Edward Thorndike
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Edward Thorndike was an American psychologist who conducted influential experiments on animal learning in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His work established foundational principles about how organisms learn through trial-and-error and reinforcement, which shaped the development of behavioral psychology and have had lasting impacts on education and animal training.
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Edward Lee Thorndike ((1874-08-31)August 31, 1874 – (1949-08-09)August 9, 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to his "theory of connectionism" and helped lay the scientific foundation for educational psychology. He also worked on solving industrial problems, such as employee exams and testing.
Thorndike was a member of the board of the Psychological Corporation and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1912. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thorndike as the ninth-most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Edward Thorndike had a powerful impact on reinforcement theory and behavior analysis, providing the basic framework for empirical laws in behavior psychology with his law of effect. Through his contributions to the behavioral psychology field came his major impacts on education, where the law of effect has great influence in the classroom.
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1874 births1949 deaths19th-century psychologists20th-century American psychologistsAmerican educational psychologistsAmerican ethologistsAnimal cognition writersColumbia University facultyFellows of the American Statistical AssociationHarv and Sfn no-target errorsHarvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumniMembers of the American Philosophical Society