Behavior and Psychological Man: Essays in Motivation and Learning

The collection's central argument is that Tolman's purposive behaviorism is a system in continuous development, best understood through the sequence of papers that built it. Unlike Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932), which presented the system as a finished structure, this volume documents the successive stages by which that structure was constructed. The papers show Tolman grappling with learning, motivation, perception, and personality in turn, integrating experimental findings with theoretical innovation. A contemporary assessment notes that the essays illustrate "the trajectory of Tolman's thinking, from its nascent stages to a mature, albeit continually evolving, framework" [citation:3][citation:6]. The collection thus serves as both a historical record and a systematic statement.

The collection was compiled by Tolman's former students and colleagues, who asked him to select papers representing meaningful steps in the development of his system. Tolman had no involvement in initiating the project; his only direct contribution was a modest footnote to the Foreword, expressing the wish that only half of the kind things said about him had been true [citation:1]. The editors drew nineteen items from a bibliography of eighty-two titles dating from 1917 to 1949 [citation:5]. A 1997 review notes that the collection was sponsored by associates who wanted to document the history of a system "coming into being" [citation:3]. The volume was first published in 1951 by the University of California Press.

The papers document Tolman's sustained engagement with Freudian theory at a time when it was largely taboo in experimental psychology. A historical note prepared by one of his students observes that Tolman never disparaged Freud or psychoanalysis; his questions were always about how to fit "the dynamic mechanisms these people are concerned with" into a systematic body of psychological thought, disregarding the colorful language used to describe them . The collection includes papers like "A Drive-conversion Diagram" and "A Stimulus-expectancy Need-cathexis Psychology" that attempt to operationalize Freudian concepts such as cathexis and ego wants within a behaviorist framework. This integrative impulse distinguishes Tolman from contemporaries who dismissed psychoanalysis outright.

The collection includes a reflective note on Tolman as a "rat psychologist." It observes that his experimental work was confined primarily to the rat, partly reflecting the era in which he developed and partly his conviction that concepts which cannot be studied by natural-science methods and demonstrated in lower animals are not useful for a basic science of behavior . The note compares the psychologist using simple organisms to the anthropologist studying relatively simple societies. It acknowledges that many applied psychologists dismissed rat experiments as having little human relevance, but argues that they failed to appreciate "the difference between the phenotypic nature of data and its genotypic meanings in the hands of a creative theorist" . Tolman's use of rats was thus a methodological commitment, not a limitation.

The volume opens with "A New Formula for Behaviorism" (1922) and closes with "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men" (1948). Intermediate papers include "Can Instincts Be Given Up in Psychology?", "Behaviorism and Purpose," "Purpose and Cognition," "A Behavioristic Theory of Ideas," "A Behaviorist's Definition of Consciousness," "Sign-Gestalt or Conditioned Reflex?", "Gestalt and Sign-Gestalt," "Operational Behaviorism and Current Trends in Psychology," "The Acquisition of String Pulling by Rats," "The Determiners of Behavior at a Choice Point," "Psychological Man," "A Drive-conversion Diagram," and "A Stimulus-expectancy Need-cathexis Psychology" [citation:2][citation:5]. The sequence shows Tolman moving from early polemics toward increasingly formalized constructs like sign-Gestalt-expectation and cognitive maps.

Reviewers characterized Tolman as a thinker who was "not ashamed of, or afraid of, our philosophical heritage," treating cognition and motivation as ultimately epistemological and ethical problems [citation:1]. The Foreword notes that for Tolman, system building was "not a grim business" but a "happy, gay, creative activity," and that his papers express wit, humor, magnanimity, and tolerance [citation:1]. A reviewer observed that Tolman was "constitutionally incapable of writing dogmatically or of publishing a polemic" [citation:1]. The collection's breadth—encompassing learning theory, motivation, perception, clinical experience, and social psychology—reflects his insistence that an adequate system must account for all psychological data.