Joseph Jastrow, the psychology of deception, and the racial economy of observation

✍ Scribed by Michael Pettit

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 117 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20221

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

This article reconstructs the recurring themes in the career of Joseph Jastrow, both inside and outside the laboratory. His psychology of deception provides the bridge between his experimental and popular pursuits. Furthermore, Jastrow's career illustrates the complex ways in which scientific psychology and pragmatist philosophy operated within the constraints of a moral economy deeply marked by notions of “race.” Psychological investigations of deception were grafted onto two of the human sciences' leading tools: the evolutionary narrative and the statistical analysis of populations. Such associations abetted the racialization of the acts of deceiving and being deceived. These connections also were used to craft moral lessons about how individuals ought to behave in relationship to the aggregate population and natural selection's endowment. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.