The law of effect: is learning the stamping-in of connections by their consequences, without reason or insight?

Edward L. Thorndike, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Watch a cat in a puzzle box and you will see how learning really happens. The animal does not study the latch, reason out the mechanism, and open it; it claws, bites, and struggles at random until, by chance, it strikes the response that opens the door, and it gets out to its food. Put it back, and the useless acts grow fewer and the successful one comes sooner, trial by trial, in a smooth curve — not by a leap of understanding but by a gradual selection.1

This is the law of effect: of the many responses made in a situation, those followed by satisfaction are stamped in and grow more likely; those followed by discomfort are stamped out. Learning is the strengthening and weakening of connections — bonds between a situation and a response — according to their consequences, and the mind is the sum of such bonds.2

There is no need to posit reason, insight, or ideas to explain it; the same law that fixes the cat's escape fixes the child's arithmetic and the man's skill. Give me the connections and the consequences that select them, and I will show you learning without appeal to the unobservable machinery of the soul.34

Sources

  1. A certain situation arouses, by virtue of accident or, more often, instinctive equipment, certain responses. One of these happens to be an act appropriate to secure freedom. It is stamped in in connection with that situation. Here the act is clawing at a certain spot instead of running to E, and is selected from a far greater number of useless acts.
    Educational Psychology Vol 2 The Psychology of Learning, pp. 10–11
  2. A certain situation arouses, by virtue of accident or, more often, instinctive equipment, certain responses. One of these happens to be an act appropriate to secure freedom. It is stamped in in connection with that situation. Here the act 9 130 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING is clawing at a certain spot instead of running to E, and is selected from a far greater number of useless acts.
    Educational Psychology Briefer Course
  3. The straight lines represent walls of boards. Besides the useless movements, there were, in the fifth trial, useless stoppings. The time taken to reach the nest in the fifth trial was seven minutes; in the fiftieth, thirtyfive seconds. The figures represent typical early and late trials, chosen from a number of experiments on different individuals in different situations, by Dr. R. M.
    Educational Psychology Vol 2 The Psychology of Learning, pp. 9–10
  4. Iurutses. Acts. Rusuutine Frexixcs Asdescribed To chirp, ete. Corresponding Continuation of situaabove. To jump at various to impulses. tion. places. Fatigue. 0B.
    The Elements of Psychology, pp. 235–236

Where the argument is made

  • Animal Intelligence (1911)
  • Educational Psychology, Vol. 2: The Psychology of Learning (1913)
  • the 1932 revision (The Fundamentals of Learning) abandoning the symmetry of reward and punishment

How the argument was received

The law of effect founded the experimental psychology of learning and is the direct ancestor of Skinner's operant conditioning and the whole reinforcement tradition; consequence-driven learning is a permanent part of psychology. But the strong claim — that learning is nothing but the blind stamping-in of S-R bonds, with no role for insight, representation, or reasoning — did not survive. Köhler's apes solved problems by apparent insight into relations; the cognitive revolution restored internal representation and structure to learning; and Thorndike himself revised the law in 1932, abandoning its symmetry after finding that punishment does not stamp out connections as reliably as reward stamps them in. The mechanism of selection-by-consequence stands; the reduction of all learning to it does not.