behaviorism

Edward Thorndike's 1898 puzzle box experiments with cats established the Law of Effect — the principle that rewarded behaviors strengthen. It is the root of all operant conditioning.

In 1948, Edward Tolman showed that rats build internal mental maps of mazes — not just stimulus-response chains. The experiment that broke behaviorism's monopoly on learning theory.

How Harry Harlow's wire-mother and cloth-mother experiments with rhesus monkeys overturned behaviorism's model of love, and why the ethical cost still matters.

Pavlov's dogs experiment began as digestion research, not psychology. Learn the real setup, the bell myth, the Tower of Silence, and how it shapes PTSD therapy today.

B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning chamber revealed that the timing of rewards — not just their presence — determines how behavior is learned and how resistant it is to extinction.

Pavlov's drooling dogs accidentally founded modern learning theory. Here's how classical conditioning works and why it explains so much of behavior.