science · 19 November 1959 · 65 years ago
death
Died 19 Nov 1959 at age 73 (born 14 Apr 1886).
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist who developed a system of psychology known as purposive, or molar, behaviourism, which attempts to explore the entire action of the total organism. Because of his strong affiliation with building a scientific psychology he embraced the core notion of behaviorism—that what an organism does is the source of legitimate data. Contrary to John B. Watson's atomism approach, Tolman advocated the use of intervening variables and focused on a number of very non-behaviorist processes such as purpose, expectation, belief and spatial representation. His major book was Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932) in which he summarized a significant series of experiments on the white rat.
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