A very different theory would also have some popularity before the behaviorism left the experimental scene to the cognitivists: The cognitive behaviorism of Edward Chase Tolman. E. C. was born April 14, 1886 in Newton, Mass. His father was a businessman, his mother a housewife and fervent Quaker. He and his older brother attended MIT. His brother went on to become a famous physicist.

E. C. was strongly influenced by reading William James, so in 1911 he went to graduate school at Harvard. While there, he spent a summer in Germany studying with Kurt Koffka, the Gestalt psychologist. He received his PhD in 1915.

He went off to teach at Northwestern University. But he was a shy teacher, and an avowed pacifist during World War I, and the University dismissed him in 1918. He went to teach at the University of California at Berkeley. He also served in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) for two years during World War II.

The University of California required loyalty oaths of the professors there (inspired by Joseph McCarthy and the “red scare”). Tolman led protests and was summarily suspended. The courts found in his favor and he was reinstated. In 1959 he retired, and received an honorary doctorate from the same University of California at Berkeley! Unfortunately, he died the same year, on November 19.

Although he appreciated the behaviorist agenda for making psychology into a true objective science, he felt Watson and others had gone too far.

1. Watson’s behaviorism was the study of “twitches” -- stimulus-response is too molecular a level.  We should study whole, meaningful behaviors: the molar level.
2. Watson saw only simple cause and effect in his animals.  Tolman saw purposeful, goal-directed behavior.
3. Watson saw his animals as “dumb” mechanisms.  Tolman saw them as forming and testing hypotheses based on prior experience.
4. Watson had no use for internal, “mentalistic” processes.  Tolman demonstrated that his rats were capable of a variety of cognitive processes.

An animal, in the process of exploring its environment, develops a cognitive map of the environment.  The process is called latent learning, which is learning in the absence of rewards or punishments.  The animals develops expectancies (hypotheses) which are confirmed or not by further experience.  Rewards (and punishments) come into play only as motivators for performance of a learned behavior, not as the causes of learning itself.

He himself acknowledged that his behaviorism was more like Gestalt psychology than like Watson’s brand of behaviorism.  From our perspective today, he can be considered one of the precursors of the cognitive movement.