A Maverick Reclaimed
Some psychologists say it's time that Egon Brunswik got his due
By Bruce Bower
On a sabbatical trip to Vienna in 1933, Edward C. Tolman, chair of the University of California, Berkeley psychology department and a leading investigator of animal behavior, encountered what he later described as “the chance of a lifetime.” At the Vienna Psychological Institute, Tolman met Egon Brunswik, a 30-year-old scholar who could, as the senior scientist wrote to a colleague, help him orchestrate “an experimental and theoretical movement of great importance and of some renown.”
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2002/03/1064.jpg?resize=116%2C150&ssl=1)
Bold words from a man who had already brashly challenged central tenets of behaviorism, then a dominant force in U.S. psychology.