Drives Toward War

Tolman argues that war is not the expression of a fixed, innate instinct for aggression but the product of frustration—an intervening variable that arises when goal-directed behavior is blocked. He rejects the instinctivist position that treats war as an inevitable outpouring of human nature, arguing that the evidence for a specific war instinct is weak. Instead, he applies the purposive behaviorism he developed in Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, treating aggression as one of several possible responses to thwarted drives rather than as an irreducible drive in itself. The causes of war, on this account, lie in frustrated group expectations and the conditions that produce them.

Frustration is the key intervening variable in Tolman's account. It arises when an organism's goal-directed behavior is blocked, and it can produce a variety of responses—aggression, regression, fixation, or substitution. Tolman treats war as a large-scale expression of frustration: when nations or groups find their expectations blocked, aggression toward an out-group becomes more likely. This framework allows him to avoid both instinctivism and pure environmentalism by locating the cause of war in the interaction between goal-directed drives and the conditions that frustrate them. The argument was a contribution to what would later be called the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which Tolman helped to shape alongside Dollard, Miller, and others at Yale.

Tolman's purposive behaviorism treats behavior as goal-directed and analyzes it in terms of sign-Gestalt-expectations—the organism's expectations about which signs lead to which goals. In Drives Toward War, he extends this framework to groups and nations. Groups, like individuals, have expectations about the outcomes of their actions; when those expectations are blocked, frustration and aggression follow. Tolman argues that international conflict can be understood as the frustration of group expectations, and that reducing such frustration—by providing alternative paths to goals or by altering expectations—can reduce the likelihood of war. This application of molar behaviorism to collective behavior is distinctive and represents one of the early attempts to bridge psychology and international relations.

Tolman was part of the Yale group whose discussions produced the frustration-aggression hypothesis, formally stated in Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, and Sears's Frustration and Aggression (1939). That hypothesis holds that frustration always leads to some form of aggression and that aggression always presupposes frustration. Tolman's Drives Toward War extends this framework to the international domain, treating war as frustrated group behavior. However, Tolman's version is less deterministic than the original hypothesis: he allows that frustration can produce responses other than aggression and that war is only one possible outcome. The relationship between the two works is thus one of extension and qualification rather than strict agreement.

The book was reviewed respectfully but did not have the impact of Tolman's major theoretical work. Reviewers praised its application of behavior theory to a pressing social problem but questioned whether the extrapolation from individual rats in mazes to nations at war was warranted. Some critics noted that Tolman's treatment of group psychology was less developed than his treatment of individual behavior. In hindsight, the book is significant as an early example of applying behavior theory to international conflict, and it contributed to the broader frustration-aggression tradition that remains influential in social psychology. However, its specific claims about the causes of war have been superseded by more complex multi-level analyses that include economic, political, and structural factors.

The contrast is sharp. Lorenz, in On Aggression (1963/1966), argued that aggression is an innate drive that accumulates spontaneously and demands discharge, and that war is a consequence of modern weapons outrunning evolved inhibitory mechanisms. Tolman, writing two decades earlier, rejected the instinctivist premise entirely. For Tolman, war is not the discharge of a specific war instinct but a learned response to frustration. Aggression is one of several possible responses to blocked goals, not an endogenous drive seeking release. Tolman's position anticipates the social-learning and frustration-aggression accounts that would later compete with Lorenz's hydraulic model. The two books thus represent opposing poles in the mid-century debate over the causes of human violence.