Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike’s line is a coolly barbed swipe at science’s favorite bad habit: treating the flashy anecdote as evidence and the dull baseline as invisible. He’s pointing to a selection effect that still haunts research today. A dog that finds its way home becomes a “remarkable instinct” story worth retelling; a dog that wanders off and stays lost is just… Tuesday. The data we don’t publish, don’t notice, don’t even count quietly rigs the conclusions we feel entitled to draw.

The jab lands because it’s domestic and slightly cruel. He doesn’t pick an exotic animal or a lab maze. He picks the neighborhood dog, where everyone’s confidence in animal “sense” is built from folklore and memory. Thorndike, a foundational figure in behaviorism, is defending a harder ethic: observation that includes failure, repetition, and boredom. In the early 20th century, psychology was trying to wrest itself away from introspection and parlor-story mentalism toward measurable behavior. This quote is part of that boundary-setting.

Subtext: the public loves miracles; science should love denominators. “Sent to a scientific magazine” is the kicker, shaming not just laypeople but researchers who reward novelty and confirmation. Thorndike is basically asking: how many lost dogs does it take to puncture a romantic theory of homing? Or, more pointedly, how many unreported nulls does it take before we admit we’ve been storytelling, not measuring?