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In a Manhattan apartment Thorndike kept his hens and four monkeys. He invented for his experiments the maze and puzzle box, now standard equipment for psychological work. At 24 Thorndike published his first work, Animal Intelligence. Armchair psychologists, who had not his patience for the laborious pursuit of facts, immediately denounced his conclusions. To them the youngster replied: "What is important is concrete information about particular facts."
Soon Dr. Thorndike abandoned animals and began to study children, who learn, he found, in the same way as animals. Later he branched out into such varied activities as studying handwriting, counting words, designing intelligence and aptitude tests for the Army in 1917. By 1926, when his admirers attempted to sum up Dr. Thorndike's work in a special issue of the Teachers College Record, it took 15 eminent scholars in as many fields of learning to appraise his contributions to psychology and education, 25 more to annotate his writings. He has turned out some 40 books, more than 300 articles and reports, an estimated 5,000,000 words and 5,000,000 figures all told.
Thorndike's Education. The schools of every nation on earth have been profoundly affected by Dr. Thorndike's facts. An old theory of learning was that certain subjects, particularly the classics, were especially useful for training the mind. Thorndike tried out this theory by experiment and found it did not work. His findings hastened the departure of Latin and Greek from school curricula.
In another great study he demolished the adage that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." He proved that man's learning speed declines very little between 25 and 45 years, very slowly after that.
Dr. Thorndike's methods are dramatic, depend considerably on his ingenuity in designing tests. To determine the effect of adults' prejudices on their attitudes, he asked them how much money they would demand to eat a quarter of a pound of human flesh. To prove that heredity was more important than environment, he tested 50 twins, demonstrated that they were less affected by differences in training than ordinary brothers and sisters.
That tests, like men, are fallible Dr. Thorndike readily admits, but they are better than guesses. His colleagues have often questioned his evidence but rarely with any success his conclusions. When Thorndike declared that "satisfiers'' (such as a reward of food) made animals remember the correct acts and thus aided their learning, and that "annoyers" retarded their learning, his contemporaries were skeptical. But many years later Thorndike confirmed his theory of the effect of rewards on learning with what he regards as his most remarkable and conclusive experiment. This was the "spread and scatter" phenomenon. Students who answered a series of nonsense questions not only remembered best the answer that was rewarded with the word "right'' but also remembered the answers just preceding and following that answer better than those more distant in time. The experiment proved that reward had far more effect on learning than repetition or punishment.
Like his methods, Dr. Thorndike's philosophy is not at all metaphysical. Says he: "Thinking is as biological as digestion."