Simon Torracinta, PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale, is this year’s co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his winning essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’.
HHS: To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce Edward Tolman and say a little about what inspired you to write about him?
ST: Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States – for several decades.
I was initially drawn to Tolman’s work because of his particularly explicit theorization of drives. But I was surprised to find that, although he was one of the most influential psychologists of his day and he’s still cited in neuroscience research today, he has mostly been neglected by historians, besides the excellent biography by psychologist David Carroll. But as I hope readers of the article will see, much of his work speaks to core concerns in the history of the human sciences. Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions.
HHS: Before I ask more about the article itself, I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates to your research more broadly?
ST: My broader dissertation is about wants and desires as objects of the human sciences in the late 19th through the mid-20th century, particularly in disciplines like economics and psychology.
Historically in the early modern human and moral sciences there was a lively discussion around the springs of action, so to speak, in which economic, psychological, and anthropological concerns all spoke to each other. For Adam Smith, to take a classic example, the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments were hardly a separate enterprise. And scientific writing on the passions, appetites, and desires continued late into the 19th century.
But my contention is that, as the professional disciplines emerged and introspection retreated as an epistemologically valid form of investigation, it was replaced by methods that looked to behaviour, whether found in experiments or prices or anything else, as the primary evidence base for explaining motivation. This led to what we might call an ‘emptying out’ of interiority, with wants defined along increasingly tautological or teleological lines, and a growing emphasis on calculative rationality above all else. I try to trace these developments across several fields through the decline of faculty psychology, the marginal revolution, and the emergence of behaviourism, neoclassicism, and eventually rational choice – and to some extent through dissidents like the neo-Freudians. So Tolman’s work is at the midpoint of these trends.
HHS: How did Tolman define ‘wants’? Are wants distinct from desires or needs, for example?
ST: Tolman had a very expansive definition of wants, which he understood to include all motives of behaviour, including basic drives like hunger and thirst, for instance, but also more ‘sophisticated’ forms of motivation that we might call ‘desires’ in ordinary language. But that was part of his aim to unite all human and animal motivation in a single theoretical model, in which rat experiments could be understood to say something important about human behaviour.
Of course, this was an idiosyncratic definition, and throughout the dissertation I show how other scientists tried to bound and delineate these concepts. The way the terms are defined and set in relation to each other can tell you a lot about a project, and certainly the boundary drawn between ‘basic’ needs and more subjective ‘wants’ is always a political one. Many 19th-century psychologists, for instance, delineated categories of higher ‘desires’ or ‘sentiments’ that supposedly distinguished civilized humans from lower animals (or races). Economists, meanwhile, moved from an explicit discussion of pleasure to more neutral, object-oriented terms like utility and want, and eventually dropped that vocabulary altogether in the turn to ‘revealed preference.’
HHS: How, according to Tolman, are human wants expressed through behaviour?
ST: Since Tolman was operating under a behaviourist paradigm that prohibited appeals to ‘unverifiable’ mental states, his theory of wants couldn’t begin by considering the experience of desire, for example. On his account that would be based on unreliable and subjective testimony. So instead, wants have to be explained through a stimulus-response model, or input from the world and output in behaviour. He tried to devise experiments that would help elucidate the mechanisms connecting a given situation – prototypically, a rat in a maze – to the behaviour it produced. That led him to list of basic drives that, he thought, motivated all behaviour, rat and human – or, as he put it, to his theory of wants. A fairly complex set of mechanisms linked distinctive and specific motivations – wanting to be a military officer, for example – to a set of underlying, basic drives.
HHS: Why were experiments with rats so central to his insights into human behaviour?
ST: Rats were really important to Tolman – he even dedicated one his books to Mus norvegicus albinus – the albino lab rat! Rat experiments exploded in popularity in the early 20th century, as Rebecca Lemov and others have shown, because they promised a kind of assembly line for attacking the major problems in psychology. This was especially compelling within a behaviourist structure of explanation that tended to think about all organisms in the same way. Rats were and are relatively cheap to breed and keep, and they are mostly powerless to resist being subjected to an endless battery of tests!
The maze in particular became very important by the 1930s, because it was a uniquely adaptable tool for manipulating and observing rat behaviour. But whether you were trying to research perception or learning or anything else, you almost always needed some kind of food or other reward to motivate the rat to traverse the maze in the first place – which is what got Tolman so interested in wants. I should add that, for Tolman, it was a good thing that a rat couldn’t introspect – that it couldn’t give you a subjective account of its own experience, unlike a human being. For him that meant its behaviour was less open to misinterpretation, and you had to construct a theory of wants from outward evidence alone.
HHS: Why did Tolman have faith in behaviourism as a ‘tool of emancipation’? In what ways do his political beliefs challenge conventional assumptions about behaviourism?
ST: This was one of the real surprises in my research. Typically when we think of behaviourism and its applications today, it has a somewhat sinister resonance, and its promises of behaviour modification seem to license authoritarian forms of ‘mind control.’ I mean, just look at the controversy over algorithms and behaviour manipulation on social media platforms today. The big fear there is that artificial platform environments are producing ‘unnatural’ behaviour or affect – which echoes a lot of mid-century popular reactions to behaviourist ideas.
As Danielle Carr [the previous winner of the History of the Human Sciences essay prize] has suggested, Cold War liberal intellectuals often felt behaviourism was a dehumanizing, totalitarian approach, which helped fuel the ‘cognitivist’ reaction in the 1960s. To some extent, these tropes have been reproduced in the scholarship on the history of behaviourism – though of course, certain behaviourists did fit the stereotype.
But Tolman is a particularly interesting character. He was a quiet radical, raised in a Quaker family and a lifelong pacifist. Although he didn’t serve, he had a nervous breakdown during World War I, and spoke of a consistent horror and aversion at the idea of war itself. He was actively involved in attempts to connect psychology to social issues in the Depression, and took a principled stance on loyalty oaths in the 1950s that briefly got him fired from Berkeley. For him, behaviourism held out the promise of altering the environmental determinants of behaviour in order to produce a more healthy and peaceful society. Now, some of this may sound like the disquieting ‘utopia’ of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, but what’s intriguing is that Tolman was more interested in satisfying basic drives at a larger scale through education and redistribution, and even hinted his vision looked something like socialism.
HHS: Where do studies of aggression fit into this history? How do theories of aggression relate to understandings of drives?
I take this from the work of Gregg Mitman and others, but aggression became a key object of study across many disciplines, from psychology to anthropology to animal ethology, in the 1940s, as scientists sought to make sense of World War II. Psychologists at the time, Tolman included, were particularly taken by the so-called Dollard-Miller or ‘frustration-aggression’ hypothesis, which created an input-output model out of Freudian ideas by suggesting that aggression could be explained by frustration. This really became ubiquitous in the postwar period, with social scientists explaining workplace problems or teenage delinquency or anything else by appeal to frustration-aggression.
But the idea was particularly important to Tolman because it allowed him to link his interest in wants to the problem of war as he saw it. If aggression was explained by frustration, then frustration was explained by misdirected drives, or ‘bad’ wants. His book Drives Toward War, published in 1942, ended up suggesting that the basic drives could be satisfied or redirected to avoid the frustrations that culminated in war.
HHS: What is the significance of the mechanical metaphor from which the term ‘drive’ derives?
ST: ‘Drive’ has a complex genealogy within psychology, since it can be traced both to the German idea of Trieb – suggesting an urge or impulse – and to the ‘drive system’ of a motor. But American psychologists fairly consistently used the latter analogy, which I think is telling in itself. The metaphor suggested that human action could be explained much like a motor, with a drive system channelling energy into particular types of motion.
Of course, using machine analogies for the human body goes back to Descartes at least, but what is significant is how the metaphor shifts as the machine of reference changes. As Canguilhem suggests, early modern thinkers like Descartes and La Mettrie were thinking of regular mechanical devices like clocks, but the motor is really something quite different. The motor created a distinctively thermodynamic model of human behaviour, so to speak. This was what made the frustration-aggression so compelling: the drives were steady conduits of energy that required constant satisfaction, and their frustration necessitated the discharge of that energy elsewhere – that is, through aggressive behaviour.
I should add that even the concept of ‘motivation’ itself comes out of the interest in ‘motive power’ produced by the development of steam engines. Add to that that behaviourism first emerged at the peak of the Second Industrial Revolution alongside bodies of thought like scientific management, and we really see how significant the social and technological context was.
HHS: To stay on the question of metaphors, you quote Tolman as saying that a brain is ‘far more like a map control room than it is like an old-fashioned telephone exchange’ – what did he mean by that and how did it relate to his theorisation of cognitive maps? Were the metaphors he employed also reflected in his ‘striking visual iconography’?
ST: Right, yes, again the metaphors are so important here! The telephone exchange is intended to invoke the stimulus-response model embraced by Tolman’s behaviourist colleagues: line goes in, line goes out. To the extent there is a mental structure, it’s simply akin to the wires connecting incoming to outgoing connections. Tolman became increasingly dissatisfied with the narrowness of this model, which he felt couldn’t explain forms of ‘spatial’ and ‘latent’ learning by rats that took place in the absence of any obvious reward. His metaphor of the map control room suggests that a mental representation of the world is built up in the brain over time: this is his famous theory of the cognitive map, which is still influential in neuroscience today.
But in the article I play with the metaphor a bit further to suggest that, if the motor had become the model of behaviour, then then Tolman’s theory of wants was intended to trace the ‘roadmaps’ through which a rat or human navigated the world. Successful or failed attempts at satisfying the drives altered the structure of wants over time – a phenomenon Tolman tried to capture in his fairly maze-like ‘maps’ of the mechanisms of want.
I don’t get into this at length in the article, but it’s also interesting to note the unexpected ways in which the concept of cognitive maps travelled since it was coined by Tolman in 1948. It gets picked up almost immediately as a key metaphor in economist Friedrich Hayek’s foray into psychology, The Sensory Order in 1952, it provides the general framework for urban planner Kevin Lynch’s classic The Image of the City in 1960, and the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson even adopts it as a tool for critical theory in 1988, with wide uptake in the humanities after that. But by this point its origins with the albino rat have vanished.
HHS: You liken Tolman’s understanding of humans’ hidden motivations to a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious – and he also used terms like ‘libido’ and ‘cathexis’ – but how was his understanding of mental processes distinct from a Freudian one?
ST: Freud was crucial to Tolman in ways that I hadn’t anticipated at the outset. Tolman’s archives show he was regularly teaching American neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Abram Kardiner, and of course his technical vocabulary was filled with psychoanalytic concepts. Now some of this was part of the general trend of behaviourism at mid-century, which mined Freud’s work for ideas to insert, in a rather mechanical fashion, into its framework. But Tolman’s engagement with Freud is especially interesting because of his research interests in want and desire – and with motivations Freud would have attributed to the unconscious.
In a way, we might say Tolman tried to create a systematic model of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives that specified (and literally mapped out) each link in the causal chain. But as I argue this had a quixotic character to it, which we can see Tolman’s totally weird and complex illustrations. There’s really a paradox in the way Tolman engaged with Freud: he was clearly drawn to the insights of psychoanalysis into unconscious motivation, but the behaviourist ban on introspection meant that subjective testimony gathered together by the analyst in a ‘case’ was totally out of bounds – which was of course at the core of Freud’s method. Once you throw that out there’s not a lot left.
HHS: What were the therapeutic implications of Tolman’s theories and how did he see the role of psychologists in fostering world peace?
ST: Tolman thought that his theory of wants had implications for psychotherapy. If frustration was the outcome of misdirected drives, or a bad roadmap, so to speak, then a therapeutic intervention might hope to ‘correct’ this roadmap. I was struck by the connections between this idea and the dominant approach of cognitive-behavioural therapy today, which similarly aims to address what one CBT pioneer, Aaron Beck, called ‘maladaptive ideations.’ And of course as the name itself suggests, behaviourism was an important tributary into the development of CBT.
More broadly, Tolman thought that his theory of wants could be applied at a much larger scale to promote the healthy satisfaction of drives – thereby holding out the possibility of constructing a more lasting peace. His famous ‘Cognitive Maps’ paper even finishes with a little-cited plea to the ‘child-trainers and the world-planners of the future’ to heed his advice. Looking back, the idea of or even the phrase ‘world peace’ strikes us as rather quaint, but it was certainly an understandable concern in the 1940s. But I think this single leap from the mental to the global shows up the limitations of the thin universality of behaviourist models – which could be applied to practically any situation, but ultimately without much concreteness or a great deal of insight.
HHS: There are various baffling-looking diagrams from Tolman’s books reproduced in the article and you suggest that something about his ‘abstruse and byzantine representations’ gestures towards the difficulty or absurdity of rendering elusive things like human wants in scientific terms. It made me think of how Freud often dismisses his own diagrams as insufficient or inaccurate because they can’t capture the weirdness of the unconscious. But is there something in that impossibility, in the strangeness and convolution of the attempts to create a topography of the mind, that’s revealing in its own right?
ST: Absolutely! I wanted to include several of Tolman’s illustrations because words really do not capture the strangeness – and I hope readers will experience that for themselves.
Sometimes I joke that I embarked on this dissertation because of my own occasional difficulty in sorting out my personal motivations, in figuring out exactly what or why I want. So I find the strangeness in Tolman’s attempts revealing and maybe even comforting in that regard. On the other hand, abandoning want and desire as scientific objects altogether had heavy costs: just look at the incapacity of much of the social sciences today, whose models of rationality falter in accounting for the upsurge of feelings of ressentiment or alienation that are wreaking havoc across the globe.
Your question also makes me think of William James, a hero of Tolman’s and also part of the dissertation, who famously presented a quasi-determinist account of the will in his Principles of Psychology, but then seemed to revel in the sheer contingency of unconscious motivations in his Varieties of Religious Experience ten years later – a work tellingly influenced by his own experiences. As James would have been the first to admit, the strange and the unexpected are also part of the story.
Finally I want to suggest that despite its failures, Tolman’s work might still have lessons for us. I agree with affect theorists that there’s something politically useful about recognizing the embeddedness of desire within the infrastructure of our lives – and Tolman recognized this too. Today, one of the perpetual injunctions of our culture is simply to ‘be yourself’ – as if that had some obvious, stable content. Setting to one side whatever one thinks of their project overall, the behaviourists would have laughed that idea out of the room.
Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.