Cognitivists: Edward Chace Tolman - Research Paper Example

His brother, Richard, was five years older than him, and he and Richard had to go into the family business. Edward Chace Tolman was born April 14, 1886, in West Newton, Massachusetts. He was the brother of the California Institute of Technology physicist Richard Chace Tolman. Edward Tolman initial interest was in engineering. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from there. Then passed to Edward Tolman psychology and completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1915.

After teaching at Northwestern University in three years, joined Tolman University of California at Berkeley, where he contributed significantly to the development of the reputation of this institution. In fact, most of his career spent at the University of Berkeley (1918-1954), where he taught psychology. Tolman became known as a brilliant and generous teacher. (New World Encyclopedia, 2011) Tolman was one of the professors at the University of California, which sought to dismiss the era of McCarthyism in the early 1950s because he refused to sign an oath not because the position did not feel any loyalty to the United States but because he believed a violation of academic freedom.

Tolman was the director of the sustainability of the oath, and when the Regents and the University of California, tried to fire, she said. . The third was the notion of intervening variables and, finally, was his support of the rats to use in question. Success shows that rats have used cognitive maps instead of just running and turning right, he used his rats as examples. Finally, Tolman was the psychologist who helped the white rats to serve as the theme as widely as they are today for the experiments.

He was quoted that “let it be noted that rats live in cages; they do not go on binges the night before one has planned an experiment; they do not kill each other off in wars; they do not invent engines of destruction, and, if they did, they would not be so inept about controlling such engines; they do not go in for either class conflicts or race conflicts; they avoid politics, economics, and papers in psychology. They are marvelous, pure and delightful. And, as soon as I possibly can, I am going to climb back again out on that good old phylogenic limb and sit there, this time right side up and unashamed, wiggling my whiskers at all the silly, yet at the same time far too complicated, specimens of homo sapiens, whom I shall see strutting and fighting and messing things up, down there on the ground below me.

" (Tolman, 1945, csbsju.edu) He wasn’t always so happy with rats; early on in his career he was quoted to say “I don’t like them. They make me feel creepy.” Tolman’s need for control changed his mind on rats. He loved to use rats because he had to be in control of everything. He felt ordinary people were far too unreliable, especially when he had rats at his disposal. Overall, Tolman can be regarded as a forerunner of cognitive psychology today. He was a man who believed in change. Unlike many others, when information