Lemov - World as laboratory: experiments with mice, mazes, and men

Table of Contents

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT AN IDEA that lived and died, then lived again during the key years of an undertaking often known as the American Experiment. The idea was quite simple: If one could quantify and control the internal arena of the personal selfits urges and wants, its worries and fearsthen the running of a modern society would require less brute external force. In the long term, putting this idea into practice would make it possible to regulate human beings in tune with the needs, demands, desires, and models of the social order, so that people would want to do whatever they were instructed to do (for example, to die for one cause, shop for another; lie back in some instances or rise up in others). This was human engineering, an endeavor also known at times as behavioral engineering, social engineering, or environmental engineering.

Starting around the turn of the twentieth century in laboratories across America, scientists acted in pursuit of the idea: they concentrated on the most human part of the equation, leaving no room for what sentimentalists would call the soul, and attempted to bring the conditioning process to bear on all aspects of life. They turned the idea into an activity, a program, and eventually something akin to a system. The social scientists, foundation officers, and policymakers who made up the ranks of human engineers might have preferred a different labelperhaps pragmatist, experimentalist, behaviorist, progressive, or even plain liberalbut still they shared a sense that one could devise ways to predict and control peoples actions and behaviorsas well as, eventually, their thoughts.

Of course, the general idea of a science of human behavior had bewitched people for a long time. Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did not lack for philosophers as well as eccentrics who fixed on certain propositions: perhaps there was an underlying mechanism to the body and soul, perhaps thought itself was susceptible to alteration. To take a key example, La Mettries strange treatise Man a Machine , published in 1748, argued that the universe contained nothing but matter and motion. Before this came Hobbess Leviathan, with its Artificial Animal to be made, and Descartess mechanistic views of the bodys hydraulic function; afterward came Comtes and Saint-Simons dreams of a true science of society. Accompanying these writings were a parade of actual devices: humanlike machines and machinelike humans; mechanical eagles, mechanized servants, and toys that came to life; automatons that inhabited gardens, courts, and rooms to carry out the will of their builders; and machines that simulated living things but were completely controlled. Yet these efforts did not bring together theory and practice. The people who dealt in ideas were hardly ever the ones who built the devices.

During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, theory and practice met in certain laboratories in America, as human engineering began to take the reality-driven form of a series of experiments. Adopting what the proto-biotechnologist Jacques Loeb called an engineering standpoint toward human life, its adherents set about to make the ultimate social science. In the 1920s the visionary technocrat Beardsley Ruml defined exactly what this new science would be and funneled great amounts of Rockefeller Foundation money into it, the equivalent of several billion of todays dollarsa far larger amount than the federal government could have come up with at the time. The resulta combination of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, with contributing subdisciplines of economics, political science, theology, mathematics, physiology, ethology, and ecologywas a social science not previously encountered in human history, one that could only have emerged out of the peculiar life-size petri dish where American ambition, open space, and can-do approach combined in the agar of scientific advance.

THIS BOOK TELLS A SECRET HISTORY that is not really secret. The obscurity attaching to the events here recounted is mainly the result of their having been ignored for some time, and the story of human engineering is in fact available to anyone with a library card. During the heyday of this emerging science of human behavior and society, experts installed themselves in laboratories and availed themselves of animal and human subjects, constructing ever-finer measuring devices and recording apparatuses. They set about building tiny labyrinths, small-scale social situations, miniature restraining devices, and microcosmical dioramas of real life where test animals grappled in conditions simulating war, competition, or self-doubt-all within the four walls of a laboratory. They adapted or invented an array of tools, gadgets, techniques, and models in order to gather social and behavioral facts. Among them, by the 1920s and 1930s, were artificial logic machines, problem boxes and special cages, mazes of every possible contour and provenance, simple hospital beds reserved not for sick but for normal people as material for observation, galvanic skin-response recorders (precursors to lie-detector machines), punishment grills for delivering electric shock, the analytic situation as a model for an obedient society, and a compendious anthropological filing cabinetRemington Rand, grade A, olive drab, to be exactthat was capable, at least theoretically, of containing the sum of all important information from every culture in existence.

By the 1940s, with the world war as their engine, behavioral engineers made use of mainframe computing and cybernetics to invent new technologies of information collecting and data processing. By means of the largest stack of punch cards ever assembled, to take just one example, a great many U.S. Army soldiers during World War II were processed using Hollerith codes and data profiles, so that everything from their feelings about mess hall to their loyalty to their country could be measured, targeted, studied, and potentially changed. Morale and the desire to fight could be built from scratch. Postwar developments benefited from more advanced information technologies, and the machines in turn became more sophisticated. Banks of computers ran cards in batches, and IBM machines worked overtime into the night. One automaton acted like a lab rat, while real lab rats actions were graphed and rendered as algorithms. At Harvards Laboratory of Social Relations, a special room was equipped with a bevy of recording devices, flashing feedback lights, and one-way mirrors for graphing the minutiae of human encountersthe origin of the modern focus group. Also in the making were polling on a mass level; polygraphs targeting particular individuals; tests for registering motivation, intelligence, loyalty, and every manner of mental twitch; propaganda of black, white, and gray varieties; and programs for the large-scale gratification of proliferating desires. Other devices rendered the inner states of shoppers or voters as a series of numbers. Altogether these developments comprised a new magic of electronics, as a group of Harvard professors hailed them, ready to bring about a sci-fi future.

Soon these devices, built up from years of research on laboratory animals, led to experiments on human subjects that combined drugs, psychosurgery, and other alarming manipulations. Seemingly straightforward programs in human engineering turned out to have many unanticipated applications in a high cold warera atmosphere fraught with enemies capable of the direst maneuvers and unseemly psychological tricks. To combat these enemies, the Central Intelligence Agency, aware of the promises that social scientists had been making for some decades about behavioral and psycho-cultural engineering, employed social scientists in an array of projects designed to manipulate and control human behavior. Some were asked to work on interrogation techniques, setting conditions for the optimal retrieval of information; some trained soldiers to resist Soviet and Chinese Communist brainwashing; and others developed a remote-controlled Pavlovian cat that could spy on clandestine conversations or, with the push of a button, detonate. As the late 1950s became the early 1960s, the cartoonish, the conspiratorial, and the very real all came together.