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 Topics
1. Hans the Wonder Horse—Math Genius?
2. Toward a Science of Behavior
3. The Influence of Animal Psychology on
Behaviorism
4. Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949)
5. Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov (1849-1936)

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 Topics (cont’d.)
6. Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857-1927)
7. The Influence of Functional Psychology on
Behaviorism
8. Selected Discussion Questions

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 HANS THE WONDER HORSE—
MATH GENIUS?

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 Hans the Wonder Horse—Math
Genius?
• Hans was a celebrity in Germany
– Achievements inspired songs, magazine articles, and
books
– Was used for advertisements
• Han’s talents
– Add and subtract; use fractions and decimals
– Read; identify coins; play card games; spell
– Recognize a variety of objects
– Perform astonishing feats of memory

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Learning
 Hans the Wonder Horse—Math
Genius? (cont’d.)

Clever Hans, the clever horse

Archives of the History of American Psychology/University of Akron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAJlAuEo7Ac
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 TOWARD A SCIENCE OF
BEHAVIOR

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 Toward a Science of Behavior
• Evolution of psychology from Wundt to
functionalism
• Watson promotes another change: the
philosophical tradition of objectivism and
mechanism, animal psychology, and functional
psychology
• Zeitgeist dominated by the objectivistic,
mechanistic, and materialistic influences
• New psychology: focused on only what could
be seen, heard, or touched
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 THE INFLUENCE OF
ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY ON
BEHAVIORISM

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 The Influence of Animal
Psychology on Behaviorism
• Animal psychology: antecedent to Watson’s
psychology
• Jacques Loeb (1859-1924): German physiologist
and zoologist
– Tropism: Loeb’s theory of animal behavior based on an
involuntary forced movement
– Argued that animal consciousness was revealed by
associative memory
• Animals had learned to react to certain stimuli in a desirable
way

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 Rats, Ants, and the Animal Mind
• 1900: the rat maze is introduced as a standard
method for the study of learning
• Charles Henry Turner begins using the word
“behavior”
– Watson later adopted the term
• 1910: eight comparative psychology
laboratories had been established
• The animal mind analogous to the human mind

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 On Becoming an Animal
Psychologist
• Animal psychology was a difficult profession
– Not well respected in academia
– Always concerned with funding
– Poor career prospects
• Was Hans really clever?
– Not receiving intentional signals from owner
– No fraud; no deceit
– Horse used subtle cues drawn from the audience
and from his keeper
– Showed animals are capable of learning
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 EDWARD LEE THORNDIKE
(1874–1949)

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 Edward Lee Thorndike
(1874–1949)
• Created a mechanistic, objective learning
theory that focused on overt behavior
• Believed that psychology must study behavior,
not mental elements or conscious experiences
• Connectionism: Thorndike’s approach to
learning that was based on connections
between situations and responses
– Argued that behavior must be reduced to its
simplest elements: the stimulus–response units

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 The Puzzle Box
• Thorndike built crude puzzle boxes out of crates and
sticks to use on animals
– Example: Thorndike placed a food-deprived cat in a box
to test how long it would take for the cat to activate the
lever to be fed
– Responses were random at first
– On subsequent trials, random behaviors were less
frequent until learning was complete
• Trial-and-error learning: learning based on the
repetition of response tendencies that lead to
success https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fanm--WyQJo

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 Laws of Learning
• Law of effect: acts that produce satisfaction in
a given situation become associated with that
situation; when the situation recurs, the act is
likely to recur
• Law of exercise: the more an act or response
is used in a given situation, the more strongly
the act becomes associated with that situation

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 IVAN PETROVITCH PAVLOV
(1849–1936)

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 Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov
(1849–1936)
• Worked on learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=asmXyJaXBC8

• Helped shift associationism from its emphasis on

subjective ideas to objective and quantifiable
physiological events
– Example of topic: glandular secretions and muscular
movements
• Provided Watson with a method for studying
behavior and for attempting to control and modify
it

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 Conditioned Reflexes
• Worked on three major problems
– Function of the nerves of the heart
– Primary digestive glands
– Conditioned reflexes: reflexes that are conditional or
dependent on the formation of an association or
connection between stimulus and response
– Reinforcement: something that increases the likelihood
of a response
• E. B. Twitmyer (1873–1943): a example of
simultaneous discovery with Pavlov

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 VLADIMIR M. BEKHTEREV
(1857–1927)

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 Vladimir M. Bekhterev
(1857–1927)
• Lead the field away from subjective ideas toward
objectively observed overt behavior
• Russian physiologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist
was a pioneer in several research areas
• Interest in motor responses:
– Associated reflexes: reflexes that can be elicited not
only by unconditioned stimuli but also by stimuli that
have become associated with the unconditioned
stimuli

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 THE INFLUENCE OF
FUNCTIONAL
PSYCHOLOGY ON
BEHAVIORISM

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 The Influence of Functional
Psychology on Behaviorism
• Before Watson: functional psychologists
moved away from Wundt’s and Titchener’s
pure psychology of conscious experience
– Need for an objective psychology that would focus
on behavior instead of consciousness
• Zeitgeist: overall movement of American
psychology was in a behavioristic direction
– Missing link: the agent of a revolution whose
inevitability and success were assured (Watson)

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 SELECTED DISCUSSION
QUESTIONS

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 Selected Discussion Questions
• In what ways had psychology changed by the
second decade of the twentieth century?
• Why was Watson so opposed to the study of
consciousness and the method of introspection?
• What role did positivism play in the scientific
Zeitgeist of the twentieth century?
• Describe Thorndike’s puzzle-box research and
the laws of learning suggested by the results.

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 Selected Discussion Questions
(cont’d.)
• Discuss the overall significance for the
development of behaviorism of Thorndike’s
research on human and animal learning.
• How did Pavlov’s work influence Watson’s
behaviorism?
• Discuss the Zeitgeist in American psychology in
the second decade of the twentieth century
with reference to ideas promoted by the
structuralists and functionalists.
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