Cats in wooden puzzle boxes taught psychology how learning actually happens
Edward Thorndike shut cats in boxes that opened only when a lever or switch was pressed. Watching other cats escape did not help them, nor did guiding their paws. They stumbled on the answer by accident, then got faster every time, and the resulting curve reshaped how we think about learning.
Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, in 1874, the son of a Methodist minister. After Wesleyan and a Harvard master's degree in 1897, where he studied animal learning alongside William James, he completed his PhD at Columbia in 1898 under James McKeen Cattell, a founder of psychometrics. His dissertation, Animal Intelligence, was the first in psychology to use nonhuman subjects. Both his brothers became notable scholars too, one a historian of science and magic, the other a Shakespeare authority.
The puzzle boxes were about 20 inches long, 15 wide and 12 high, with a door held shut by a weighted string running over a pulley to a lever or button inside. A cat put in would pace and meow until it triggered the mechanism by chance, then was rewarded, usually with food. Thorndike timed each escape. Letting cats watch others escape made no difference to how quickly they learned, so he settled on trial and error: successful actions were stamped in, and plotted escape times formed a learning curve.
This research on animals produced his law of effect, and it made him a pioneer both of behaviourism and of using animals in experiments. The law gave behaviourism and reinforcement theory a basic empirical framework and shaped classroom practice. Thorndike called his wider account of learning connectionism, and it helped lay the scientific base for educational psychology. He also tackled practical problems such as employee exams and testing.
After an unhappy year at a women's college in Cleveland, he joined Teachers College, Columbia, in 1899 and stayed for the rest of his career. He led the American Psychological Association in 1912 and, in 1937, became second president of the Psychometric Society after its founder, L. L. Thurstone. He bought land on the Hudson and gathered fellow researchers around him in a small colony. A 2002 survey ranked him ninth among the most cited psychologists of the 20th century. He died in 1949.
Source: Edward Thorndike
