Hypothetical machines: The science fiction dreams of cold war social science

ISIS

Volumn 101, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 401-411

  Lemov, Rebecca ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; SOCIOLOGY; UNITED STATES; USSR; WAR;

HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; SOCIAL SCIENCES; UNITED STATES; USSR; WAR;

EID: 77953991732     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/653107     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. The historical-background account of the creation of the focused interview technique is found in Robert K.Merton, "Focus Groups: Continuities and Discontinuities," Public Opinion Quarterly, 1987, 51:550 -566;p. 553
2. A subsequent, slightly different version of these events appeared as part of Merton's Introduction to Robert K. Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall, The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. xiii-xxxi;
3. the first edition was published in 1956. The quotation is from the second version (1990 edition), p. xvi.
4. This, at least, is how Merton framed the experience and his concomitant education. In noting that the firsthand work with indigents and drifters did not seem a formative experience in Merton's life save in regard to methodology, one might speculate about personal reasons;
5. however, here the purpose is to suggest a new historiographical angle on the period among certain soon-to-be eminent social science researchers. Whereas, for example, James Agee and Walker Evans used their WPA work as a route to engage in existential-slash-selfrevelatory journeys, this was not the case for Merton, possibly because he was quite familiar with how the other half lives. (Note, too, that Merton was at this time a socialist and age-mate of the youngest of the New Deal documentarians.)
6. Alfred Kazin on the New Deal documentarians' "signal literature of empiricism" which served as "evidence of how deeply felt was the urge born of the crisis to recover America as an idea-andperhaps only thus to build a better society in the shell of the old;
7. Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942; New York: Mariner Books, 1995), p. 489.
8. Eudora Welty described feeling "seared" in her WPA job interviewing poor, rural southerners. Others used new methods to innovate with representational capacities. Dorothea Lange began in this period to interview the subjects she photographed, and saw her representations transformed by "gathering this sort of information" about their lives: Jonathan Raban, "American Pastoral," New York Review of Books, 19 Nov. 2009, 56, p. 16.
9. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937; Athens: Univ. Georgia Press, 1995);
10. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939; New York: Mariner Books, 2001).
11. On "working documents" see Ron Robin,The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001),p. 8
12. The phrase on "nodes" refers to the usefulness of considering "things" and the practices associated with them when studying science: see Lorraine Daston's Introduction to Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Objects Lessons in Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 16 (quotation).
13. More broadly, Merton in his role as sociologist of science spoke of "strategic research materials" which might include strategic research sites, objects, or events. These are useful to the sociologist or historian of science because they "exhibit the phenomena to be explained or interpreted to such advantage and in such accessible form that they enable the fruitful investigation of previously stubborn problems and the discovery of new problems for further inquiry." My claim is that the methodological materials described here constitute a key set of strategic research materials.
14. Robert K. Merton, "Three Fragments from a Sociologist's Notebook: Establishing the Phenomena, Specified Ignorance, and Strategic Research Materials," Annual Review of Sociology, 1987, 13:1-28, p. 3
15. Pursuing this "debunking" strategy, important and groundbreaking works have addressed the history of Cold War expert knowledge, and particularly the social sciences and behavioral sciences; key contributions include Michael A. Bernstein's, "American Economics and the National Security State, 1941-1953," an essay in "The Cold War and Expert Knowledge: New Essays on the History of the National Security State," Radical History Review, 1995, 63:8 -27;
16. Laura Nader, "The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology," in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the War Years, ed. Noam Chomsky (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 107-146;
17. David Price, "Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State," Identities, 1998, 4:389-430;
18. Christopher Simpson, "Universities, Empire, and the Production of Knowledge: An Introduction," in University and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. C. Simpson (New York: The New Press, 1998). Such literature has often originated within a discipline-say, anthropology-and this may explain the vigor with which certain actors and programs are unveiled as subject to (borrowing from Nader, "The Phantom Factor," p. 108) the "phantom factor," that is, a complex of external factors and forces that contributed to a putatively neutral and universalistaspiring social science. Overall, these works aim to "add context" to disciplinary history where context has been hidden or not talked about for decades.
19. On debunking strategies implicit in science studies see Lorraine Daston, "Science Studies and the History of Science," Critical Inquiry, 2009, 35:798-813, p. 801.
20. Ron Rifkind interview with Arthur Miller, Bombsite 49, Fall 1994 (http://www.bombsite.com/issues /49/articles/1821). Talcott Parsons delighted to report that his children were given to marching around the house with toy megaphones blaring, "The Sociology is About to Begin Said the Man with the Loudspeaker." Parsons made the social-atom-splitting comment most famously in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, as one of his students, Clifford Geertz, recalled: "And for a while it really seemed so."
21. Clifford Geertz, "Disciplines," Raritan, 1995, 14:65-102, p. 66.
22. On the growth of behavioralism and the new entity of behavioral sciences see also Hunter Crowther-Heyck, "Patrons at the Revolution: Ideas and Institutions in the Behavioral Sciences," Isis, 2006, 97:420-446;
23. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 115-117;
24. Dorothy Ross, "Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines," in Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Ross and Theodore Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 229-234;
25. Ron Robin, Ch. 1 "Inventing the Behavioral Sciences," in The Making of the Cold War Enemy (cit. n. 3) (Princeton,\ N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001).
26. For Bellah's quotation of Wallace Stevens see Robert Bellah manuscript dated 28 Aug. 1979 for the eulogy delivered at the annual Sociology meeting, "The World is the World through its Theorists. In Memory of Talcott Parsons (1902-1979)," Harvard Archives, Parsons Papers, HUGFP, 15.2, Box 20. Robert Redfield refers to "special procedures" of the social sciences, as quoted in Oscar Lewis, "Controls and Experiments in Field Work," in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. Alfred Kroeber (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 188-189.
27. Special instruments (the "interaction recorder") and the Special Room (an experimental room with adjoining observation room) were trademarks of Harvard sociologist Robert Freed Bales, the action-oriented partner of Talcott Parsons at the Laboratory of Social Relations: see, for example, Robert FreedBales, Interaction Process Analysis (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1950).
28. For an insightful study of the fine-tuning of social scientific tools for polling, sampling and quantifying the American public see Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).
29. On "administrative rubric" see Jonathan Sterne, "C. Wright Mills, the Bureau of Applied Social Research, and the Meaning of Critical Scholarship," Cultural Studies, 2005, 5:65-94, p. 70. For Talcott Parson's obituary see "Nobody's Theories Were Bigger," New York Times, 13 May 1979.
30. For Talcott Parson's obituary see "Nobody's Theories Were Bigger," New York Times, 13 May 1979.
31. "Methodological thought" is a phrase from Jennifer Pratt's pathbreaking A History of Sociological Research Methods in America (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 2.
32. Herzog worked closely with Merton for the Research Branch and subsequently took her academic and war bona fides to become a vice president for marketing at McCann Erikson. The agency acquired through Herzog exclusive commercial rights to the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer; in addition, Herzog innovated in developing with ecologist E. H. Hess of the University of Chicago an "Eye Camera" that recorded pupil-dilation in the presence of a product or scenario. On Herzog see Elizabeth M. Perse, "Herta Herzog," in Women in Communication: A Biographical Sourcebook, ed. Nancy Signorielli (Westwood, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1997), pp. 202-211.
33. The concept of "effective stimulus" derived from wartime work, according to Merton; it appears in published form in Merton et al., The Focused Interview (cit. n. 1), p. 6. Note that Merton further refined the post hoc interview in additional, extensive wartime work published as Mass Persuasion, in which project teams systematically interviewed over 2,000 radio marathon respondents-people who pledged to buy war bonds, responding to an airborne message of a Kate Smith war bond drive, and those who resisted it. Robert K. Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Alberta Curtin, Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946).
34. All quotations in the paragraph are from Merton and Patricia Kendall, "The Focused Interview," American Journal of Sociology, 1946, 51:451-557 p. 553.
35. All direct quotations in the paragraph are from ibid. on pp. 541-2 and passim;
36. five prime situations are described on p. 547.
37. That an iteration of the focused interview metamorphosed, within a decade, into the soon-to-be ubiquitous focus group made Merton the incidental inventor of a nearly $1 billion a year industry (a fact about which Merton expressed rue late in life, joking he never had a chance to share the profits). Merton's role is no secret, although it should be noted that the use of the focus group is a technique that attracts very little historical interest. Historians of the method are as rare as practitioners are common. However, one of its most prominent boosters, Frank Luntz, acknowledges its roots in Merton's research on his website: http://www.pollingreport.com /focus.htm. On Merton's machine see Merton et al., The Focused Interview (cit. n. 1), pp. 22-23.
38. Merton et al., The Focused Interview (cit. n. 1), pp. 22-23.
39. J. S. Bruner and L. Postman, "An Approach to Social Perception," in Current Trends in Social Psychology, ed. Wayne Dennis (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1948), pp. 71-118.
40. Merton et al., The Focused Interview (cit. n. 1), p. 23, n. 1.
41. Clyde Kluckhohn, "Southwestern Studies of Culture and Personality," American Anthropologist, 1954, 65:685- 697, p. 691;
42. Merton and Kendall, "The Focused Interview" (cit. n. 9), p. 545.
43. For the quotation on "systematic research" see Dan Gollen, Foreword to Merton et al., The Focused Interview (cit. n. 1), p. x. Whole careers were made not only on the development of an effective, productive test, but on the second-generation streamlining and standardizing of such tests.
44. One example of many is Charles E. Thompson, "The Thompson Modification of the Thematic Apperception Test," Rorschach Research Exchange, 1949, 13:469-478.
45. For the second quotation see Robert A. Dahl, "The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest," American Political Science Review, 1961, 55:763-772, p. 766.
46. Robert Redfield, Foreword to Louis Gottschalk, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Robert Angell, The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology and Sociology (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1945), pp. vii-xi, on p. vii.
47. Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Personal Document in Anthropological Science,"
48. ibid., pp. 79-162, on p. 106.
49. Florence Kluckhohn contributed to systematizing field work for audiences outside anthropology with "The Participant-Observer Technique in Small Communities," American Journal of Sociology, 1940, 56:331- 343.
50. Allan Holmberg further refined participant-observation by introducing the "participant-intervention" method for use in Vicos, a Peruvian village leased by Cornell University and declared an experimental field site for new methods.
51. Allan Holmberg, "Experimental Intervention in the Field," in Peasants, Power and Applied Social Change: Vicos as Model, ed. Henry Dobyns, Paul Doughty, and Harold Lasswell (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1964); pp. 21-32.
52. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922; Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984);
53. especially the introductory chapter on method of inquiry. See also W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, vols. 1 and 2 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1918), vols. 3-5 (Boston, Mass: Badger Press, 1919, 1920).
54. A SSRC series on the "Appraisal of Research" included Herbert Blumer, An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1939);
55. Gottschalk, Kluckhohn, and Angell, The Use of Personal Documents in History.
56. Peter Galison, "Image of Self," in Things that Talk, ed. Daston (cit. n. 3), pp. 257-296.
57. Henry A. Murray, The Thematic Apperception Test: A Manual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1943), p. 4 (quotation). "Subjective materials" was a commonly used locution. Another description of how the tests worked was that the subject faced with stimulating materials such as vivid pictures or inkblots "'projects' himself and his own world of thoughts and feelings onto the stimuli presented to him":
58. Jules Henry and Melford Spiro, "Psychological Techniques: Projective Tests in Field Work," in Anthropology Today, ed. Kroeber (cit. n. 6), p. 419.
59. Kroeber, Foreward to Microcard Publications in Primary Records in Culture and Personality (Madison, Wisc.: Microcard Foundation, 1957), available at http://lccn.loc.gov/sv92080005 [Library of Congress permanent link].
60. Cutting-edge researchers such as anthropologist Jules Henry and psychologist Ivan Mensh argued that "direct observation" was best understood as sharing the mechanics and power of projective tests. Thus the human capacity to see with the "naked eye" appeared on a continuum with other, technology-aided faculties. Likewise, Melville Herskovits proposed a parallel method called the "hypothetical situation" that combined the advantages of projective test technologies with a literature-inspired technique to enable the ethnographer to "probe" those materials that subjects were unable or unwilling to talk about: "in essence the method of the hypothetical situation is a novelistic technique, the utility of which arises out of its character as a kind of projective device."
61. Mensh and Henry, "Direct Observation and Psychological Tests in Anthropological Field Work," American Anthropologist, 1953, 55:461- 480;
62. M. J. Herskovits, "The Hypothetical Situation: A Technique of Field Research," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 1950, 6:32- 40, p. 39.
63. David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), p. 3.
64. Robert Freed Bales, "The Strategy of Small Group Research," presented to the Sociological Research Society of the American Sociological Society, Sept. 1950, Denver, Colorado, Rockefeller Archive Center, RF: R.G. 1.1, Series 200S, Box 521, Folder 4449.
65. Merton and Kendall, "The Focused Interview" (cit. n. 10), p. 543 (emphasis added).
66. the similar argument in Mass Persuasion in which the study of a "real life situation" can be considered to act as "a prelude to experimentation, by providing a realistic basis for selecting the variables to be included in experiments. It provides a bridge, so to speak, from the concreteness of everyday life to the abstractions of experimental inquiry":
67. Merton et al., Mass Persuasion (cit. n. 9), p. 11.
68. Howard Hampton, Born in Flames (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008), p. 36.
69. The answer is, apparently, both; the machine that overheated the imaginations of some was never realized, but an actual if somewhat pedestrian system called Perimetr was activated along these lines by the Soviets in theearly 1980s.
70. Slate article: http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/. On a Strangelovian dream of automated nuclear destruction by a Doomsday machine
71. P. D. Smith, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon (London: St. Martin's, 2007).
72. Likewise, the fake social science "Report from Iron Mountain" (1968) came from real think tank insiders and was very often received as real despite its unveiling as parody. The supposed clandestine report postulated that the most stable national course was to pursue a state of permanent war-the "war system."
73. Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy (cit. n. 3), pp. 226-238.
74. The place of the hypothetical threat of thermonuclear war as Herman Kahn expounded it, is explored skillfully in Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005).
75. The "power of⋯tools" to measure and promote creativity as an object of postwar research is discussed in Jamie Cohen-Cole, "The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society," Isis, 2009, 100:219 -262, p. 243.
76. Mills is quoted in M. Brewster Smith, "The American Soldier and its Critics: What Survives the Attack on Positivism?" Social Psychology Quarterly, 1984, 47:192-198.
77. Clifford Geertz, "An Inconstant Profession: The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times," Annual Revue of Anthropology, 2002, 31:1-19; p. 3.
78. On the "impossible possible" see Bellah, "The World is the World Through Its Theorists" (cit. n. 6).