Question

Which statement about Edward C. Tolman is incorrect? He disagreed with John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. He found that emotions can be a conditioned response. He placed hungry rats in a maze with no reward for finding their way through it, and he studied a comparison group that was rewarded with food at the end of the maze. His experiments demonstrated that organisms can learn even if they do not receive immediate reinforcement.

Answer 1

The correct answer is He found that emotions can be a conditioned response.

Tolman was influenced by the theoretical and experimental legacy of Thorndike, Watson and Gestalt psychologists. Whereas, in philosophical terms, he started his career under the aegis of Perry and Holt's neorealism (Lopes, 2008). These multiple influences, combined with the diversity, evolution and longevity of his work, make it difficult to classify his system based on broad labels such as behaviorism or cognitiveness (Santana & Borba, 2015).

In his first presentation of his explanatory system, Tolman (1922) addresses the problem of proposing an explanation that reconciles the need for an observable and measurable phenomenon like behavior - as opposed to introspectionist psychology - with a theory that encompasses behavioral functions not reducible to physiology , but that address the relationships between organism and environment capable of generating a “transformation factor” (Tolman, 1922), or that understand the behavior of each organism from its motivations and effects in a context.