World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men

  • Rebecca Lemov
Hill & Wang: 2005. 304 pp. $30 0809074648 | ISBN: 0-809-07464-8

The modern world was created by egg-headed, white-coated scientists working in laboratories, surrounded by complex equipment and inventing ever more ingenious gadgets. That at least is the popular myth of intentional or intelligent design, and there is some truth in it: after all, the laser began as a laboratory curiosity firmly rooted in hard science, but now delivers entertainment to the masses.

High hopes: in the 1950s researchers tried to manipulate behaviour by altering our view of the world. Credit: GREY VILLET/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

Other technologies, arising from theories long since discredited and from scientists whose claims to white-coat status now seem tenuous, have moulded our world more than we realize. What's more, there were shadowy and sometimes sinister sponsors at work promoting and channelling developments that are now ubiquitous and inescapable in Western culture. These are techniques intended to shape behaviour, attitudes and thinking, arising principally from experimental psychology. And they are dangerous. That is the message I take from World As Laboratory, an anthropologist's view of twentieth-century psychological, behavioural and social science.

Rebecca Lemov's avowed focus is on the transfer of laboratory findings to the real world, and on the treatment of the real world as if it were some kind of laboratory. She finds manifest and manifold flaws in this enterprise, which she calls variously “human engineering” and “the American experiment”. Her topics range from Jacques Loeb's experiments on tropisms, Elton Mayo's Hawthorne studies and Clark Hull's work on learning in rats, to the American administration of Pacific islands after the Second World War, brainwashing in Korea and subsequent work by the CIA, Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments and the Stanford prison experiment.

Much of Lemov's attention is given to the Yale Institute of Human Relations and the Rockefeller funding sources that supported it. Indeed, the extent to which Rockefeller money bankrolled laboratory psychology and allowed favoured schools of thought to flourish in the 1930s without a care for tomorrow, while most of the world was coping with the Great Depression, was news to me.

“A secret history that's not really a secret any more” is how the dustjacket puff characterizes Lemov's story. Unfortunately it's not really a history either. Her theme encompasses the whole of experimental, social and differential psychology, and more besides, but there is a great deal of selective focus in the tale she tells. The narrative veers from revealing new perspective to radical misconception, with some startling clangers on the way, and great chunks missing. A couple of howlers: on the use of electric shocks in experiments on rats, “the current ranged in intensity from 3.3 amperes to 7.6 volts”; on the use of a tape recorder in the 1950s, the tape was “running at the standard rate of seven and a half feet per second”. There is also a bizarre misreading of history: rat researchers' accomplishments apparently “included the intelligence test, the SAT, the opinion survey, the early poll, the projective test…” (although the development of none of these is described at all). A huge omission, but for a passing reference, is operant conditioning and the work of B. F. Skinner. Such flaws undermine one's confidence in the author's sure-footedness on topics where one has to trust the detail of her account.

On a second reading, it becomes clear where the problem lies: Lemov has failed to get under the skin and into the minds of the characters who populate her narrative, and she has too selective and episodic a view of how psychology and related disciplines developed. It is as if she got her perspective from the sorts of stories that get into newspapers and failed to notice that they are but the tips of icebergs. Whether it is in the potted biographies or her account of laboratory methods, she comes to describe but stays only to scoff. The prevailing tone is one of uncritical pre-modern ethnography: look at this strange tribe and the weird things they got up to.

Empirical psychology arose and developed in contradistinction to prevailing views of the nature of mind, and grasped at emerging technologies both for theoretical models (hydraulic systems, the telephone exchange, the computer) and for laboratory tools. It is not necessary to agree with the theories, be sympathetic to the characters concerned or share their moral standpoint to make sense of what happened. Schools of thought flourished and then failed as their limitations were made manifest, but some left behind effective technical methods that can be used for good or ill, regardless of their theoretical origins.

It does not help an author attempting to communicate how this affected modern society to have an apparent aversion to technology and mathematics. On Hull's approach to learning theory, for example, she says, “from 1929 to 1936 the mechanisms become increasingly complex, like fine-spun webs”. But she does not see that Hull's rather modestly complex work was a remote precursor of modern attempts to create artificial intelligence, and she can scarcely have any acquaintance with the sorts of software models they involve. Hull just didn't have digital computers to play with. “Hull loved logarithms and seems to have had a fetish for mathematics,” she remarks. Whether this would be a similarly perverse trait in a quantum physicist I cannot guess, but as most of the attempt to develop scientific psychology has involved elements of quantification, I suppose her objection must be to that enterprise as a whole and in principle. It would be a more persuasive objection if it were based on a clearer, more comprehensive and more penetrating grasp of its target.