Edward Chace Tolman (April 14, 1886 – November 19, 1959) was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

[3] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tolman as the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

[10] Later, Tolman transferred to Harvard University for graduate studies and worked in the laboratory of Hugo Munsterburg.

[1] Tolman is best known for his studies of learning in rats using mazes, and he published many experimental articles, of which his paper with Ritchie and Kalish in 1946 was probably the most influential.

His major theoretical contributions came in his 1932 book, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, and in a series of papers in the Psychological Review, "The determinants of behavior at a choice point" (1938), "Cognitive maps in rats and men" (1948), and "Principles of performance" (1955).

In the language of the time, Tolman was an "S-S" (stimulus-stimulus), non-reinforcement theorist: he drew on Gestalt psychology to argue that animals could learn the connections between stimuli and did not need any explicit biologically significant event to make learning occur.

The rival theory, the much more mechanistic "S-R" (stimulus-response) reinforcement-driven view, was taken up by Clark L. Hull.

A key paper by Tolman, Ritchie, and Kalish in 1946 demonstrated that rats learned the layout of a maze, which they explored freely without reinforcement.

[9] However, Hull and his followers were able to produce alternative explanations of Tolman's findings, and the debate between S-S and S-R learning theories became increasingly complicated.

", persuaded many psychologists interested in animal learning that it was more productive to focus on the behavior itself rather than using it to make hypotheses about mental states.

His 1938 and 1955 papers, produced to answer Hull's charge that he left the rat "buried in thought" in the maze, unable to respond, anticipated and prepared the ground for much later work in cognitive psychology, as psychologists began to discover and apply decision theory – a stream of work that was recognized by the award of a Nobel Prize to Daniel Kahneman in 2002.

In his 1948 paper "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men", Tolman introduced the concept of a cognitive map, which has found extensive application in almost every field of psychology, frequently among scientists who are unaware that they are using the early ideas that were formulated to explain the behavior of rats in mazes.

[21] Tolman was very concerned that psychology should be applied to try to solve human problems, and in addition to his technical publications, he wrote a book called Drives Toward War.

[22] In another publication, "Physiology, Psychology, and Sociology", Tolman takes the three subjects and explains how all three depend or interrelate with each other and must be looked at as a whole.

Subordinate acts are randomized independent actions, excluding reflexes, that are part of larger groups of activity.

Thinking-of-acts triggers an inhibitory process that prevents the determining adjustment from cuing subordinate acts.

This might be because you learned that it may be safer to stay near a window and call for help than to go further into the burning building, creating a self-preservation adjustment.

Tolman was a leader of the resistance to the oath, and when the Regents of the University of California sought to fire him, he sued.

[5][6][7] In 1963, at the insistence of the then President of the University of California, Clark Kerr, the Berkeley campus' newly constructed Education and Psychology building was named "Tolman Hall" in honor of the late professor.

As mentioned previously, Tolman's father wished for his son to eventually take over the manufacturing company.