Edward C. Tolman

Edward C. Tolman is best recognized as a pioneer in the development of cognitive psychology and for making that input at a time when the behaviorists were prevailing in this sphere. Edward C. Tolman was born in 1886, in Newton, Massachusetts, and obtained his primary education in the Newton Public School. His family belonged to the class that the sociologists would classify "upper middle" or probably "lower upper" one.

Tolman's father was a head of an industrialized business and his uncle was a head of an analogous business. Due to these conditions, both Tolman and his brother, who was 5 years older than he was, were projected to take part in their family's business; however, none of them did. Both brothers applied for to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and got thriving careers in the fields of science and academics. Tolman mentions that the fact that they both have chosen to follow academic profession, rather than going into the industrial unit, and the additional fact that this didn't result in family quarrels - they were even provided with money throughout their college time - perhaps tells a good deal about the environment inside his family and of the general positive cultural surroundings in which he lived.

In the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tolman received a bachelor's degree in electrochemistry, mentioning that he applied for MIT, "not because I wanted to be an engineer, but because I had been good in mathematics and science in high school and because of family pressure." During his last year at the institute, Tolman became more confident of his individual interests and chose his career. At that point he studied some of William James's works and determined that he wishes to be a philosopher.

When graduating from MIT in the year of 1911, he went to the Harvard summer courses and took preliminary classes in philosophy with Perry and one in psychology with Yerkes - both young assistant lecturers in the united department of philosophy and psychology at that time. According to Tolman, he thought then that he did not have intelligence enough to be a philosopher, but that psychology was closer to his abilities and interests. Psychology provided, at that date, what appeared a good compromise between philosophy and science. The next autumn, thus, Tolman joined up Harvard as a full graduate student in the field of philosophy and psychology. He wrote in his autobiographic book that the classes he remembered most vividly were: Perry's course in ethics, which (strengthened by a book of McDougall Social Psychology) shaped the groundwork for his subsequent concentration on motivation, and provided him the major conceptions that he applied all over his life span.

And now several words about Tolman as a psychologist. To comprehend Tolman's heritage to psychology, one should start by identifying that he was a behaviorist and considered himself as a behaviorist. He had slight tolerance with introspection, in any case not of the kind applied by Titchener and Wundt. However, he was evenly contrasting to the sort of behaviorism supported by Watson. In a common sense, Tolman's personal behaviorism, which he occasionally called "purposive behaviorism," was a mix, in which American practicality, an assertion on the all-significance of motivation, and a fairly more calm technique of being objective were combined. One more vital topic in Tolman's hypothesizing was the division between the molecular and molar sides of behavior - between the real muscle movements made by an animal on the one side, and the more generally classified, goal-directed act on the other.

Nowadays Tolman is commonly considered as a "cognitive behaviorist" and the creator of a "cognitive theory" of education. He is undoubtedly a precursor of contemporary cognitive psychology. We still state this, even though the term cognitive psychology is now so broadly used that it's not at all apparent precisely what the word, cognition, means or whether there is any one remained who is still not a cognitive psychologist.