Captain Psychology

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Thorndike’ s Accomplishments

  • 1. Founded connectionism
    • Through experience, neural bonds or connections are formed between perceived stimuli and emitted responses
    • Intellect facilitates formation of the neural bonds
    • People of higher intellect can form more bonds
    • People of higher intellect form bonds easier
    • The ability to form bonds is rooted in genetic potential through the genes’ influence on the structure of the brain
    • The content of intellect is a function of experience and cultural background
  • 2. Conducted the first animal lab studies
    • Research on cats in puzzle boxes
    • Trial-and-error learning
    • Cats escaped by trying various behaviors until hit on the one solution that worked
    • Discard all non-solution behaviors
    • “Stamp in” correct connection
  • 3. Proposed multifactor theory of intelligence
    • During the 1920’s
    • CAVD Test of Intelligence
    • Completion
    • Arithmetic
    • Vocabulary
    • Directions
  • 4. Popularized adult education
  • 5. Changed “trained mind” to “transferable skills”
    • Locke’s Doctrine of Formal Discipline
    • John Locke (1632-1704)
      • Empiricism = ideas originate with sensory experience
      • No innate ideas
      • Blank slate
      • The mind is like a muscle
      • You have to exercise it to make it stronger
      • Transfer depends on the amount of effort you put into mastering a task
      • To reason well, a man must exercise his mind by observing the connection of ideas and following them in train
    • John & John Stuart Mill “Train of thought”
      • Nothing does this better than mathematics
      • It should be taught to all those who have the time and opportunity
      • Not to make them mathematicians
      • But to make them “reasonable creatures”
      • Once the mind is trained, they will be able to transfer their reasoning skills to other areas of knowledge
    • Thorndike’s Theory of Identical Elements
      • Transfer takes place when the original task is similar to the transfer task
      • More similarity, more transfer
      • It depends on how many “elements” the two tasks have in common
      • Taking a high school course in geometry
      • Won’t strengthen a general ability to think logically
      • May help you later in life
      • If you become a surveyor or navigator
      • Won’t help you if you become a lawyer
  • 6. Laid the groundwork for behaviorism
    • Objective experimental approach
  • 7. Laid groundwork for operant conditioning
    • Law of Effect
  • 8. Laid the groundwork for psychometrics
    • Used factor analysis before there were computers
  • 9. Founded educational psychology

‘There are two great principles of psychology: people have a tremendous capacity to change, and we usually don’t.”   Ken Tangen