Edward L. Thorndike

American psychologist

• Born: August 31, 1874
• Birthplace: Williamsburg, Massachusetts
• Died: August 9, 1949
• Place of death: Montrose, New York

Often referred to as the founder of modern educational psychology, Thorndike incorporated measurement into education and psychology, as well as developing testing of animals and studies of learning in humans.

Early Life

Edward Lee Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, the second son and the second of four children of Edward Roberts Thorndike and Abigail Brewster (Ladd) Thorndike. His father had first practiced law and later became a Methodist clergyman. Reared in a clergyman’s home, Thorndike and his siblings were expected to be models for the congregation and to strive for excellence.

The religious environment of the Thorndike home has been described as austere, and the children constantly participated in church activities. As an adult, Edward Thorndike financially supported the local Methodist church, but he did not attend or require attendance of his children. Thorndike guided his later life by nonsectarian ethical precepts, rather than by the religious precepts of his upbringing.

Intellectual pursuits were important in the home. Thorndike’s mother, Abigail, was a highly intelligent woman, and the children were stimulated by their home environment as well as by contact with the sophisticated congregations of the Boston-Cambridge area. The four children all went on to earn excellent grades and scholarships, and all established academic careers. Ashley, the eldest son, became a professor of English; Lynn, the third son, a historian; and Mildred, the youngest child, a high school English teacher. All three of the Thorndike brothers were professors at Columbia University.

The elder Thorndike, as a minister, was forced to move his family frequently, and the disruption left young Thorndike with pronounced shyness and social uneasiness. This discontinuity of social contacts also may have contributed to his adult preference for the lonely privacy of research. His social contacts were with small groups of friends, and he disliked such routine gatherings as faculty meetings and national scientific conventions. Thorndike’s work consumed his time and attention, and he found competition and the effort to influence others distasteful. To him, learning was essentially a private undertaking, something that happened under one’s skin, in the nervous system.

Life’s Work

Thorndike attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 1891 to 1895 earning the B.A. degree, with honors, in the traditional classical curriculum, but had no firm career plans. While at Wesleyan, he held membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Thorndike stated in an autobiographical sketch that he had neither heard nor seen the word “psychology” until his junior year at Wesleyan. A required course taught by Andrew Armstrong in the subject and the text Elements of Psychology (1886) by James Sully did little to pique Thorndike’s interest in psychology. While a senior, however, Thorndike studied parts of William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) in connection with a prize examination and found them stimulating and interesting. An opportunity to study with James came the following year with a scholarship to Harvard. Study under James strengthened Thorndike’s interest in psychology, and as he later wrote, “by the fall of 1897, I thought of myself as a student of psychology and a candidate for the Ph.D. degree.”

Pioneering in the use of animals for psychological research, Thorndike, while studying with James, conducted several experiments on the instinctive and intelligent behavior of chickens. In 1897-1898, a substantial fellowship brought Thorndike to Columbia University in were chosen to complete his doctoral study. While at Columbia, he received additional training in biology and statistics and worked primarily under James McKeen Cattell, who provided him with laboratory space. He completed his doctoral dissertation, “Animal Intelligence,” in 1898; this work inaugurated the scientific study of animal learning and laid the foundation for study of stimulus-response connections (known as S-R bonds) as the central factors in all learning.

On graduation, Thorndike began teaching at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. While there, teaching education courses in the 1898-1899 school year, he continued his investigations into animal learning. Then, on the recommendation of William James, he returned to Columbia University in 1899 as instructor in genetic psychology and remained there for the rest of his life, earning the titles adjunct professor in 1901, professor in 1904, and professor emeritus in 1941.

During the five decades of his career, Thorndike applied theoretical principles and empirical techniques to a vast range of educational problems. He attempted to rid psychology of such philosophical concepts as “soul” and “mental philosophy” and bring a more scientific approach to psychology and research. Thorndike believed that achievement and intellectual differences between people are quantitative, not qualitative. He believed heredity to be responsible for human differences and scorned environmental explanations. Thorndike also asserted the triumph of character over circumstances, arguing that the ingredients of success are in humans and not around them.

Thorndike became the educational world’s major exponent of the use of science’s universal language of description, numbers. All that exists, he affirmed, exists in some amount and can be measured. In 1902, he introduced the first university course in educational measurement, and two years later he wrote the first handbook for researchers in the use of social statistics, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (1904).

Thorndike’s approach to research was observational; he would present the subject with a problem to solve how to escape from a confining place, how to rank his attitudes, which response to select to avoid a mild shock and then observe the behavior and report it in a quantitative form. Despite the simplicity of his approach, Thorndike is credited with creating two basic psychological research techniques: the maze and the problem box. Using this type of stimulus work in animal studies, Thorndike concluded that learning had taken place following the law of cause and effect. Thorndike also studied learning in human beings. His conclusions were that being right helped the student retain a correct response, but being wrong did not eliminate errors.

In work on more practical matters, Thorndike was active in the preparation of school materials and tools, various achievement scales, and a series of arithmetic texts for the elementary grades. His The Teacher’s Word Book (1921), an alphabetical list of ten thousand words that occur most frequently in the general use of the English language, provided a foundation for a series of school readers. He also conducted large-scale statistical studies of mathematics, Latin, and other subjects that affected the later school performance of students. He was one of the first to devise tests to measure aptitudes and learning.

On August 29, 1900, Thorndike married Elizabeth Moulton of Boston; they had five children, four of whom lived to maturity and themselves followed scientific careers: Elizabeth Frances in mathematics, Edward Moulton in physics, Robert Ladd in educational psychology, and Alan Moulton in physics. Having enjoyed generally robust health throughout his life, Thorndike succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Montrose, New York, shortly before his seventy-fifth birthday. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery, Peekskill, New York.

Thorndike received much recognition during his lifetime for his efforts to help educational institutions capitalize on learning potential. He received honorary degrees from many universities, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and held the presidencies and memberships in numerous American and international scientific and educational associations. In a 1925 tribute to Thorndike, Columbia University bestowed on him the Butler Medal, “in recognition of his exceptionally significant contributions to the general problem of the measurement of human faculty and to the applications of such measurements to education.”

Significance

Thorndike wrote more than 450 books, monographs, and articles. His works include Educational Psychology (1903), Elements of Psychology (1905), The Principles of Teaching (1906), Animal Intelligence (1898), The Original Nature of Man (1926), The Teacher’s Word Book of Thirty Thousand Words (1944), Psychology of Arithmetic (1922), The Measurement of Intelligence (1926), Fundamentals of Learning (1932), Thorndike Century Junior Dictionary (1935), Human Nature and the Social Order (1940), Thorndike Century Senior Dictionary (1941), and Man and His Works (1943).

Thorndike’s work with educational testing has been a basis for subsequent quantitative testing in educational and psychological situations. Although many of his theories were not complete and were later superseded, Thorndike introduced the scientific method into these fields. This emphasis on scientific method is a reflection of the ideas and influence of the Industrial Revolution, of which Thorndike was a product.

Thorndike contributed significantly to the development of scientifically based schooling. Books such as Notes on Child Study (1901), The Principles of Teaching Based on Psychology (1906), and Education: A First Book (1912) directed teachers toward a more humane approach to teaching and to a support for the scientific movement in education. He also contributed to the growing awareness of individual differences and the main divisions of modern educational psychology measurement, learning, and individual differences. Thorndike’s word lists are the basis of the teaching of reading in all English-speaking schools, and his impact on education has been, and continues to be, diverse and practical.

Bibliography

Arthurs, Edna M. “From Whence We Came.” Contemporary Education 70, no. 4 (Summer, 1999): 47. Reviews Thorndike’s contributions to the teaching of mathematics in the twentieth century.

Curti, Merle. “Edward Lee Thorndike: Scientist.” In Social Ideas of American Educators. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. Curti elaborates on why he disapproves of Thorndike and his methods.

Gibboney, Richard A. “Intelligence by Design: Thorndike Versus Dewey.” Phi Delta Kappan 88, no. 2 (October, 2006): 170-172. Compares the educational theories of Thorndike and John Dewey, concluding that Thorndike, ultimately, had a greater influence on education and educational practice.

Joncich, Geraldine. The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. A full-scale study of Thorndike and his work. The standard biography, covering Thorndike’s personal as well as intellectual development.

Kimble, Gregory A., Michael Wertheimer, and Charlotte White, eds. Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1991-2003. This collection of portraits of pioneering psychologists includes a look into the scholarly and personal life of Thorndike.

Mook, Douglas. Classic Experiments in Psychology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. A study of Thorndike’s experiments on the law of effect, and of the background, conduct, and implications of Thorndike’s work as a whole.

Murchison, Carl. A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Vol. 3. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1936. Autobiographical sketch of Thorndike with emphasis on his studies in psychology.

Thorndike, Edward Lee. Man and His Works. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969. Consists of the William James Lectures given in 1942 at Harvard University. First three chapters present facts about humanity, and the remaining chapters concern applications of psychology. Provides good insight into Thorndike’s philosophy.

Wood, Robert S. Biographical Memoir of Edward Lee Thorndike. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Science, 1952. Useful background material on Thorndike’s personality.