What we really really want

This discussion of the work of Edward Tolman is fascinating - not just for the ‘what do we want’ question, including the resolve of economists to settle on 'revealed preferences'.

"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."