Prediction and Control

A cat in a box, a baby and a white rat — how psychology threw out the mind and promised to engineer a person instead.

A course on the thought of Thorndike & Watson.

Psychology

What you will learn

  • Describe the puzzle-box design and what it measured.
  • Distinguish learning by insight from learning by trial and error.
  • Read a learning curve and say what its shape rules out.
  • State the Law of Effect precisely, in both directions.
  • Explain what makes it an operational rather than a mentalistic claim.
  • Identify where it appears in modern systems.
  • State the behaviorist programme and its stated goal.
  • Explain the objection to introspection as a method.

Course outline

  1. The Cat in the Box — Everyone who owns an animal has a story about how clever it is. A graduate student with a stopwatch and some crates decided to find out what the stories were actually worth.
  2. The Law of Effect — A mechanism needs a statement. Here it is, in the form I published in 1913 — and it is still running, under other names, in most of the software you used today.
  3. Throw Out the Mind — In 1913 Watson proposed that psychology stop studying consciousness altogether. Not bracket it. Not defer it. Stop.
  4. Albert B. — The most notorious study in the history of psychology: an eleven-month -old, a white rat, and a steel bar struck behind his head.
  5. A Dozen Healthy Infants — The most-quoted sentence in psychology, the retraction attached to it that almost nobody quotes, and the childrearing advice that followed.
  6. What Survived — The ledger. What behaviorism got right is now so standard it is invisible; what it got wrong is what everybody remembers.

Works read in this course

  • Animal Intelligence — Thorndike, 1911 (from his 1898 dissertation) — the puzzle boxes and the learning curves
  • Educational Psychology, Vol. 2: The Psychology of Learning — Thorndike, 1913 — the Law of Effect stated formally
  • Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology — Watson, 1914 — the behaviorist programme in book form
  • Behaviorism — Watson, 1925 — the popular statement, Little Albert, and the dozen healthy infants
  • Psychological Care of Infant and Child — Watson, 1928 — the childrearing advice, and the part of his legacy that aged worst

Terms introduced

law of effect, trial and error, learning curve, conditioned emotional response, generalisation, behaviorism

Part of the Simposeum course library.