Margaret Mead and behavioral scientists in World War II: Problems in responsibility, truth, and effectiveness
✍ Scribed by Carleton Mabee
- Book ID
- 102678037
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1987
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 950 KB
- Volume
- 23
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In World War 11, Margaret Mead and her behavioral science colleagues actively applied their science 10 the American war effort on issues such as morale, food habits, psychological warfare, and the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. Mead's participation or lack of participation in these activities, and her varying enthusiasms and misgivings about them, raise fundamental issues about the responsibility of behavioral scientists to warn the public against dangerous policies, as well as the ethics of behavioral scientists participating in deceitful psychological warfare and the extent of their effectiveness in contributing to public policymaking.
During World War 11, Margaret Mead, already well-known for her anthropological study of primitive South Sea cultures, was a leader in applying behavioral science to the war. This story is significant not only in Mead's evolution as a behavioral scientist, but also because it raises fundamental questions about the relationship of behavioral science to public policy.
In 1939, as the war broke out in Europe, the behavioral sciences were still in their adolescence, and many American behavioral scientists were reluctant to apply their science to public affairs. Mead, however, had often tried to apply what she had learned about primitive cultures to advising the American public on public issues, such as how to raise children. As the Nazis overran much of Europe, Mead, in her late thirties, earnest and optimistic, was developing a fierce sense of mission to the world. Feeling anxious for the survival of freedom, Mead urged behavioral scientists to apply their skills to the war. Mead prided herself on being willing to tackle big problems, in big units, using broad, swift, interdisciplinary, cultural and cross-cultural methods even though it went against the long-term trend in behavioral science toward specialization and quantification. In particular, Mead and some of her anthropological colleagues, especially her husband Gregory Bateson, and her friends Ruth Benedict (Columbia) and Geoffrey Gorer (Yale), dared at this time to turn from studying small primitive cultures to studying large modern cultures like the United States and Germany, in what Mead called the new study of "national character."' They also moved toward advising not just the American public but also the American government, which behavioral scientists had seldom done.
From her base at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Mead pushed for anthropologists to prepare themselves for war service. She found at first that many of them balked, preferring to concentrate on what seemed to Mead to be trivialities such as how the people of Fiji combed their hair.2 She also worked within a private organization, the Committee for National Morale, with a few of the nation's leading behavioral scientists. Among them were psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and Walter V. Bingham who in World War I had promoted the use of mass intelligence tests in ~ I acknowledge the aid of many individuals, only some of whom can be named here, and of the National Science Foundation for grant SES-82-04307. I also wish to thank Conrad Arensberg, Eliot Chapple and Leo Rosten for giving me permission to quote from their letters to me.