Synopses & Reviews
Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, community studies, and consumer research transformed the United States public.
Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as "the average American" and as intimate as the sexual self.
With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society--and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.
Review
The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public presents a fascinating history of the coevolution of scientific techniques and public consciousness through the use of polls, interviews, and surveys of the opinions and behavior of U.S. citizens...Historian Sarah Igo has delved deeply into various documentary sources, ranging from newspapers and popular magazines to specialized social scientific treatises, to provide the analytic backbone to this history. Finding fresh ways to deploy her copious source materials, the author loses no time before plunging immediately into her compelling narrative about the maelstrom of mass opinion, dissecting the who, what, when, where, how, and why of this broad sociocultural movement. Focused on the middle third of the 20th century, the story has an inherent dynamism that Igo enhances with remarkable literary verve. John F. Reynolds - Journal of Social History
Review
Few scholars of twentieth century America have been able to navigate the complexities associated with simultaneous change in multiple institutions--media, social science, the marketing industry, and community life. Igo does so with tremendous imagination and panache: The Averaged American demonstrates how numbers can transform both the texture of everyday life and the very course of a nation. Susan Herbst, Provost, The University at Albany, State University of New York
Review
Briskly written, forcefully argued and broad in scope, The Averaged American falls into a category occupied by works like Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Midwife's Tale, Pulitzer Prize-winning books by academics whose reach extended beyond the ivory tower...Igo does for social statistics what Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club did for American pragmatism, providing a narrative intellectual history of the field. Library Journal
Review
With all of the data now available on consumers' wants and needs, it's hard to imagine that less than a century ago market research consisted of little more than knowing the number of widgets your business sold in Muncie. Then, in the years after World War I, commerce was revolutionized by the dawning of modern social science research and scientific polling techniques. A fascinating glimpse of the upheaval that forever altered the way Americans see themselves, sell products, and operate election campaigns may be found in The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Brendan Boyle - New York Sun
Review
Americans have grown used to crisp statistics, but as Sarah Igo points out in her new book The Averaged American, it wasn't always so easy to create a snapshot of the country's collective psyche. Igo tells the story of how surveys and polls have contributed to a sometimes distorted, always controversial conception of the archetypical American. Financial Times
Review
Social scientists, pollsters, and market researchers now regularly apply the techniques of scientific sampling and measurement to their work. Indeed, survey research has become the dominant methodology used to produce social science scholarship, public and political polling, and consumer research. Sarah Igo puts into historical context the way in which these now-commonplace research techniques have transformed American society over the past century. Igo's historical examination of survey research in America provides a compelling argument that the statistical data generated and disseminated by surveys have given America a new way to view itself--as a "mass public." Margo Anderson - Journal of American History
Review
A brilliant and probing inquiry into one of the subtlest but most significant developments of our time: the cultural construction of a mass society. The Averaged American illuminates the ideological uses of quantitative social research with extraordinary verve and acuity. Jackson Lears, editor of < i=""> Raritan <> and author of < i=""> Something for Nothing: Luck in America <>
Review
The Averaged American turns the history of quantitative social research into a fascinating human story of interviewers probing and cajoling and of citizens who at times were desperate to give information about themselves and who sometimes welcomed, sometimes protested the new statistical characterizations of "normal" American opinions and behavior. Theodore M. Porter, author of < i=""> Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age <>
Review
In her strikingly bold and original The Averaged American, Sarah Igo captures the wonderfully rich and complicated relationships between surveys and those surveyed as she shows how this interaction helped create a mass public. We can see how those surveyed yearned for and understood their roles in the survey process--as well as the creation of expectations of what it meant to live as 'typical' or 'average' respondents/citizens in a mass society. Daniel Horowitz, Smith College
Review
The Averaged American is an engaging, impressively researched history of the social scientific quest to conjure that ever-elusive "American" public: what "we" think, what "we" believe, how "we" will vote, how "we" behave. Igo shows how, despite their shaky claims to objectivity, inclusiveness, or even accuracy, surveys gradually gained acceptance as a new, more "scientific" way of knowing modern America, with consequences this important and never more relevant book challenges us to confront. Alice O ' Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Review
[Igo] investigates how, in our poll-saturated culture, with its insatiable appetite for social facts, our ideas about who we are, what we want, and what we believe are all shaped by and perceived through survey data...Her reflections on the origins, trajectory, and subsequent social impacts of demographic research and its characterization of what constitutes the 'median, average, typical, and normal' are insightful. An important contribution to the early history of the information society and politics of knowledge. Theresa Kintz
Review
Sharp and surprisingly lively...Ms. Igo patiently documents how surveys came to exercise [its] grip on the American imagination...This is an excellent, thoroughly readable book. Scott Stossel - New York Times Book Review
Review
Most people don't bat an eye at the myriad statistics and studies cited by the media, the government, and the dinner guest. In The Averaged American, Sarah E. Igo documents the 'movement of social data into everyday life,' a fascinating shift rarely mentioned in discussions of the United States in the middle of the 20th century. Igo's well-written, well-organized book focuses on three iconic moments: the Middletown studies of the 'supposedly typical American community,' the emergence of the Gallup and Roper opinion polls, and the controversial Kinsey reports on sexual behavior. Though some people disputed the methods or results of these studies, most accepted their newfound importance as the 'inevitable product of a modern mass society.' But, as Igo compellingly argues, the studies themselves were every bit as responsible for creating and maintaining that mass society. Richard S. Dunham - Business Week
Review
A richly detailed account of the arrival of social science data in the middle of the 20th century and its lasting effects on the U.S. Danielle Maestretti - Utne Reader
Review
A fascinating book. Kerry Howley - Reason
Review
The 20th century, marked by the ascendance of the social sciences in academia, brought to the US the movement to socially engineer society by surveying, measuring, statistically analyzing, polling, and categorizing Americans. Standardized IQ and behavior tests produced quantified measurements of what was average and what was normal. Polls replaced literary traditions in defining the "American mind"..."Normality" increasingly lined up with quantified averages. "Mass public" and "average American" became synonymous with the search for a coherent US culture. The character of the "aggregated Americans" emerges in Igo's chapters on Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown (1929), George Gallup and Elmo Roper's public polling, and Alfred Kinsey's revelations of the behavior of statistically normal Americans. The movement magnified the issues involved in weighing the significance of statistical minorities. Igo's well-written study is an excellent introduction to the problems involved in aggregating and disaggregating the US...[H]er book provocatively proposes the seeming inevitability that Americans need to understand that they will live in a world shaped and perceived through survey data. Andrew Witmer - University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Magazine
Review
This is a significant contribution to the literature on the history of the social survey. J.H. Smith - Choice
Review
Cultural historians of the modern era and social scientists of many stripes will find much to admire in this insightful volume. Igo reminds us how deeply steeped social scientific inquiries are in contemporary social conventions and attitudes. She also outlines the overlooked role social scientists have played in shaping today's imagined communities, picking up where the census takers, map makers and newspaper publishers had left off during the century previous. Ken Dautrich - Political Science Quarterly
Review
and#8220;Broadly revelatory. . . . The authors show how dangerous our behavioral scientists (and by implication their human and social science kin) might have been, co-opted as they were into the military and political decision-making in crisis situations just as physicists were co-opted into the construction of the bomb.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;This is an important book, one that should be read not just by historians of science but by anyone interested in the unique intellectual culture of Cold War America. In this context, reason was redefined, reduced, and simplified into a rule-governed thingandmdash;a seemingly universal technology for making choices in an uncertain world. This is a brilliant insight, and the authors carry its illumination into a range of fields, from game theory and operations research to studies of heuristics and biases in individuals and decision making in groups, from the lab and the andlsquo;situation roomandrsquo; to the wilds of Washington policy making.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The inhuman assumptions of the postwar human sciences form the problematic for this fascinating book. If not quite a
fons et origo, the Cold War arms race appears here as the uniquely disturbing frame for a wide-ranging campaign to extirpate irrationality by implementing strict rules of human reasoning.andrdquo;
Review
and#8220;In the wake of World War II, a generation of self-proclaimed and#8216;action intellectualsand#8217; fought to save the world from nuclear Armageddon. They nearly destroyed it. This extraordinary book explains how and why a generation of American social scientists reconceived human reason as algorithmic rationalityand#8212;and how, when they did, they delivered us into a world that remains anything but rational. If youand#8217;ve ever wondered where Dr. Strangelove was born, you need look no further.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;Traversing territory from Micronesia to Berlin, from Kant to Kantorovich to Schelling, from psychology to economics, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind offers novel insights about a whole way of thinking.and#160;Moving beyond discipline-by-discipline studies, this all-star team of scholars sets the standard for new histories of American intellectual life and the vexed question of andlsquo;Cold War thought.andrsquo;andrdquo;
Review
"Hegartyand#8217;s work may inspire more careful considerations of the ways scientists think about sexuality and intelligence."
Review
and#8220;Peter Hegarty has crafted a fascinating history of the intersectionality of sexuality and intelligence in the social sciences. Hegarty masterfully weaves together queer theory, history, and psychology to examine how what many in the social science community have defined as normal is constructed and mutually constitutive.
Gentlemenand#8217;s Disagreement sheds new light on Alfred Kinsey and Lewis Terman, but just as important, it offers insight into how these human science discourses ofand#160; sexuality and intelligence developed and how they continue today to shape modern psychologyand#8217;s understandings of (and assertions about) normality. and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Peter Hegartyand#8217;s highly original study of the relationship between sexuality and intelligence in the twentieth-century American human sciences focuses on their most celebrated students, Alfred Kinsey and Lewis Terman. By analyzing their personal biographies, training, disciplinary outlooks, and use of the conventions of contemporary science, Hegarty is able to construct a fascinating cautionary tale about unacknowledged subjectivity, misleading methodologies, and the politics of intelligence testing and human sexuality that will inform both practitioners and historians of the human sciences.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Peter Hegarty is the first scholar to examine seriously and systematically the connections between the discourses of intelligence and of sexuality, both of which were being refashioned in important ways in the United States. Hegartyand#8217;s use of Lewis Terman and Alfred Kinsey to build his analysis is original and compelling.and#8221;
Review
"[An] intriguing and provocative study."
Review
andquot;The authors do an excellent job of probing debates about the meaning, possibilities, and limits of rationality between the 1940s and the 1970s. . . . This masterly book makes a crucial contribution to understanding of Cold War thought, opens many new avenues for further research, and raises important questions about the durability of Cold War thinking in contemporary American social science.andquot;
Review
andquot;The authors of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind have made a particularly insightful contribution by showing how and#39;rationalityand#39; has a time and a place; by laying bare its historical contingency, they have taken and#39;rationalityand#39; off its methodological pedestal. . . . In this sense, this kind of scholarship empowers us as humans when we are confronted with the institutional authority of the social sciences.andquot;
Review
andquot;A dream team of historians of science and technology.andquot;
Review
andquot;Through six roughly chronological chapters, the authors demonstrate that this austere, antihumanistic concept of rationality underpinned the work of a far-flung and heterogeneous group of scholars pursing a truly dizzying variety of research programs. . . . How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind advances a provocative argument about a period of American social science that is now attracting increasing and well-justified attention. Historians of post war social science will certainly read this book with profit, as will scholars of the history of thought and, indeed, more generally of scientific practice in the United States.andquot;
Synopsis
Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
Synopsis
2006 President's Book Award, Social Science History Association
Synopsis
Slate Best Books of the Year selection
Synopsis
2008 Cheiron Book Prize, Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Synopsis
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciencesandmdash;psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among othersandmdash;and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the peopleandmdash;Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many othersandmdash;and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a andldquo;Cold War rationality.andrdquo; Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationalityandmdash;optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanicalandmdash;in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
Synopsis
What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly commonandmdash;and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In
Gentlemenandrsquo;s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Termanandmdash;the intellect who championed the testing of intelligenceandmdash; and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology.
Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Termanandrsquo;s complaints about Kinseyandrsquo;s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.
About the Author
Paul Erickson is assistant professor of history and science in society at Wesleyan University.
Judy L. Klein is professor of economics at Mary Baldwin College.
Rebecca Lemov is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University.
Thomas Sturm is a Ramandoacute;n y Cajal Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Michael D. Gordin is professor of the history of science at Princeton University.
Table of Contents
Preface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Struggle over Cold War RationalityChapter 1. Enlightenment Reason, Cold War Rationality, and the Rule of RulesChapter 2. The Bounded Rationality of Cold War Operations ResearchChapter 3. Saving the Planet from Nuclear Weapons and the Human MindChapter 4. andldquo;The Situationandrdquo; in the Cold War Behavioral SciencesChapter 5. World in a MatrixChapter 6. The Collapse of Cold War RationalityEpilogue. Cold War Rationality after the Cold WarNotesBibliographyIndex