and he himself as neither.6Except for one year, he spent all of his long career in psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he researched and wrote fifty books and 450 articles dealing with educational psychology, learning theory, tests and measurements, industrial psychology, language acquisition, and social psychology. For good measure he produced such unusual items as a teachers’ list of the twenty thousand words students most often encountered in general reading, a rating of American cities according to how desirable they were to live in, and a highly popular dictionary. Our interest in Thorndike, however, is focused on his work as a graduate student, when, notwithstanding his later demurral, he was very much a behaviorist.
Born in Massachusetts, Thorndike, the son of a Methodist minister, was a homely, lonely, and painfully shy child who found satisfaction in his studies. Exceptionally gifted, he ranked first or second in all his high school courses and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1895 with the highest average achieved there in