ABSTRACT
Edward Lee Thorndike is perhaps the most influential of all American psychologists. His early work in animal learning helped establish comparative psychology as an experimental science and created the field of psychology that became known as the experimental analysis of behaviour. Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts on 31 August 1874. At Harvard, Thorndike became interested in psychology through William James, who had published Principles of Psychology in 1890. James supported Thorndike's research, even to the point of allowing him to keep his chickens in the basement of the James home, but when he received a fellowship Thorndike and his chickens moved to Columbia University where Thorndike completed graduate work under James McKeen Catell. Thorndike's dissertation, 'Animal Intelligence', was a landmark in the history of psychology. Thorndike's dissertation provided a vigorous critique of anecdote, introspection and anthropomorphism, and employed a set of new methods for studying behaviour systematically and quantitatively under controlled conditions.
