Behaviorism paper 1: Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals by Edward L. Thorndike (1898)

Part of a blog series covering the seminal papers in learning—this entry opens the Behaviorism sub-series.

In 1898, Edward L. Thorndike—then a 24-year-old doctoral student at Columbia, having worked with William James at Harvard before that—published a monograph in the Psychological Review series titled Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals. It is, by most accounts, the founding document of the experimental study of animal learning. But its significance for a science of learning is larger than that. Thorndike did three things in this paper that would define the behaviorist program for decades: he replaced anecdote with controlled experiment; he introduced a quantitative measure of learning (the time-curve); and he proposed the first great law of learning—the Law of Effect—which asserted that “of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation.”