Recent Issues. Chapter 12: The Behavior of Organisms at Fifty. Quote 12

“Many textbooks in psychology continue to describe operant conditioning as trial-and-error learning . . . The organism need not be trying to do anything. Many of the things Thorndike’s cats did could also be called errors in the sense that reinforcing consequences did not follow, but my rats learned from their successes. There was neither trial nor error.” (p. 126)