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(Find A Grave, 2018)
Edward Chace Tolman, otherwise known as E. C. Tolman, was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1886. He was born into a family that could be considered upper-middle-class and his educational journey started in Newton public schools. From there he went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he obtained a bachelor's degree in electrochemistry. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1911. (Kimble, Wertheimer, White & Boneau, 1991)
Further
Education
Further Education
Upon graduating from MIT he took a summer class at Harvard where he studied both philosophy and psychology under a young Robert Yerkes. After that time Tolman determined he was more suited to psychology over philosophy and he enrolled at Harvard University full-time in the psychology graduate program (Kimble, Wertheimer, White & Boneau, 1991).
Tolman studied with Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka in Germany the summer of 1912 (Schultz & Schultz, 2012). He had been trained in the tradition of Titchener’s structuralism but became acquainted with Watson’s behaviourism in his final year of graduate school. He received his doctoral degree in 1915 and became an assistant professor at Northwestern University for several years after that (Kimble, Wertheimer, White & Boneau, 1991).
Career
Career
In 1918 Tolman took a position at the University of California Berkeley teaching comparative psychology (comparing animals to humans). He conducted research on rats and soon became disillusioned with Watson’s ideas and began to develop his own line of thinking around behaviourism (Schultz & Schultz, 2012). Tolman spent most of his life at University of California in Berkeley, CA and, according to a review of general psychology 2002 survey, he was the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century (Wikipedia, 2018).
Three main contributions to Psychology
(Schultz & Schultz, 2012)
Theory of learning-- Tolman rejected Thorndike’s law of effect and said that rewards had little effect on learning. He pointed out that there were ’sign Gestalts’ that were built up over time after repeated performance at a task. For example, the hungry rat in the maze moves about and learns which blind alleys lead him nowhere and finally finds food. After repeating this many times the rat learns that at each choice point the options will bring him closer to or further from the food – thus when the rat is measured to be faster at arriving at the food it is clear that his purpose is to find the food (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
(Alchetron, 2018)
The cognitive map – the pattern of many sign Gestalts or choice points is devised over repetition and thus this is what is learned NOT muscle memory or motor habits. Tolman concluded that this happens in people who are familiar with the neighbourhood or town. They can go from one point to another using a variety of routes because they have built mental maps developed over repeated exposure to the area. This learning has been developed latently(Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
Exploring It
Purposive Behaviourism
Exploring purposive behaviousim
Tolman published a book in 1932 called Purposive Behaviour in Animals and Men. The term seemed to imply that he believed consciousness played an important role in behaviour - a mentalistic term at odds with behaviourism. This was not Tolman‘s objective, he rejected introspection and was only interested in those things which could be objectively observed - like Watson before him (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
Instead he argued that each action was goal orientated - that is, a cat’s goal is to escape from a puzzle box, a rat's may be to find food. His rat’s repeatedly ran mazes and made fewer mistakes each time, therefore it is learning, therefore it has a purpose. Tolman was careful to measure only objective observable changes in behaviour, he responded to criticisms from Watson and his followers by stating that he had no interest in whether the subject was conscious or not - only what the organism did (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
He termed intervening variables things which are internal to the organism which could affect behaviour, in his way of thinking Watson’s stimulus – response model was too simplistic and needed another step. He decided that the chain should be S-O-R, where the O = organism. He used the idea of hunger as an example of the intervening variables which might affect the response. We all know what hunger is and that it does affect our behaviour, yet to the behaviourists, rooted in their evidence-only world, it was of little import. Tolman thought that these things could in fact be measured objectively, in the case of hunger by measuring the time since the last meal. Other things could be measured by measuring biological measures like heart rate or change in heart rate (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
Strengths and Limitations
Strengths
Tolman broke the limitation of early behaviourism, and proposes the concepts of intervening variables (S-O-R), changed the erroneous tendencies of ignoring the internal factors in behaviourism, promotes the development of the behaviourism (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
He insisted on the principle of behaviourism and absorbs the cognitive gestalt psychology.
He is recognized as a forerunner of contemporary cognitive psychology.
Another significant contribution was Tolman’s wholehearted support for the rat as an appropriate subject for psychological study. Rats were considered simple but accessible model animals when investigate the behaviour, emotion and so on (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
Tolman did not provide a systematic or rigorous theoretical system and he did not have explicit definitions in some concepts (Schultz & Schultz, 2012).
References
Alchetron. (2018) Edward C Tolman. Retrieved from https://alchetron.com/Edward-C-Tolman
Find A Grave. (2018) Edward Chace Tolman. Retrieved from https://www.findagrave.com/
memorial/6640270/edward-chace-tolman
Kimble, G., Wertheimer, M., White, C. and Boneau, C. (1991). Portraits of pioneers in psychology.
Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Tissot, B. (n. d.) Once Again. Retrieved from https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/track/
once-again
Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2012) Modern Psychology: A History, International Edition (10th ed., pp.
236-239). Canada, Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Wikipedia. (2018, March 8) Edward C. Tolman. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Edward_C._Tolman
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