Synopses & Reviews
The idea in the 1930s and '40s was to build a grand system by which people's actions and behaviors eventually even their thoughts could be predicted and controlled. To cure society's ills was the goal. That the early "social scientists" ran animals, then men, through mazes, strapping them to galvanic skin response recorders and "punishment grills" in the process, seemed a small price to pay. With World War II came federal money and new techniques as vast amounts of information were collected, filed, and fed to computers so that everything from personal preferences to national loyalty could be measured, targeted, studied, and changed. And with the advent of the cold war, decades of well-intentioned programs took a sinister turn. With CIA encouragement, and using drugs and psychosurgery, scientists turned to brainwashing, interrogation techniques, and remote-control behavior.
Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that's not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of "spin" practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.
Review
"The greatest strength of Lemov's book is that she doesn't only describe the scientific efforts to engineer the brain, she describes the scientists who organized the experiments." New York Times
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"Rebecca Lemov, a lecturer at the University of Washington, has produced a lively and well-researched history of the human engineering field and its broad intellectual and social legacy." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Lemov...maintains an energetic and fact-crammed narrative throughout...as she details the history of modern research into why we behave the way we do." Seattle Times
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Anyone interested in the history of the social sciences should find this authoritative, well-paced work enlightening." Library Journal
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"A balanced account of the behaviorists' crusade, Lemov's history provides crucial backstory to contemporary practices in psychology and mass media." Booklist
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"World as Laboratory is a marvelously written, deeply informative contribution to the history of social science and to American intellectual history." David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley
Review
"Lemov gives us a fascinating and unnerving account of twentieth century attempts to create laboratories of life. She shows that their ultimate success was the creation of yet more exorbitant and eager researchers promising brave new worlds and producing more of themselves. All in the name of science." Paul Rabinow, UC Berkeley
Synopsis
Deeply researched,
World as Laboratory tells a secret history that’s not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of “spin” practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.
Synopsis
An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a “lost” project to unlock humanity’s common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data
Synopsis
Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other innovative scientific protocols. Kaplan, along with anthropologist A. I. Hallowell and a team of researchers, sought out a varied range of non-European subjects among remote and largely non-literate peoples around the globe. Recording their dreams, stories, and innermost thoughts in a vast database, Kaplan envisioned future researchers accessing the data through the cutting-edge Readex machine. Almost immediately, however, technological developments and the obsolescence of the theoretical framework rendered the project irrelevant, and eventually it was forgotten.
About the Author
Rebecca Lemov teaches history and anthropology at the University of Washington. This is her first book.