ABSTRACT
There was a time not long ago when research in the tradition of Thorndike and Pavlov on the learning of nonhuman animals was a topic of central interest for psychologists, but hardly today. Contemporary students have little beyond the smattering of information about it provided by their glossy primers, and they care less. One reason, of course, is that psychology is more than ever anthropocentric in its concerns, and the work is thought to have little relevance for man; the brave hope, rekindled in every generation of psychologists since the turn of the century, that the great problems of human socialization and education and of psychopathology and psychotherapy will yield to a few simple principles of conditioning readily demonstrable in rats or pigeons seems on the way at last to being permanently dispelled. There is the impression too that the conditioning enterprise has been a failure even on its own terms—that years of effort have been wasted in fruitless controversy over rather meaningless questions. I argue here that this appraisal is incorrect—that reasonable questions have been asked, that a good deal of progress has been made in answering them, and that the work has considerable importance for understanding man, who leads the animals, in the words of Thorndike (1911), “not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race [p. 294].”
