A Century Of Effect: Legacies Of E. L. Thorndike's Animal Intelligence Monograph.
Thorndike’s law of effect still anchors ABA, but today’s choices need numbers like Young et al. (2022), not just tales.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lattal (1998) looks back at Thorndike’s 1898 cat puzzle-box experiments.
The paper traces how the law of effect and objective data became ABA building blocks.
No new data are given; it is a birthday-style tribute, not a test of an intervention.
What they found
The review reminds us that Thorndike kicked off reinforcement science.
His core idea—responses followed by satisfying outcomes get stronger—still guides our work.
How this fits with other research
Kaiser et al. (2022) now supersedes the older token-economy story. Their 2022 meta-analysis of 24 elementary studies gives hard numbers, while Lattal (1998) keeps the historical lens.
Alba et al. (1972) and Weitz (1982) started the token-economy narrative reviews. Lattal (1998) sits beside them as another narrative, showing how the field first summed evidence before meta-analysis arrived.
Branch (2006) mirrors Lattal (1998): both honor a founding figure without fresh data. Together they show our habit of learning from the past before running the next study.
Why it matters
Read Lattal (1998) when you need a quick origin story for staff or parents. Pair it with Kaiser et al. (2022) to show how far we’ve moved from stories to numbers. Use the combo to explain why today’s decisions rest on data, not just history.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Edward L. Thorndike's monograph, Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals , is reviewed with respect to three contemporary issues: the relation between human behavior and that of other animals, the law of effect, and research methods for studying behavior. Thorndike employed an experimental analysis, rather than relying on either anecdote or naturalistic observation, to study problem solving and other behavioral processes of cats, dogs, and chicks. His analysis focused on whether the similarities between humans and other animals were homologous, that is, functionally equivalent, or whether they were merely analogous in form. Concluding the latter, he used the law of effect, not stated as such until long after the monograph was published, to account for the behavioral processes he studied, without appeal to reason or other cognitive mechanisms. His combination of applying experimental methods to the study of animal behavior and his insistence on objectivity in behavioral description were prescient of such later behaviorists as Watson and Skinner.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1998 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1998.70-325