Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [160]
Despite his admiration for James, he chose to do graduate research on a very un-Jamesian topic, “the instinctive and intelligent behavior of chickens.” Later in life he said that his motive had been “chiefly to satisfy requirements for courses and degrees…I certainly had no special interest in animals.”7 Perhaps, but no doubt a shy person (as he still was at the time) would find animals easier to work with than people. James approved the project and Thorndike bought a batch of chicks, which, for lack of laboratory space, he housed in his room until his outraged landlady ordered him to get rid of them. When he told James of his problem, James, going far beyond the bounds of professorial duty, allowed Thorndike to install them in the cellar of his house.
There, using stacked books, Thorndike built a maze with three blind alleys and a fourth leading to an adjoining enclosure in which were food, water, and other chicks. When he put a chick in the maze, it raced in and out of the blind alleys, peeping loudly, until it blundered to the exit; when he put it back in again and again, it slowly got better at finding its way out. Clearly, there was no intelligence at work but something much simpler. In Thorndike’s words:
The chick, when confronted by loneliness and confining walls, responds by those acts which in similar situations in nature would be likely to free him. Some one of these acts leads him to the successful act, and the resulting pleasure stamps it in. Absence of pleasure stamps all others out.8
Those sentences contained the seed of behaviorist theory.
The following year, after being rejected by a young woman he had proposed to, Thorndike felt it necessary to flee from Cambridge. He transferred to Columbia University to complete work for his Ph.D. under James McKeen Cattell, who was then in the middle of his effort to measure intelligence by anthropometric tests. Though Thorndike too would later do research in mental testing, for his dissertation he continued his animal-learning studies. From fruit and vegetable crates he built fifteen puzzle boxes of various designs, and in the attic of an old university building began studying the ability of cats (plus a few dogs) to learn how to escape.
In some boxes his cats could escape by performing a single action: stepping on a treadle, pushing a button, or pulling on a loop of string. In others, escape required multiple actions such as pulling on the loop and then moving a stick, and in one experiment Thorndike released the door only if the cat licked or scratched itself. Driven by fierce ambition—Thorndike meant to (and did) reach the top of his profession in five years—he worked so hard in the attic with his animals that in less than a year he had arrived at several findings that leaders in the field at once recognized as being of major importance. The New York Academy of Sciences invited him to talk about his results at a meeting in January 1898; in June, Science published a paper by him on his work; his thesis appeared as a monograph supplement to Psychological Review late in the year; and the American Psychological Association had him make a presentation at its annual meeting in December.
Thorndike’s findings, though simple, had significant implications. First, the cats had not learned to escape by means of reasoning or insight; rather, by trial and error they slowly eliminated useless movements and made the connection between the appropriate action and the desired goal. They learned nothing from seeing how an experienced cat escaped, or from having Thorndike manipulate their paws to release the door of the box. All the cats learned to escape when only a single response was required, but more than half of them never learned to escape when two responses were required.
From all this,