Animal intelligence: Experimental studies

by Edward L. Thorndike

It is further certain that the thought of doing one thing very often results in the man’s doing something quite different. The thought of moving the eyes smoothly without stops along a line of print has occurred to many people, who nevertheless actually did as a result move the eyes in a series of jumps with long stops.

It is further certain that in many cases where an animal does connect a given response with the image or thought of that response, the connection has been built up by the laws of exercise and effect. Such cases as appropriate responses to, ‘I will go to bed,’ ‘I will get up,’ ‘I will eat,’ ‘I will write a letter,’ ‘I will read,’ or to the corresponding commands, requests or suggestions, are observably built up by training. The appropriate response follows the idea only if it has, by repetition or reward, been connected with it or something like it. If the only requirement in moral education were to have the idea of the right act at the right time, the lives of teachers and parents would be greatly alleviated. But the decision to get up, or the idea of getting up or of being up, is futile until the child has connected therewith the actual act of getting up.

The defender of the direct potency of conscious representatives of a response to produce it may be tempted to complain at this point that what the laws of exercise and effect do is to reduce the strength of competing ideas, and leave the idea, say of getting up, free to exercise its direct potency. The complaint shows a weak sense for fact. The ordinary child is not a Hamlet, nor is he beguiled by the imagined delights of staying in bed, nor repelled by the image of getting up out of it. On the contrary, he may be entirely willing to think of getting up. It is the actual delights that hold him, the actual discomforts that check him, and the only way to be sure that he will get up is so to arrange matters that it is more satisfactory to him to get up than not to when the situation, whatever it be, that is to suggest that response, makes its appearance.

The experience of every schoolroom shows that it is not enough to get the idea of an act. The act must have gone with that idea or be now put with it. The bond must be created. Responses to the suggestions of language, whether addressed to us by others or by ourselves in inner speech, in a very large majority of cases owe their bonds to the laws of exercise and effect. We learn to do what we are told, or what we tell ourselves, by doing something and rejecting or retaining what we do by virtue of its effects. So also in the case of a majority of responses to the suggestions of other than verbal imagery.

The idea of a response, like the perception of a response by another, acts often as a guide to response ex post facto by deciding what shall be satisfying. Where superficial inspection leaves the impression that the idea creates the act, a little care often shows it to have only selected from the acts produced by instinct and habit. For example, let the reader think of some act never performed hitherto, such as putting his left middle finger upon the upper right hand corner of this page, and make the movement. It may seem at first sight that having the idea entirely unopposed was the sufficient cause of the act. But careful experiment, including, for instance, the closure of the eyes and anesthesia of the fingers will reveal that the original propulsion of the idea is not to just that act, but to many possibilities, and that its chief potency lies in the fact that not to get the finger to that point is annoying, and that consequently the organism is at peace only when the act is done.

So far it has been shown that: The majority of responses are not produced by ideas of them. The idea of a response may be impotent to produce it. The idea of one act may produce a different, even an opposite act. When an idea seems to produce a response in and of itself, it may really act by determining the satisfyingness of responses otherwise made. These facts are sufficient to destroy the pretensions of any general law that the image of an act will, other things being equal, produce it. But the possibility that such an image may occasionally exercise this peculiar potency remains.

I despair of convincing the reader that it does not. Man is the only animal possessing a large fund of ideas of acts, and man’s connection-system is so complex and his ideas of acts are so intricately bound to situations that have by use and effect produced those acts, that the proof of this negative is a practical impossibility. But it is possible to show that even the most favored cases for the production of a response by securing an ideal representation of it may be explainable by use and effect alone.

The extreme apparent potency of ideas representing acts to produce them regardless of bonds of use or effect is, of course, witnessed in the phenomena of suggestion in hypnosis and allied states. To try to reduce these phenomena to consequences of the laws of habit may seem fanatical. Here, it will be said, are the crucial cases where the idea of an act, if freed from all effects of opposing ideas, does inevitably produce the act so far as it is a possibility for the animal’s action-system.

That is precisely what I cannot find proof of.

Efficient suggestions to hypnotized subjects, on the contrary, are often ambiguous in the sense that they seem as likely to arouse a situation to which the act has been bound by the law of habit as to arouse an idea of the act. Often they are far better suited to the former purpose. Direct commands—Walk, Dance, Get up, Sit down—obviously will operate by the law of habit provided the situations connected with disobedience are excluded. This is also the case with such indirect suggestions as ‘This is a knife (stick).’ ‘This is your sword (broom).’ ‘Have a cigar (a pen).’