Thorndike’s Theory of Intelligence.

In this article, we will discuss the Thorndike’s Theory of Intelligence.

What is Thorndike’s Multifactor Theory of Intelligence?

One of the sharpest critics of Spearman’s two-factor theory was E. L. Thorndike. He believed that Spearman’s inter correlations studied were too small to test the question of a common factor. He opposed very strongly the idea of the existence of a characteristic such as general intelligence. Instead of one kind of factor, he maintained that there are a large number of separate characteristics that makeup intelligence.

According to Thorndike, the common element does not exist in the individual but in the nature of the tasks themselves. People differ in their ability to perform any specific act in terms of the level of difficulty they can manage. They also differ in the range or number of tasks they can or cannot perform.

Thorndike believed intelligence was like a series of skills or talents. It is several or many tasks that might call for the same kind of ability. According to him, the correlations between various tests are the result of the fact. The tests have common features with each other even though they are called as measures of different aspects.

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Thorndike’s disagreement that there is no general intelligence but have very specific acts. However, the acts do not hold water because some tasks have so many elements in common. That is desirable to classify them into groups as arithmetical reasoning, visual perception, word meaning, analogy, etc.

Thorndike has classified intellectual activity into three categories: (i) Social Intelligence, (ii) Concrete Intelligence, and (iii) Abstract Intelligence. Yet, this is a classification of the type of tasks and not an analysis of mental organisation itself.

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