Edward_L._Thorndike_-_Animal_Intelligence.pdf

ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

Animal Intelligence

By Edward L. Thorndike (1911)

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ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

Classics in the History of Psychology

Preface

Chapter 1. The Study of Consciousness and the

Study of Behavior

Chapter 2. Animal Intelligence

Chapter 3. The Instinctive Reactions of Young

Chicks

A Note on the Psychology of Fishes

Chapter 4. The Mental Life of the Monkeys

Chapter 5. Laws and Hypotheses of Behavior

Chapter 6. The Evolution of the Human Intellect

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ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

Animal Intelligence

Edward L. Thorndike (1911)

Preface

THE main purpose of this volume is to make accessible to students of psychology and biology

the author's experimental studies of animal intellect and behavior. [ 1 ] These studies have, I am

informed by teachers of comparative psychology, a twofold interest. Since they represent the

first deliberate and extended application of the experimental method in animal psychology, they

are a useful introduction to the later literature of that subject. They mark the change from books

of general argumentation on the basis of common experience interpreted in terms of the faculty

psychology, to monographs reporting de-tailed and often highly technical experiments

interpreted in terms of original and acquired connections between situation and response. Since

they represent the point of view and the method of present animal psychology, but in the case of

very general and simple problems, they are useful also as readings for students who need a

general acquaintance with some sample of experimental work in this field. [p. vi.]

It has seemed best to leave the texts unaltered except for the correction of typographical errors,

renumbering of tables and figures, and redrawing the latter. In a few places, where the original

text has been found likely to be misunderstood, brief notes have been added. It is hard to resist

the impulse to temper the style, especially of the 'Animal Intelligence,' with a certain sobriety

and restraint. What one writes at the age of twenty-three is likely to irritate oneself a dozen years

later, as it doubt-less irritated others at the time. The charitable reader may allay his irritation by

the thought that a degree of exuberance, even of arrogance, is proper to youth. To the reports of

experimental studies are added two new essays dealing with the general laws of human and

animal learning.

January, 1911. [p. vii]

[1] Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals' ('98),

'The Instinctive Reactions of Young Chicks' ('99), (A Note on the Psychology of Fishes' ('99),

and 'The Mental Life of the Monkeys' ('01). I have added a theoretical paper, 'The Evolution of

the Human Intellect,' which appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in 1901, and which was a

direct outgrowth of the experimental work. I am indebted to the management of the

Psychological Review , and that of the American Naturalist and Popular Science Monthly , for

permission to reprint the three papers.

CHAPTER I

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ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR

The statements about human nature made by psychologists are of two sorts, -- statements about

consciousness , about the inner life of thought and feeling, the 'self as conscious,' the 'stream of

thought' and statements about behavior , about the life of man that is left unexplained by physics,

chemistry, anatomy and physiology, and is roughly compassed for common sense by the terms

'intellect' and 'character.'

Animal psychology shows the same double content. Some statements concern the conscious

states of the animal, what he is to himself as an inner life; others concern his original and

acquired ways of response, his behavior, what he is an outside observer.

Of the psychological terms in common use, some refer only to conscious states, and some refer

to behavior regardless of the consciousness accompanying it; but the majority are ambiguous,

referring to the man or animal in question, at times in his aspect of inner life, at times in his

aspect of reacting organism, and at times as an undefined total nature. Thus 'intensity,' 'duration'

and 'quality' of sensations, 'transitive' and 'substantive' states and 'imagery' almost inevitably

refer to states of conscious- [p. 2] ness. 'Imitation,' 'invention' and 'practice' almost inevitably

refer to behavior observed from the outside. 'Perception,' 'attention,' 'memory,' 'abstraction,'

'reasoning' and 'will' are samples of the many terms which illustrate both ways of studying

human and animal minds. That an animal perceives an object, say, the sun, may mean either that

his mental stream includes an awareness of that object distinguished from the rest of the visual

field; or that he reacts to that object as a unit. 'Attention' may mean a clearness, focalness, of the

mental state; or an exclusiveness and devotion of the total behavior. It may, that is, be illustrated

by the sharpness of objects illumined by a shaft of light, or by the behavior of a cat toward the

bird it stalks. 'Memory' may be consciousness of certain objects, events or facts; or may be the

permanence of certain tendencies in either thought or action. 'To recognize' may be to feel a

certain familiarity and surety of being able to progress to certain judgments about the thing

recognized; or may be to respond to it in certain accustomed and appropriate ways. 'Abstraction'

may refer to ideas of qualities apart from any consciousness of their concrete accompaniments,

and to the power of having such ideas; or to responses to qualities irrespective of their concrete

accompaniments, and to the power of making such responses. 'Reasoning' may be said to be

present when certain sorts of consciousness, or when certain sorts of behavior, are present. An

account of 'the will' is an account of consciousness as related to action or an account of the

actions themselves.

Not only in psychological judgments and psychological terms, but also in the work of individual

psychologists, this twofold content is seen. Amongst writers in this country, for example,

Titchener has busied himself almost [p. 3] exclusively with consciousness 'as such'; Stanley Hall,

with behavior; and James, with both. In England Stout, Galton and Lloyd Morgan have

represented the same division and union of interests.

On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized

the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character. There was a

tendency to an unwise, if not bigoted, attempt to make the science of human nature synonymous

with the science of facts revealed by introspection. It was, for example, pretended that the only

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ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

value of all the measurements of reaction-times was as a means to insight into the reaction-

consciousness, -- that the measurements of the amount of objective difference in the length,

brightness or weight of two objects that men could judge with an assigned degree of correctness

were of value only so far as they allowed one to infer something about the difference between

two corresponding consciousnesses. It was, for example, pretended that experimental methods

were not to aid the experimenter to know what the subject did, but to aid the subject to know

what he experienced.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not

without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology. For one thing, it probably delayed

them. So long as introspection was lauded as the chief method of psychology, a psychologist

would tend to expect too little from mere studies, from the outside, of creatures who could not

report their inner experiences to him in the manner to which he was accustomed. In literature of

the time will be found many comments the extreme difficulty of studying the psychology of

animals and children. But difficulty exists only in the case of their consciousness . Their

behavior , by its simpler [p. 4] nature and causation, is often far easier to study than that of adults.

Again, much time was spent in argumentation about the criteria of consciousness, that is, about

what certain common facts of behavior meant in reference to inner experience. The problems of

inference about consciousness from behavior distracted attention from the problems of learning

more about behavior itself. Finally, when psychologists began to observe and experiment upon

animal behavior, they tended to overestimate the resulting insight into the stream of the animal's

thought and to neglect the direct facts about what he did and how he did it.

Such observations and experiments are, however, themselves a means of restoring a proper

division of attention between consciousness and behavior. A psychologist may think of himself

as chiefly a stream of consciousness. He may even think of other men as chiefly conscious selves

whose histories they report by word and deed. But it is only by an extreme bigotry that he can

think of a dog or cat as chiefly a stream or chain or series of consciousness or consciousnesses.

One of the lower animals is so obviously a bundle of original and acquired connections between

situation and response that the student is led to attend to the whole series --situation, response

and connection or bond -- rather than to just the conscious state that may or may not be one of

the features of the bond. It is so useful, in understanding the animal, to see what it does in

different circumstances and what helps and what hinders its learning, that one is led to an

intrinsic interest in varieties of behavior as well as in the kinds of consciousness of which they

give evidence.

What each open-minded student of animal psychology at first hand comes thus to feel vaguely, I

propose in this essay to try to make definite and clear. The studies [p. 5] reprinted in this volume

produced in their author an increased respect for psychology as the science of behavior, a

willingness to make psychology continuous with physiology, and a surety that to study

consciousness for the sake of inferring what a man can or will do, is as proper as to study

behavior for the sake of inferring what consciousness he can or will have. This essay will attempt

to defend these positions and to show further that psychology may be, at least in part, as

independent of introspection as physics is.

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