232 JOHN D. DODSON 



tempted to establish habits of subserviency in lower animals he 

 has resorted primarily to one or both of these motives for action. 

 But the close of the last century and the beginning of the present 

 have seen an awakening of a broader interest in animal behavior 

 than that of subserviency an interest in the comparative 

 behavior of living organisms. With the interest in comparative 

 behavior and the use of laboratory methods naturally came the 

 question of motive to secure the desired behavior. 



If one ignores a few experiments done by Romanes, .Lubbock, 

 Graber, Preyer, Loeb and Verworn (1881 to 1890), whose inter- 

 ests were primarily physiological and not psychological, he may 

 begin his history of comparative experimental behavior with 

 E. L. Thorndike whose " Animal Intelligence" appeared in 1898. 

 He reduced his subjects to a state of "utter hunger" and placed 

 them in a box from which they might escape by working some 

 form of simple door-fastener. The motive used to get the animal 

 to react to this situation was the placing of food on the outside 

 of the box. These experiments brought forth a considerable 

 amount of adverse criticism. These criticisms were directed 

 either against the placing the animal under abnormal conditions 

 as a means of control or against reducing them to a condition of 

 1 ' utter hunger. ' ' But these obj ections did not seriously affect the 

 interest in comparative behavior; and many valuable experiments 

 have been performed in our psychological laboratories, especially 

 at Harvard, Chicago, Johns Hopkins and Clark. 



Within the next decade after the appearance of Thorndike 's 

 monograph, Yerkes, in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, 

 had devised a means of using punishment as a motive for the 

 proper performance of a required act. He says (11) : 



My experiments with the dancer differ from those which have 

 been made by most students of mammalian behavior in one important 

 respect. I have used punishment instead of reward as the chief motive 

 for the proper performance of the required act. Usually in experiments 

 with mammals hunger has been the motive depended upon. The 

 animals have been required to follow a certain devious path, to escape 

 from a box by working a button, a bolt, a lever, or to gain entrance to a 

 box by the use of the teeth, claws, hand, or body weight and thus 



