SOURCE: “Celebrating E. L. Thorndike a Century After Animal Intelligence,” in American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 10, October, 1998, pp. 1121-24.

In the following essay, Dewsbury provides an overview of Thorndike's life and career.

This is a year in which to celebrate the career of one of the most productive and influential of all American psychologists, Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949). It is the centenary of the publication of his doctoral dissertation, “Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals” (E. L. Thorndike, 1898), a key work in shifting the focus of much thought about animal behavior and in the development of animal experimental psychology. However, Thorndike's influence was much wider than this. His animal research was confined primarily to the early years of his career. His work on psychometrics and educational psychology dominated most of his academic career and had considerable impact.

In the set of articles that follows...