The Ford Foundation and the Rise of Behavioralism in Political Science

How did behavioralism, one of the most influential approaches to the academic study of politics in the twentieth century, become so prominent so quickly? I argue that many political scientists have either understated or ignored how the Ford Foundation's Behavioral Sciences Program gave form to behavioralism, accelerated its rise, and helped root it in political science. I then draw on archived documents from Ford as well as one of its major grantees, U. C. Berkeley, to present several examples of how Ford used its funds to encourage the behavioral approach at a time when it had few adherents among political scientists.     

Include or exclude: Discourses on immigration in Germany

The integration of migrants in German society today is a heavily loaded part of the political agenda. It is conceived as easy and legitimate in the contexts of European integration, economic contribution, and the welfare state. It is associated negatively with Islam and with non-Europeans. Turks are in-between. With the end of the Cold War, the status of East European immigrants has been devalued, and they are conceived as problem groups, including the ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union. A taboo about anything associated with Nazism and discrimination has been built up in the last decades. With the power shift to the red-green coalition in 1998, this has been supplemented by a far-reaching consensus about easy naturalization, a consistent immigration policy and the need for integration programs, including substantial state finding.     

Uncovering the metaphysics of psychological warfare: The social science behind the Psychological Strategy Board's operations planning, 1951–1953

In April 1951 president Harry S. Truman established the Psychological Strategy Board to enhance and streamline America's sprawling psychological warfare campaign against the USSR. As soon as the Board's staff began work on improving US psychological operations, they wondered how social science might help them achieve their task. Board Director, Gordon Gray, asked physicist turned research administrator Henry Loomis to do a full review of America's social science research program in support of psychological operations. Loomis willingly accepted the task. This paper documents Loomis's investigation into America's social science research program. It uncovers the critical role that government departments had in the creation of research in the early 1950s and thus highlights that the government official is an important actor in the history of social science and the application of social science to psychological operations at the beginning of the Cold War.     

The last stand of the psychocultural cold warriors: military contract research in Vietnam

In 1966, the social scientists of the Simulmatics Corporation arrived in Saigon. Tasked by the Pentagon with helping to pacify South Vietnam, they conducted political and social psychological research on Viet Cong defectors, government soldiers, and Vietnamese villagers. This essay argues that Simulmatics's work captures some of the ironies of Cold War social science: its tendency to mask militarization behind the rhetoric of peaceful nation-building, its blurring of data collection and intelligence gathering, and its ambitious dedication to revealing the unseen contents of hearts and minds while remaining ignorant of the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which its subjects lived.     

Political Psychology as Discipline and Resource

Around the 1960s, political psychology was developed as a field of knowledge that attempted to interrelate scientific psychology and political phenomena. However, social and academic conditions are very different today. More and more, political psychology is becoming a protagonist, as much in the internal context of psychology as in the external context of its relations with the social world. Thus, political psychology can now be seen as a resource relating psychological knowledge to social practice, and relating psychological processes to social action. Political psychology is the interface that puts psychology and society in contact. The development of political psychology in Spain provides an example of this alternative view of the field.     

The Vatican and Europe: Political Theology and Ecclesiology in Papal Statements from Pius XII to Benedict XVI

The article examines the origins and evolution of the Vatican's political theology and ecclesiology for Europe from Pius XII (especially after the Second World War) and including the pontificates of John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It seeks to examine the continuities of the ‘Idea of Europe’ in papal thought against a background of changing political context – the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, the fall of the communist state system, the emergence of a united but diverse Europe after 1989. The political structures of the continent now include within its geographic sweep Western and Eastern Christian churches which, divided by tradition and modern history, find their relationship a key marker in the contemporary religious identity of Europe. This reality is a significant framework for Vatican thinking on Europe especially for John Paul II and Benedict XVI.     

Large Group: A Brief Historical and Personal Account

ABSTRACT

Large Group (LG) developed in a postwar period searching for answers about the effects of group membership on the individual. If individuals perpetrating evil in World War II were “banal,” a group effect was suspected of eliciting their extreme brutality. Following Bion’s ideas, group psychoanalysis explored this using free association in a public setting. Later generations systematized his ideas out of context. They sought to professionalize and extend his and other psychoanalytic group theories yet they still worried that the group effect was regressive. After the Cold War, faith in democracy increased and likewise optimism about the effect of group on the individual. Sociotherapy and therapeutic community could furnish the social context missing in individual psychotherapy. LG could also examine relationships between inside and outside – individual mind and social structure. More recently, however, concern about negative group effects has returned. LG theorists have drawn from relational psychoanalysis, a model based on the intimacy of the individual session. However, personal encounter with “the other” is ideal in a small group setting where members feel they belong. What LG offers is understanding the experience of being in a crowd. Meanwhile, LG is popular at group therapy conferences, but we do not know what draws attendees. If leaders and members harbor different aspirations, they may not work constructively together. It would be helpful to understand what participants seek and how setting and format interact. This article begins with a naïve account of exposure to a crowd and then LG.     

Rethinking the military paradigm

The article begins with an overview of the historic moment of ‘the end of the Cold War’, and of the paradoxically deepening moral, social, and environmental problems posed by the military system. It demonstrates that historical and contemporary analyses of defence and war have dogmatically presupposed the military paradigm, and have therefore failed to recognize the self‐reproducing structure of covert premisses and inferences upon which it rests. In laying bare this underlying system of unreason, the analysis demonstrates that the military paradigm's ultimately self‐contradictory concepts of ‘security’ and ‘defence’ repose on unstated interests of social and political rule. Proposing new distinctions between pathological and life‐enabling forms of war, and between guilty and innocent combatants, the argument develops alternative, non‐military principles of war to guide rational and moral agency     

X-rays of inner worlds: the mid-twentieth-century American projective test movement

This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular, the targeted data included the traces of the inner life and elusive aspects of subjective experience including dreams, life stories, and myriad test results from a battery of tests. This essay explores how the movement and the experimental data bank that resulted were unlikely yet telling sites for the practice and pursuit of the Cold War human sciences. To look closely at the encounters that resulted is to show how the most out-of-the-way places and seemingly insignificant moments played a role in heady scientific ambitions and global geopolitical projects. At times, the projective test movement became a mirror of Cold War rationality itself, as tests were employed at the very limits of their possible extension. The essay argues for an off-kilter centrality in the movement itself, shedding light on the would-be unified social sciences after World War II and the "subjective turn" they took.     

必须关注防止医学领域内的唯心科学观

对医学科学领域内存在的和某些一度充斥的唯心科学观的社会表现进行分析,从过程管理和科学方法论的重要性入手,提出防范学术腐败和发展医学科学的方法和措施,从教育和民生的角度探讨医务工作者和社会学家必须关注的医学领域内的唯心科学观,并举例说明医学工作者的科学道德自律和社会责任感的重要性。     

Living with Contradictions: The Taken-for-Granted in Israeli Political Discourse

Two apparently contradictory ideas are closely linked in Israeli political discourse: Israel is powerful and independent and Israel is vulnerable and dependent. This study used content analysis and focus groups, as well as existing survey data analyzed by others, to explore how this paradox has been reflected in newspapers and conversations during six different time periods from 1948 to 1996. The goal was not to explain the paradox but to examine its consequences for Israeli perceptions of U.S. policy in the Middle East—and, in the process, to explore Israeli self-images. The nature of U.S. strategic interests was originally treated as problematic and in need of political discussion, but in the past 25 years these interests have become taken for granted. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Cold War, a critical discourse moment in which a reexamination of U.S. interests in the Middle East would seem inevitable, the U.S. role remains taken for granted and largely unexamined. The strong/vulnerable paradox explains this absence of discussion: Examining U.S. interests too closely upsets the delicate balance that keeps the sense of vulnerability in check.     

The creation of a postcolonial subject: The Chicago and Ateneo de Manila schools and the Peace Corps in the Philippines, 1960–1970

In the 1950s and 1960s scholars from the University of Chicago and the Ateneo de Manila created social scientific knowledge that helped establish the Peace Corps as a Cold War institution in the Philippines. Central were the social scientists at the University of Chicago and the Ateneo de Manila University who established a knowable postcolonial subject: “the Filipino,” which resulted from their research on Philippine values. In this context, the Ateneo/Chicago social scientists developed the “SIR,” the “smooth interpersonal relation” model that entails the notion that Filipinos and Filipinas particularly valued this nonconfrontational skill set among people. The SIR model was taught by social science experts to early Peace Corps volunteers as they prepared for their assignments in the Philippines. The article shows how the SIR model could cause distress and confusion as it was applied by Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines.     

Totalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the Lithuanian case

By taking into account dissident/political and art historical interpretations of Soviet art, I analyze how polemics about totalitarianism in the West, which generally corresponded with Cold War debates and Eastern European dissident thought, shaped the post-Soviet evaluations of national artistic legacies. It is argued that the political relationship with the totalitarian past, like in many post-socialist areas where the immediate past was subjected to radical re-evaluation, affected Lithuanian artists’ and critics’ attitude towards local Soviet art. Because of an obvious lack of underground art in Soviet Lithuania, however, the retrospective usage of political categories here became problematic. Especially in international representations, the complexities of artists’ relationship with officialdom came to be routinely assigned to the phenomenon of non-conformism; this eventually obfuscated the differences between the Lithuanian Soviet art context as somewhat different from the Russian case.

Understanding responses to political conflict: interactive effects of the need for closure and salient conflict schemas

Two studies examined the relationship between the need for cognitive closure and preferences for conflict-resolution strategies in 2 different samples of elite political actors. Although research has suggested that high need for closure should be associated with competitiveness, the authors argue that this relationship should be strongest among political actors with a hostile conflict schema, or representation of what a conflict is and how it should be dealt with. The authors provide evidence for this hypothesis using archival survey data on American foreign-policy officials' attitudes toward international conflict at the height of the Cold War (Study 1) and their own data on the relationship between the need for closure and conflict-strategy preferences among samples of activists from 2 political parties in Poland: a centrist party with a reputation for cooperativeness and an extremist party with a reputation for confrontation (Study 2). The broader implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Impact of Roles and Frames on Attributions of Responsibility: The Case of Cold War Human Radiation Experiments1

The phrase Cold War human radiation experiments has been used by the media to categorize a broad range of research programs involving radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War era. The present study uses vignettes based on 3 widely disseminated “horror stories” used by the media to frame the radiation experiments as deviant. Both the role of the actor (autonomous or obedient) and the media frame (sensational, counter claim, or control) were manipulated in the vignettes for the purpose of testing their independent effects on attributions of responsibility. Data were collected from 337 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory sociology courses to examine whether role, frame, or both shaped respondents’ attributions of responsibility to the individual or organization involved in the experiments. Results indicate that role has a significant effect on how individuals attribute responsibility, but media frames do not.     

The Impact of Personality on the End of the Cold War: A Counterfactual Analysis

The end of the Cold War is examined with respect to the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and their respective foreign secretaries. This discussion yields an approach to the systematic examination of counterfactual questions about the impact of political actors on historical outcomes.     

Providential Understandings of Childhood and Public Policy: The Politics of Generation, Future Adulthood and Moral Regulation of Sexuality in Liberal Democracies

This article focuses on the resurgence of regulation of children’s and young people’s sexuality in the UK, Canada and the US despite the efforts, and some success, of feminist and LGBT movements to broaden notions of gender, sexuality and the family. Although different institutional structures and the complexity of the political process are both important factors, this comparative analysis considers the ideational realm and how symbolic ideas shape and are shaped by public policy. While political mobilization of social conservatives is often cited as the cause of this resurgence, when we pay attention to this realm, we can locate a much broader, robust and politically salient foundation for these symbolic ideas in academic concerns of the disciplines and utilitarian concerns of the state. The evidence presented below demonstrates that in all three cases, despite the different political contexts, the enabling political compromise between the various political actors is centred on the protection of children which, in turn, rests on the symbolic ideas of childhood in relation to adulthood (generation), including providential understandings of childhood as an imagined future adulthood based on an ideal of the proper expression of adult sexuality. In understanding these symbolic meanings and paying attention to their use in the legislative process, we can improve our understanding of how regulation of sexuality persists and even intensifies in new ways.     

Minority leadership, science, symbols, and the media: The Belgian Islam debate and its relevance for other countries in Europe

This article discusses the processes that occurred in Belgium during the period of 1989–2000 in the constructive areas of minority policy decision-making regarding the search for a representative and legitimate partner to represent Muslims vis-à-vis the State: minority leadership, the administration, the academic community, the great social symbolic events, and the media. It concludes with the political decision-making process itself. The conclusions refer to the interpretation of change in terms of continuity and discontinuity, and to the means of coping with historical ethnic otherness. Comparisons are made with other European countries.     

Finding the space between east and west: the emotional impact of teaching in St Petersburg

The paper describes our experience of teaching analytical psychology to a group of graduates of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg, our developing partnership as we struggled to teach and learn, each with our own assumptions, preconceptions and projections about the other, and the emotional impact of our radically different social, intellectual and political histories. We had to be affected to become effective. It draws on contemporary Jungian ideas to unpack the interpersonal dynamics involved when there are culturally different styles of learning, which created a complicated transference/countertransference matrix. We believe we have by now witnessed a process of individuation among our students and at the same time they too have witnessed some change and growth in us.