Tolman, Edward Chace

Tolman, Edward Chace, 1886–1959, American psychologist, b. West Newton, Mass., grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1911; Ph. D. Harvard, 1915. He spent most of his academic career at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, where he taught psychology (1918–54). His approach to human behavior involved a synthesis of Gestalt psychology and behaviorism, focusing on an entire, goal-directed action, including both muscular responses and the cognitive processes which direct them. The first to selectively breed rats for high and low maze-solving abilities, Tolman wrote Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932, repr. 1967), and Drives Toward War (1942).

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Tolman, Edward Chace (1886–1959) psychologist; born in West Newton, Mass. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Yale, and taught at Northwestern University before joining the University of California: Berkeley (1918–54). In his first book, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932), he broke with the rigid stimulus-response behaviorism of John B. Watson to postulate such variables as goals, cognition, and behavioral supports within the environment. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of the nation's leading theorists in the field of cognitive psychology.