E. L.
Thorndike and the Origins of
Animal Psychology
On the Nature of the Animal in Psychology
Henderikus J. Stam and Tanya Kalmanovitch
University of Calgary
E. L. Thorndike's deliberate use of the experimental
method and rejection of anthropomorphism and anecdot-
alism place him squarely at the beginning of a century
of animal research in psychology. The authors examine
Thorndike's critique of the extant research of his day and
the development of his methods, including the important
way in which animals and children were often taken as
interchangeable sources of data for the new functional
psychology. Thorndike's research clearly altered the rela-
tionship between psychologist and animal, as is demon-
strated by his own studies and those that were published
in the decade that followed. The authors review this body
of work in the early 20th century for (a) the manner in
which it exchanges anthropomorphism for mechanico-
theriomorphism and (b) its constitution of the animal
as a conflation between organism and technology. The
authors conclude by noting the importance of debates
concerning anthropomorphism in psychology for the cen-
tury-long question of consciousness.
J
ust as 1879 is celebrated as the founding o f experi-
mental psychology with the establishment of
Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, so is 1898
celebrated as the founding of experimental animal psy-
chology with the publication of Thorndike's " A n i m a l
Intelligence" in the Psychological Review Monograph
Supplement. Such dates are frequently combinations of
practical changes in the orientation of a field as well as
the source of various origin myths created for particular
purposes by subsequent generations.
Thorndike's doctoral thesis at Columbia University
readily fulfills both functions. As practical reorientation
it signals the beginning o f a century o f animal research in
North American psychology that would play an important
role in the development of the discipline' s first theoretical
frameworks. In the accompanying article by Galef (1998,
this issue) and in histories by Boakes (1984), Dewsbury
(1984), and others (e.g., Bruce, 1997; Jonqich, 1968), the
general chronology of Thorndike's animal research and
his writings from 1896 to 1911 are readily available. I In
this article we discuss the origin myth that accompanied
this founding moment in animal psychology. In effect,
Thorndike inaugurated a new set o f relationships between
October 1998 • American Psychologist
Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/98/$2.00
Vol. 53, No. 10, 1135 1144
the psychologist and the animal in the creation of the
field of experimental animal psychology. His work was
not just the application o f an experimental method or
simply a precursor of behaviorism. Rather, it led to the
production o f a convention that treats animals as abstract
devices for introducing concepts that were to become
c o m m o n in human psychology. That is, animals were to
become organisms o f convenience on which psycholo-
gists could script a variety of processes that were made
" v i s i b l e " in ways that were not possible with human
beings. The origin myth is that Thorndike's methods and
explanations overcame anecdotalism, anthropomor-
phism, and introspectionism. We argue that, in the
creation of a new technology and in the concern with
measurement and experimentation, his methods and
explanations replaced anthropomorphism with mech-
anomorphism and theriomorphism (hereafter mechani-
cotheriomorphism). Mechanomorphism is the exclusive
attribution o f mechanistic properties to psychological
phenomena, whereas theriomorphism is the attribution
of the qualities of nonhuman animals to human beings
(English & English, 1958). By mechanicotheriomorph-
ism we mean the ascription o f mechanical properties to
phenomena that are psychological in nature in nonhuman
animals that are, in turn, used to explain human psycho-
logical phenomena (e.g., instinct and habit).
Henderikus J. Stam and Tanya Kalmanovitch, Department of Psychol-
ogy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Portions of this article were presented in our paper, Isolating the
Mind: Animal Research in EarlyAmerican Psychology, at the 104th
Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, To-
ronto, Ontario, Canada, August 9-13, 1996.
We thank Barbara Beatty, Bennett G. Galef, Jr., and Cheryl Logan
for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Henderikus J. Stam, Department of Psychology,University of Calgary,
Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. Electronic mail may be sent to
stam@acs.ucalgary.ca.
~Washburn (1926), and many subsequent psychologists, placed
the birth of experimental animal psychology in Thorndike's laboratory
at Columbia University in 1898. Nevertheless, a comparable and con-
temporary experimental program was underway at this time under the
direction of Small and Kline at the Clark University laboratory (see
Dewsbury, 1984, p. 49). Such dating also requires that work that was
all but psychological in name and conducted by physiologists such as
Shepherd Franz and Ivan Pavlov be ignored.
1135

Our use of the term animal psychology is meant to
designate the entire set of studies that have typically used
nonhuman animals as a source of data for psychological
research. We deliberately do not use the term compara-
tive psychology because a great deal of animal research
carried on in the discipline was not truly comparative,
even though it may have gone under that label. At the
same time, serious attempts to compare species of ani-
mals were discussed, if not actually carried out in prac-
tice, and Linus Kline at Clark University wrote two pa-
pers in 1899 outlining the content of a laboratory course
in comparative psychology (Kline, 1899a, 1899b). By
retaining the older term, animal psychology, we mean to
include all psychological research carried on primarily
with nonhuman mammals (see Dewsbury, 1992).
In order to understand the manner in which Thorn-
dike altered the nature of the relationship between the
psychologist and the animal in North American psychol-
ogy we discuss two aspects of this history. First, we focus
on the predominant understanding of animal psychology
prior to the publication of Thorndike's thesis. This re-
quires a discussion of both the important role played by
animals in the largely British, natural histories of the
time as well as the criticisms of that role by the New
Psychology of the late 19th century. Second, we examine
the relationship between research on animals and children
in early North American psychology and third, trace de-
velopments in animal psychology in North America that
followed Thorndike's work in the first decade of this
century.
Thorndike and the Nature of Animal
Psychology
Animal psychology, or more popularly, animal intellect,
had been a source of considerable speculation since the
1136
writings of both Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer
became well-known in the 1860s and beyond (e.g.,
Boakes, 1984; Galef, 1988; Richards, 1987). As Thorn-
dike himself did, historians frequently make an important
distinction between the anecdotal reports that character-
ized the naturalist traditions of midcentury, particularly
British, writings and the gradual development of an ex-
perimental science of animal intelligence. The progres-
sion from Darwin to Romanes and from Romanes to
Morgan "represented a continuous but evolving, tradi-
tion in the study of animals" (Boakes, 1984, p. 51).
George Romanes shared Darwin's interest in the evolu-
tion of mind and attempted to clarify the nature of animal
intelligence by classifying the many reports available.
His Animal Intelligence (1882) and the succeeding Men-
tal Evolution in Animals (1883) are indeed anecdotal and
anthropomorphic in addition to being thoroughly Lamar-
ckian with respect to the evolution of instinct and intelli-
gence. The latter could be acquired, argued Romanes,
" b y the hereditary transmission of novel experiences"
(Romanes, 1883, p. 197).
Lloyd Morgan followed these developments with
a critique of a number of key elements in the work of
Romanes. In particular, Morgan made several crucial
observations that proved to be useful to Thorndike in
his experimental work. First, Morgan (1894) criticized
the anecdotal tradition and distinguished between two
types of psychology. One was inductive and introspec-
tive and the other was observational and objective. Al-
though both were required for a proper understanding
of psychology, it was also the case that M o r g a n ' s mo-
nism led him to emphasize that these were dual aspects,
subjective and objective, of the same mind. In addition,
Morgan modified the Lamarckian views of Romanes,
and Boakes (1984) went so far as to argue that Morgan
returned to the principle of natural selection of the
" e a r l y D a r w i n " (p. 50). As Galef (1998) notes, Thorn-
dike was strongly influenced by Spencerian doctrine.
Had he taken the early Darwin and Morgan more seri-
ously he might have avoided the lapse out of what
would later become the mainstream of evolutionary
biology.
Romanes and Morgan were influential, however,
in suggesting to Thorndike a number of key elements
of his method. 2 The puzzle boxes that Thorndike con-
structed were devices suggested to him, apparently, by
some of the descriptions of animal abilities in the
works of both of these earlier authors. Morgan had
discussed two possible forms of trial-and-error learn-
ing as a basis for his argument that the acquisition of
skills could be attributed to the consequences of an
action and not to complex forms of association that
2Morgan visited Harvard while Thorndike was in his first year of
graduate school in 1896 but Thorndike makes no mention of attending
Morgan's lectures. Thorndike would have been aware of Morgan's
work, however, through William James, and he quotes Morgan exten-
sivelyin his dissertation. In 1904, Morgan deliveredthe LowellLectures
in Boston. and again there is no record of a meeting between the two
men (see Boakes, 1984; Jonqich, 1968; Richards, 1987).
October 1998 • American Psychologist

resided within the animal. Crude boxes with latches
and doors were constructed, and Thorndike tested his
animals in a state of " u t t e r hunger," a phrase he came
to regret following repeated criticism (Thorndike,
1911 a). 3 These boxes were refinements of the method
used in Thorndike's earlier work with chicks at Har-
vard University as well as the systematic application
of a technology to the observations contained in the
works of the British zoologists.
Thorndike railed against the anthropomorphism of
the animal psychology of his day in 1898, acknowledg-
ing in 191 I that " w h a t one writes at the age of twenty-
three is likely to irritate oneself a dozen years later"
and attributing it to the "exuberance, e v e n . . , arro-
g a n c e " (p. vi) of his youth. He argued that previous
work on animal psychology did " n o t give us a psychol-
ogy, but rather a eulogy, of animals. They have all been
about animal intelligence, never about animal stupid-
ity" (1898a, p. 3). In addition to making animals ap-
pear more rational than they might be, Thorndike chal-
lenged the existing literature's anecdotal method. " T h e
unconscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless
compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's
mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvel-
o u s " (1898a, p. 4). Anecdotes, argued Thorndike
(1898a), provide only an "abnormal or supernormal
psychology of animals" (p. 5). Methodologically,
Thorndike was highly critical of the single case and
argued for repeated observations under regulated
conditions.
Thorndike's criticisms have typically been inter-
preted as a move away from the anthropomorphism of
the 19th-century naturalist. This is certainly true inso-
far as Thorndike eschewed both the method and analy-
sis of the naturalist. His work was written in the con-
text of the Progressive Era. and he, like his colleagues
October 1998 • American Psychologist
in the new profession of psychology, was concerned
with the scientific explanation of life and later would
emulate the progressives' concern with popular school-
ing and the professionalization of education in the early
20th century (Bledstein, 1976; Jonqich, 1968). This
required a reconceptualization of the dominant psy-
chology of his day, including the need to incorporate
evolutionary theory, already widely popularized in its
Lamarekian version in the United States by Herbert
Spencer, in any understanding of psychology. It also
included the application of experimentation, which
was so usefully developed in late 19th-century physiol-
ogy, to the problems of animal psychology. More im-
portant, however, the new animal psychology served as
much as the old animal psychology to provide psychol-
ogists with their first preoccupation, namely, represent-
ing the human mind.
Thorndike was clear in articulating his intellectual
heritage in t898 as well as in subsequent publications
(Thorndike, 191 ta). However, the differences between
him and his precursors have been emphasized, if not
exaggerated, both by Thorndike himself and by most who
have written about his work. This exaggeration of differ-
ences has two important implications: It suppresses the
common understanding of evolution that was prevalent
in the late 19th century, and it makes invisible the me-
chanicotheriomorphism inherent in Thorndike's work.
First, the transition in British and North American aca-
demic communities to a professional zoologist and biolo-
gist designation that came in tandem with the acceptance
of evolutionary theory, and the gradual downgrading of
the amateur naturalist, did not necessarily mean a change
in the underlying metaphorical understanding of the rela-
tionship between animals and humans. As Ritvo (1987)
has argued, Darwinian and Spencerian theory still ranked
animals in relation to humans, and the continuity between
animals and people that had emerged in evolutionary
theory "'made it even easier to represent human competi-
tion, and the social hierarchies created by those who
prevailed, in terms of animals" (p. 40). Both the popular
and scientific zoological literature promulgated a hierar-
chical vision of the animal kingdom and "provided its
reade~ with a shared set of assumptions, values, and
associations that simultaneously confirmed human ascen-
dancy and supported the established social order" (Ritvo,
1987, p. 42). 4 In addition, world fairs, ethnographic ex-
hibits, new museums of history and natural science, and
a host of panoramas and other exhibitions put exotic
animals on show along with natives from a wide range of
colonized cultures. These were then measured, classified,
pictured, and so on in the context of a discourse that
Thorndike akmg with many other animal psychologists (e.g., Pav-
lov, Watson) had to contend with a sustained antivivisectionist move
meat at the turn of tile century, a factor that aright account for a certain
defensiveness on this issue in Thorndike's work (see Dewsbury, 1990,
for a full account).
4 This hierarchical conception of the animal world has persisted in
20th century discussions of comparative psychology (see, e.g., Hodos &
Campbell, 1969).
1137
relied on scientific, particularly evolutionary, theories to
justify their educational value (Corbey, 1995). As back-
ward ancestors, their exhibition was used to justify the
colonialism of late 19th-century Europe and the inherent
superiority of the White race. A gradual hierarchy of
evolution became common knowledge. By sharply distin-
guishing himself from his predecessors, the evolutionary
view that Thorndike shared with his peers was eclipsed.
Second, the subtext that often informs discussions
of the literature that precedes Thorndike was that this
earlier work was largely unscientific due to its reliance
on anecdote and mere description. The charge of anecdot-
alism is subtly related to the charge of anthropomor-
phism, namely that the anecdote is favored because it
supports an anthropomorphic view of the animal as
clever, rational, and possessed of human-like qualities.
Implied is that rigorous experimentation that does not
rely on anecdote, but rather on observation and manipula-
tion, is not anthropomorphic. Morgan's claim that attri-
butions of consciousness in others (human or animal) are
merely an image of one's own consciousness, however,
was directly derived from his reading of idealist philoso-
phy (Richards, 1987). But Morgan considered human
and animal intelligences vastly different. The distinctions
between animals and humans would gradually be turned
on their heads, first by mechanizing the conception of
animal intelligence and second, by attributing such forms
of intelligence to all animals, human and nonhuman alike.
It was characteristic of Progressive Era intellectuals,
however, to view mind as the outcome of evolutionary
processes whereby that which could be known about an
animal could be understood as a graduated step away
from "primitive" forms of mind, such as those found in
children and in those who made up the lower strata of
society (e.g., Noble, 1958). Thorndike's later turn to the
problems of education and his interests in eugenics were
therefore not unrelated to his animal work.
Thorndike, Children, and Other Animals
Like a number of his peers, Thorndike conducted research
on both animals and children. In fact, Thorndike made
his entry into animal research, by his own account, be-
cause of the failure to obtain approval from Harvard, in
his first year of graduate studies, for his mind-reading
experiments in young children. In these studies, young
children from three to six years of age would attempt to
guess which letter, object, or number was the one that
Thorndike held in mind at that moment. The purpose of
the research was to determine the "responsiveness of
young c h i l d r e n . . , to facial expressions or movements
made unconsciously" (Thorndike, 1936, p. 264). Ac-
cording to his 1936 autobiographical statement, he said
of this research in the 1896-1897 study year,
The children enjoyed the experiments, but the authorities in
control of the institution would not permit me to continue them.
I then suggested experiments with the instinctive and intelligent
behavior of chickens as a topic, and this was accepted. I kept
these animals and conducted the experiments in my room until
1138
the landlady's protests were imperative. (Thorndike, 1936, p.
264)
William James attempted to intervene and when he could
not obtain space for Thomdike's animals elsewhere, he
allowed Thorndike to keep the chickens in his basement
for the duration of the year. As Thorndike recalled, "The
nuisance to Mrs. James was, I hope, somewhat mitigated
by the entertainment to the two youngest children" (p.
264).
Jonqich (1968) believed that Thorndike would not
have so readily substituted chickens for children as he
let on in 1936 and that this decision was not just a "fortu-
itous second choice" (p. 88). Thorndike was already in-
volved in other forms of animal research, an apparent
rarity amongst his peers. Gertrude Stein, who was with
Thorndike in the same seminar taught by James in the
spring of 1896, noted the oddness of the chicken research
(Jonqich, 1968). It appears that Thorndike had an aca-
demic interest in animals and children from the onset of
his graduate training.
Thorndike would devote the bulk of his professional
career at Columbia's Teachers College not to animal re-
search but to educational psychology. Indeed Thorndike
would be at the center of the movement to professionalize
education during the Progressive Era at the institution
that became the leading voice of that movement. His first
post at Western Reserve University in 1898 was to teach
pedagogy, and Thorndike published an article in the No-
vember 1898 issue of Psychological Review on the con-
troversy initiated by Mtinsterberg that was then raging
over the value of child-study in psychology. In this article
Thomdike (1898b) compared the amateur with an interest
in child-study to the naturalist in biology. And in the
dissertation itself Thomdike argued,
Comparative psychology has, in the light of this research, two
tasks of prime importance. One is to study the passage of the
child mind from a life of immediately practical associations to
the life of free ideas; the other is to find out how far the
anthropoid primates advance to a similar passage, and to ascer-
tain accurately what faint beginnings or preparations for such
an advance the early mammalian stock may be supposed to
have had. (1898a, p. 151)
Although Thorndike may have downplayed the im-
portance of his animal research in 1936, it was not un-
usual to his career alone that he should move freely from
research between children and animals. For example,
Swiss psychologist Edouard Clapar~de said that in 1900
he resolved his conflicts between clinical neurology, labo-
ratory research work, and animal psychology when he
read Die Spiele der Tiere by Karl Groos, which "revealed
to me, as in one illuminating flash, what should be the
foundation of the art of education, i.e., the right use made
of the child's natural tendencies" (Clapar~de, 1930, p.
75). Two decades later John Watson would switch to the
study of infants from animals in a seamless move, and
Jean Piaget switched from research on mollusks to re-
search on children at about the same time, seeking in
this move to base morality on science (Vidal, 1987).
October 1998 • American Psychologist
 Animal psychology in early 20th-century psychol-
ogy, based on hierarchies of intelligence and adaptivity,
was readily moved to the problems of the hierarchical
environment of the classroom. For as animals were re-
strained and tested so was mass education a setting in
which to regulate and adapt the child to the new industrial
age. And just as labor could be conceived of in terms of
its constituents and timed accordingly (as Frederick Tay-
lor so aptly demonstrated) so could the classroom be
regulated and work divided according to subjects and
tasks. This analogy is supported by the development of
the concept of intelligence. Spencer had already argued
for the special role of intelligence from the very first
edition, published in 1855, of the Principles of Psychol-
ogy. His associationism led him to argue that
since all modes of consciousness can be nothing else than
incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its
environment; they must all be different sides of, or different
phases of, the co-ordinated groups of changes whereby internal
relations are adjusted to external relations. (Spencer, 1897, pp.
495 -496)
Here nature was one, and " n o impassable chasm" ex-
isted between physical and psychical life as far as Spencer
was concerned. Danziger (1997) has argued that Spen-
cer's terminology eventually won the day and, as noted
above, intelligence was a word readily adopted by both
Romanes and Morgan. By the time Thorndike moved to
Teacher' s College in 1899, it would only be a matter of a
few years before Pearson, Spearman, and Binet published
their articles on intelligence, bringing the terminology
fully into educational circles and practice. However, its
biological roots ensured that it would eventually replace
the older and more established, strictly human concept
of "intellect." Instead, intelligence became the preferred
term during the first decade of this century because it
referred to individual adaptability and a graded set of
abilities. It also sped the process whereby learning gradu-
ally became one of the dominant topics in psychology
(Danziger, 1997). Again, Thorndike stands at the head
of this tradition, being the first to use "learning" as a
psychological category in 1901 (Thorndike, 1901/1911b,
p. 283; earlier even than Danziger's dating of 1902).
Mechanicotheriomorphism had arrived.
The need to develop objects of scientific interest in
the animal laboratory also had the unfortunate effect of
diminishing the importance of evolutionary theory, the
one position that might have prevented the theriomorphic
stance. By enlisting animals as analogs for human psy-
chology, Thorndike, like many other animal psychologists
in the period from 1890 to 1920, simply ignored the
dictates of evolution (Mills, 1997, in press). Thorndike
(191 l a) noted only that connections between sensations
and reactions formed the basis of adaptive habits if these
connections were accompanied by beneficial conse-
quences. As Mills (1997, in press) has argued, Thorndike
displayed a remarkable lack of interest in questions of
inheritance and instinct, relegating both of these to a
minor role in his thesis. The emerging conception of
October 1998 • American Psychologist
individual adaptation was deeply at odds with the Dar-
winian notion of species adaptation (Sohn, 1976). For
animal psychologists of the period, "Darwin's name
would be intoned but his voice, if heard at all, would be
muffled and distorted" (Mills, 1997, p. 15). Indeed, for
Thorndike, Spencer played a more critical role than
Darwin.
Although Thorndike's interests shifted after his ap-
pointment to Teacher's College, research in animal psy-
chology began to emerge as a distinct subfield and spe-
cialty. Next we examine the first decade of this emer-
g e n c e - l a t e r years have already been covered in detail
elsewhere (cf. Beach, 1950; Boakes, 1984; Dewsbury,
1997). Our purpose is to reconstruct the mechanicotherio-
morphism of the "animal subject" that emerged out of
Thorndike' s work.
Animal Research After Thorndike
In the years immediately following the publication of
Thomdike's dissertation, animal psychologists attempted
to establish their field as a scientific project, their goal
being the production of positive knowledge about the
animal mind. The cornerstone of animal psychology as
natural science was the use of experimental methodolo-
gies, where the anecdote gave way to the experiment,
and the naturalist to the experimentalist. The original
ontological question of the animal mind, as considered
by Romanes and Morgan, was transformed into a method-
ological one, a product of the budding functionalism and
pragmatism of early 20th-century psychology. The ques-
tion of interest rapidly became not "was there an animal
mind," nor "what are the kinds of qualities of the ani-
mal's mental experience," but rather "how might psy-
chologists collect facts about the psychological features
and processes of the animal mind such as intelligence
and instinct." The uniquely American answer, brought to
wide attention by Thorndike in 1898, was the laboratory
experiment, in which the animal could be systematically
isolated, controlled, and observed. From 1898 onward,
the number of experimental reports citing the use of ani-
mals as subjects rose steadily as the experiment rapidly
eclipsed any rival method of animal study in psychology
(see Figure 1). The figure shows our calculation of the
number of experimental papers in animal psychology that
appeared in the five journals that published such research
in the United States. The trend was influenced by a num-
ber of factors. In particular, the establishment of a dedi-
cated journal for animal psychology (the Journal of Ani-
mal Behavior, 1911, an offshoot of the Journal of Com-
parative Neurology and Psychology) was associated with
a marked increase in the number of published experimen-
tal reports using animals as subjects. Moreover, in 1909
the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia began its breeding
program with the albino rat creating a colony that would
expand to 11,000 rats by 1913 to be widely distributed
to other laboratories (Clause, 1993).
For animal psychology to establish itself within the
existing institutional and intellectual structures of Ameri-
can psychology, its advocates needed to demonstrate that
1139

Figure 1
Number of Experimental Reports on Animals in Five
Psychology Journals Published in the United States
1898- 1914
20
15-
NUMBER OF
PUBLISHED
REPORTS
10-
5-
0 tions (e.g., jumping from a height, the presence of a
1895 1900 1905 1910 1915
YEAR
knowledge of the animal mind would be both scientific
and useful. Animal laboratories were established because
they provided an inexpensive means of science education
even if the methods were time consuming. Until the ar-
rival of psychological tests, animal psychology was a sure
means of demonstrating the relative roles of instinct and
habit in psychology (Mills, 1997). Utility would ulti-
mately be based, however, on the light such research
would shed on the mental processes of humans. Thus
research in the early years, mainly in response to Thorn-
dike's publication, dealt largely with the learning and
sensory capacities of animals. The vibrancy of early ani-
mal research was due in part to the fact that once the
problems of animal psychology had been reconceptual-
ized as problems of learning, then it was a short step to
the obvious claim that very little precise knowledge about
learning and the perceptual capacities of various species
had previously been established. Despite this reconceptu-
alization, the change from anecdotalism to experimental
laboratory methodologies proceeded slowly over the first
decade.
The development of experimental methodologies
was to have significant consequences for the animal. The
animal as the subject of naturalistic observation was to
undergo significant changes when it was cast as an object
of psychological experimentation. The technology of ex-
perimental research transformed not only the knowledge
that could be obtained from an animal but the insertion
of the isolated animal into a piece of machinery became
an entirely new way of "seeing" the animal. Gradually,
this form of knowledge production became a privileged
and definitive source of knowledge about animals in psy-
chology. Confined, food-deprived, restricted to limited
1140
actions, and interbred, the animal in experiments was
sufficiently unlike its natural counterpart to provide ab-
stract knowledge of a hierarchical notion of intelligence
that paid no heed to the concrete bodies of specific spe-
cies of animal. Although comparative and descriptive
work continued to be done, it gradually became less im-
portant to North American psychology (see Dewsbury,
1984; Kalikow & Mills, 1989). A brief description of
the major transformations that allowed this transition to
occur can be found by examining the research conducted
by Thorndike (1899, 1901), Yerkes (1903), Allen (1904),
and Watson (1907).
Thorndike's (1899, 1901) two experimental reports
published after Animal Intelligence were both presented
as extensions of the 1898 work, and the first of these
(in 1899) consisted of data collected contemporaneously
with the data from his doctoral thesis. The studies re-
ported are observations on young chicks ranging in age
from a few hours to several months under various condi-
cat). The methods and analyses, however, owe more to
Morgan's anecdotalism than to the experimentalism that
would become established by 1911. Indeed, Thorndike
compared many of his observations of the reactions of
young chicks with those reported by Morgan in An Intro-
duction to Comparative Psychology (1894). Notable in
the 1899 article is an absence of formal laboratory appa-
ratus. Instead, Thorndike reported using living cages, col-
ored cardboard squares, and a box off of which the chicks
were induced to jump. Auditory stimuli were produced
by the industrious experimenter himself by "clapping the
hands, slamming a door, whistling sharply, banging a tin-
pan on the floor, mewing like a cat, playing a violin,
thumping a coal-scuttle with a shovel, etc., etc." (Thorn-
dike, 1899, p. 290). In contrast to the 1899 paper, the
1901 monograph displays many of the elements of later
experimental animal study. Thorndike studied three
Cebus monkeys, referred to only by number, and con-
ducted numerous experiments that required the monkeys
to carry out activities such as opening complex boxes,
obtaining food, or discriminating between two signals.
The apparatus consisted of various puzzle boxes similar
to those from the 1898 monograph, and the central motive
used to induce association was hunger. Thorndike
switched early in the experiments from the egress-type
configuration of his 1898 work (in which the hungry
animal was required to escape confinement to reach the
food) tO an ingress configuration when Monkey 1 proved
to be "not easily handled at [the] time" (1901, p. 9).
Results were once again presented in the form of learning
curves and tables, with additional anecdotal information
provided only to further illustrate and support the infer-
ence drawn from the quantitative data.
Along with vestiges of anecdotalism, the key ele-
ments of what would later become the standard of experi-
mental method in animal psychology were present in
these reports; animal study was carried out in a labora-
tory setting, with concern and attention given to standard-
izing the animals' environment. The use of apparatus,
October 1998 • American Psychologist
though not prominent in the 1899 paper, further served
to isolate and control the animal and assisted in the ma-
nipulation of motives such as fear, hunger, and constraint,
which provided the experimenter with a means to elicit
the requisite behaviors.
In 1903, Robert Yerkes reported his development of
apparatus to further control the animal subject, and in
particular, he reported the first published use of electric
shock as a stimulus in animal psychology. Yerkes devised
a reaction box in which the subjects of these experiments,
green frogs, were required to escape confinement. When
confinement alone was not a sufficient motive to induce
the green frog to learn the task, Yerkes attempted to
stimulate the subject with a stick. This only seemed to
frighten the animal (1903, p. 582). By means of a solu-
tion, Yerkes introduced a piece of apparatus which he
termed a "labyrinth." The apparatus consisted of an en-
trance chamber and a two-choice path over a series of
electrical circuits which led to a shallow tank of water.
Either path could be obstructed with a glass plate. Upon
selecting the obstructed path, the animal was stimulated
with an electric shock. As Yerkes explained, the electric
shock "facilitated the experiment by forcing the animal
to seek some other way of escape, and it also furnished
material for an association" (1903, p. 584).
Yerkes explicitly acknowledged selecting subjects
of exceptional suitability for this particular experimental
task, a practice that would soon lead to the breeding
of laboratory animals. Nevertheless, when Yerkes came
across a problem in audition that he could not seem
to address in the laboratory, he conducted a post facto
naturalistic study. Thus research in a natural habitat re-
mained an option in 1903. By 1913, however, Yerkes
would have adopted what became a more standard view
of experimentation. In his lecture notes of that year, he
wrote "Ideal--the animal should [be] in a perfectly con-
trolled and describable situation [to] take a 'picture' (ac-
curate record) of its behavior" (Yerkes, 1913).
In 1904, Jessie Allen at the University of Chicago
published what, to our knowledge, is the first experimen-
tal psychological study using guinea pigs. She acknowl-
edged the influence of Thorndike:
My work on the guinea pig has been undertaken from a point
of view somewhat similar to that assumed by Thorndike; viz.,
the point of view that the law of parsimony must govern inter-
pretation, and a sufficient number of control experiments must
condition every statement made. (Allen, 1904, p. 297)
This paper was still transitional, however, largely describ-
ing guinea pigs' development and habits and comparing
these with the white rat. Allen gave the guinea pigs vari-
ous maze tasks to solve but in doing so still argued that
" n o problem should be given to an animal which involves
the inhibition of a deep-seated instinct" (1904, pp. 3 0 9 -
310), a (soon to vanish) recognition that experimental
arrangements could restrict or alter natural activities.
One final, major innovation that would come to de-
fine experimental animal research in psychology was pro-
vided by Watson in 1907. He considered this monograph
October 1998 • American Psychologist
to constitute the introduction of a new research paradigm
in comparative psychology in which vivisection would
be performed on animals that had been trained in an
association task. Although he acknowledged in a footnote
that a 1902 paper by Shepherd Ivory Franz had already
presented a virtually identical method, Watson announced
with typical grandiosity, "Here is, undoubtedly, a new
field for the student of animal psychology; a field which
must be worked over from the psychophysical standpoint,
in contradistinction to the purely physiological o n e "
(1907, p. 1).
The method reported in this paper consisted of train-
ing white rats on a modified Hampton Court Maze (in a
virtual replication of one reported by Small in 1901) and
successively removing or lesioning sensory functions in
order to address questions about sensory organ processes
in animals. 5 Watson admitted to not going far beyond the
interpretive scope of Small's earlier work, but he did
claim to make certain minor methodological improve-
ments. This consisted in large part of the use of tamer
animals, which, accustomed to laboratory life, were
thought to settle into their tasks straight away without
needing time to be familiarized to the laboratory environ-
ment or to adjust to the rigors of maze-learning. Watson
expected the animal as psychological subject to be a so-
phisticated denizen of the laboratory. Fittingly, the rats
in this report were referred to by number or as " n o r m a l "
or "defective." In an appendix, Watson considered that
the successive, but temporally separated, elimination of
separate sensory functions might allow a source of error
into his conclusions. To address this, he performed an
operation in which the eyes, the olfactory bulbs, and
the vibrissae of a young male rat were simultaneously
removed. According to Watson's optimistic report, "Nat-
urally recovery was slow with this a n i m a l . . . The ani-
mal finally completely recovered and is still alive . . .
and in absolutely perfect condition. He shows the same
eager curiosity, which is so characteristic of the normal
animal" (p. 98). The destruction of sensory functions,
whether successive or simultaneous, nevertheless carried
the same consequence for the subjects, rendering the rats
essentially and enduringly unsuitable for any other life
than that of a laboratory subject.
Primary in the accomplishment of the transition of
the animal from natural object to object of psychological
science was the implementation of experimental methods
that were intended to force the formation of associations
through the manipulation of the animal's physical and
psychological experience, thereby eliciting the required
or desired behavior of the animal. Although most of the
researchers that are cited above expressed a certain eager-
ness to demonstrate that no harm came to their animal
subjects (the irony of this stance perhaps most evident
in the appendix to Watson's 1907 report), the successive
elaboration of experimental apparatus and methodology
5 See Dewsbury (1990) for a description of the public outcry that
followed the presentation of this study at the meetings of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1906.
1141
that began with Thorndike in 1898 only carried increas-
ingly severe consequences for the animal subject. The
construction of more sophisticated laboratory appara-
tuses may have had as its impetus the need to refine,
standardize, and optimize inherently fallible observa-
tional techniques, but its larger, implicit, goal was the
erosion of the experimental animal as a sentient being
with ties to the natural world. The further incorporation
of surgical techniques of control of the animal's sensory
functions also had serious consequences for animals and,
explicit in the mandate of experimental animal psychol-
ogy, the conclusions drawn for human psychology. In
1907, Watson stated that " f r o m the standpoint of method,
the study of the minds of animals (normal or defective)
does not essentially differ from the study of human defec-
tive minds and the minds of children" (p. 2), and it is
of no little significance that he later referred to surgical
manipulation of the animal's body as no more than a
"very serviceable" method of environmental control
(Watson, 1914, p. 69).
Technologies, Mechanicotheriomorphism,
and Animal Consciousness
In his analysis of the social organization of Pavlov's
"physiology factory," Todes (1997) has argued that the
modifications surgically produced on Pavlov's dogs con-
stituted these animals not only as objects of study but
also as technologies that were created to produce particu-
lar kinds of knowledge. Hence the animal served as both
object and intermediary to the facts. Donna Haraway
(1989) made this case about Yerkes' s work with primates:
"The laboratory animal in general possessed the highest
value for human beings precisely because it was designed
and standardized, in short, engineered, to answer human
queries. But the animal's epistemological status was also
as natural object yielding objective understandings" (p.
62). There is a gradual narrowing from understanding
the animal as the outcome of, and as understandable in,
a unique environment to the animal as a subject of conve-
nience, a process that extends over approximately 20
years (see Beach, 1950; Dewsbury, 1997). It is also con-
sistent with methodological developments in human psy-
chology at the turn of the century (Stare, 1997).
Animal research played an important role in the
development of a graded theory of intelligence, and it
continued to support the development of theories of be-
havior that could be applied to children and adults alike.
In order for animals to fit this role they had to be shorn
of their unique characteristics as animals, that is, they
needed to be the equivalent of a laboratory tabula rasa.
In 1913 when Watson presented his behaviorist mani-
festo, that is exactly what the animal had become! By first
making animals fit for laboratory consumption through
restraints, isolation, and food deprivation and then taking
the resulting animals as representatives of "nature," the
refined knowledge that emerged from the animals could
be treated as entirely objective. Properties of a mechani-
cal nature are ascribed to the animal, and having been
1142
thus inscribed they are fit objects for explaining the prop-
erties of humans and nonhumans alike.
Thorndike's work heralded a period of productivity
and engagement with animals that would eventually alter
the substance of North American psychology. It was a
new orientation with new aims, methods, and explanatory
goals. However, we challenge the view that the orientation
was exactly what Thorndike and those who followed took
it to be. By introducing physiological forms of experi-
mentation and control into the psychological laboratory,
Thorndike replaced anthropomorphism with mechan-
icotheriomorphism.
In the late 20th century, psychologists are still not
decided about the place and function of animals in psy-
chological research (e.g., Davis & Balfour, 1992; Pious,
1993; Wertz, 1994). Anthropomorphism was a term
whose origin in the 18th century was reserved for the
ascription of human forms and attributes to deities, and
only in the 19th century did it become a general term for
the attribution of human form or character to anything
impersonal or irrational such as nations or animals. As
Thorndike made so clear, anthropomorphism became a
problem for the scientific community after the introduc-
tion of evolutionary theory. Adherents of the "new psy-
chology" at the turn of the century attempted to resolve
this issue by recourse to the so-called argument from
analogy: If others (persons, species) behave like I do then
I can reasonably infer similar experiences. Boring (1929)
described this position in retrospect as, "the experi-
menter penetrates the subject's mind by way of analogy
with his own. If one dislikes, as Titchener did, this em-
phasis on behavior in discussing introspection, one can
substitute the conception of 'empathy' for analogy" (p.
551). By 1929 Boring dismissed this position, saying that
"it is not possible to penetrate the animal's consciousness
by way of analogy" (p. 551), and under the influence of
Jacques Loeb, a committed mechanist, he was forced to
ask whether an animal had any consciousness at all. It
is interesting to note that this exact argument from anal-
ogy was repeated recently by the ethologist Marian Daw-
kins (1993), when she argued for the existence and sig-
nificance of animal consciousness.
For the later behaviorists, anthropomorphism was a
continuing embarrassment fueled no doubt by the public
avowals of its necessity in the writings of psychologists
such as Tolman (1938/1978) and Waters (1939). Waters
argued that animal behavior can be made intelligible only
by describing it in anthropomorphic terms, and Tolman
justifies his being "openly and consciously just as anthro-
pomorphic" as he pleases and continues " I in my future
work intend to go ahead imagining how, i f I were a rat,
I would behave as a result of such and such a demand
combined with such and such an appetite and such and
such a degree of differentiation; and so o n " (1938/1978,
p. 356). Yet, as anthropomorphic as he was, Tolman was
equally theriomorphic. At the end of his 1937 APA Presi-
dential Address, he proclaimed his belief that
everything important in psychology (except perhaps such mat-
ters as the building up of a super-ego, that is everything save
October 1998 • American Psychologist
such matters as involve society and words) can be investigated
in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical
analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice-point in
a maze. (1938/1978, p. 364)
A n t h r o p o m o r p h i s m b e c a m e ever m o r e p r o b l e m a t i c
w h e n the w o r k o f ethologists such as L o r e n z and T i n b e r g e n
b e c a m e m o r e w i d e l y k n o w n in the 1950s. A n d along with
theriomorphism, it remains an o p e n question, for as M a r i a n
D a w k i n s asks, " i f being sufficiently like us d o e s not m e a n
looking like us or h a v i n g h u m a n c u s t o m s and language,
w h a t does it m e a n ? I f c o n s c i o u s n e s s does not h a v e to h a v e
a h u m a n face, speak with a h u m a n v o i c e or l o o k out f r o m
h u m a n eyes, inside w h a t sort o f bodies should we l o o k for
it? A n d h o w will w e r e c o g n i z e w h e n w e find i t ? " ( D a w -
kins, 1993, p. 16; see also Burghardt, 1991). C o n t e m p o r a r y
e t h o l o g y grants the rat far m o r e abilities and sociality than
was ever c o n s i d e r e d possible by the early animal experi-
mentalists (e.g., D a w k i n s , 1993). W h a t animals did p r o v i d e
was a ready source o f data points for the experimental
project. H i g h l y restricted in their ability to eat, sleep, repro-
duce, interact, and so on, they p r o v i d e d a b o d y on w h i c h
mechanistic m o d e l s c o u l d be inscribed and f r o m w h i c h
inferences c o u l d be d r a w n about h u m a n beings. In this
respect T h o r n d i k e ' s 1898 dissertation is surely to be
c o u n t e d the first study a m o n g many.
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