Edward Thorndike

Exactly.

Thorndike's puzzle boxes, Pavlov, Skinner.

The senior author of this new study, neuroscientist Kishore V. Kuchiputla, He points out that the scientific consensus has always, always been a slow burn.

A slow burn, yeah.

The general subject was labor problems.

The students had to read one book a week, such books as Hart's Psychology of Insanity, Keller's Societal Evolution, Holtz' Freudian Wish, MacDougall's Social Psychology, two weeks to that, Lippmann's Preface to Politics, Veblen's Instinct of Workmanship, Wallace's Great Society, Thorndike's Educational Psychology, Hoxie's Scientific Management, Ware's The Worker and His Country, G.H. Parker's Biology and Social Problems, and so forth, and ending as a concession to the idealists with Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty.

One of the graduate students of the seminar wrote me, "For three years I sat in his seminar on labor problems, and had we both been there ten years longer, each season would have found me in his class.

His influence on my intellectual life was by far the most stimulating and helpful of all the men I have known.

I am to see him again.

Tomorrow will be a big day for me.

I see Hollingsworth and very probably Thorndike, and I'll know then something of what I'll get out of New York.

Next day.

Religious wars, happily, are specters of a medieval or ancient past, and the Christian Church is laboring valiantly to fulfill the destiny of peace on earth.

Professor Edward L. Thorndike, writing from the psychologist's standpoint in 1911, and apparently influenced by an essay of William James's on the same subject, shows how deluded a man who usually bases his statements on quantitative research may become when he launches into the flowery domain of the philosophy of history.

Professor Thorndike ignores the important fact that we cannot yet dogmatize as to the causes of war.

He seems to assume that armed conflict arises from something in the minds of the common people, some natural longing for excitement and adventure, that has to be satisfied somehow, and might be vicariously satisfied in some other form of daring.

Religious wars, happily, are spectres of a medieval or ancient past, and the Christian Church is laboring vainly to fulfil the destiny of peace on earth.

Professor Edward L. Thorndike, writing from the psychologist's standpoint in 1911, and apparently influenced by an essay of William James's on the same subject, shows how deluded a man who usually bases his statements on quantitative research may become when he launches into the flowery domain of the philosophy of history.

Professor Thorndike ignores the important fact that we cannot yet dogmatize as to the causes of war.

He seems to assume that armed conflict arises from something in the minds of the common people, some natural longing for excitement and adventure, that has to be satisfied somehow, and might be vicariously satisfied in some other form of daring.

It's called the halo effect, and it is absolutely everywhere.

In one of psychology's earliest studies on reputation done in the 1920s, the psychologist Edward Thorndike asked military officers to rate their soldiers on traits like intelligence, leadership, and character.

But there was a twist to this.

Many of the officers barely knew the men they were judging.

You cheat on somebody, you do something terrible to a friend, it's hard to get that back because your capacity for doing such things has been revealed, and it's assumed it was always in you and you were lying about it.

As human beings, we're also hardwired to pay attention to those big moments more because of something known as the negativity bias.

This was coined in two thousand and one by the psychologist Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman.

Rozin and Royzman, I know, are like perfect names to be collaborators.

The foundational architecture of mindset theory was being laid down over a century ago.

You look at the 1910s and 1920s and you have these pioneering cognitive and educational psychologists like Thaddeus Lincoln Bolton, Edward Thorndike and William Hurt Kilpatrick.

And they weren't using the term as a motivational poster.

No, they were studying cognitive inertia, trying to figure out why human beings get locked into specific rigid ways of processing information and how prior experiences create a filter that alters how we perceive a current task.