8

The Legacy of Psychological Warfare

Wilbur Schramm deserves special mention in any discussion of the evolution of ideas about communication among social scientists in the United States. Schramm’s biographer, Steven Chaffee, has written that Schramm “towers above our field” and that communication studies between 1933 and 1973 might best be described as the “Age of Schramm.” Schramm’s specialty throughout his career was academic administration and the definition and dissemination of the mass communication “knowledge” of his day: Schramm was the “principal disseminator of that zeitgeist [of U.S. mass communication theory], those paradigms and the knowledge yielded by mass communication research,” Chaffee contends.1 James Tankard agrees that “Wilbur Schramm … probably did more to define and establish the field of communication research and theory than any other person.”² Even when such comments are discounted for hyperbole, it is clear that Schramm was central to U.S. academic programs in mass communication studies between about 1948 and at least 1970.

Schramm’s writings remain important today because of their continuing impact on later generations of scholars and as an illustration of the ideological and political preconceptions of the leadership of the communication education profession during the early cold war years. His writings between 1945 and 1960 reveal a distinctly black and white, Manichaean view of the world that pitted Schramm’s enthusiastic Americanism against ideological rivals abroad and at home.³

Even Schramm’s most vocal advocates concede that his work during his ascendancy to the peak of U.S. journalism education was characterized by “interpreting mass communication behavior in terms almost of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’” and by “a touch of ethnocentrism.”4 Though little remembered today, Schramm prepared his most influential writings, including the watershed text The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, as training materials for U.S. government propaganda programs.⁵ Similarly, one of Schramm’s most pervasive theoretical contributions, his still widely accepted distinction between “authoritarian” and “Soviet totalitarian” media systems, was developed under USIA contract and based largely on secondary sources concerning the Soviet Union that had themselves been prepared in U.S. psychological warfare programs during the early 1950s.⁶

There, Schramm contended that authoritarian, anticommunist states should be seen as qualitatively better, more free, and more humane than the Khrushchev-era communist states in Eastern Europe, in part because of the structure of their communication systems. Schramm’s schema lumped quite different societies together into “good” and “bad” categories, ignored the complex relationship between any society’s claims and its actual behavior, and failed to account for elementary aspects of political life in both communist and noncommunist states. What his approach lacked in scientific rigor it more than made up for in political utility, however, for it provided a seemingly rational basis for democracies to underwrite extraordinarily corrupt and brutal governments as a means of facing down the purported totalitarian threat. Schramm’s formulation has passed in and out of fashion in U.S. national security circles. Recently, it was particularly prominent during Jeane Kirkpatrick’s tenure as U.S. ambassador the United Nations.⁷

Some important Schramm writings from the 1950s concerning communication remain inaccessable today, because they were prepared in connection with CIA- and military-sponsored psychological warfare projects that the government insists must remain secret more than thirty years later. Even so, it is possible to begin to trace the extent to which Schramm’s career was bound up with U.S. psychological warfare campaigns. Examples of such work include:

1. U.S. Air Force studies of U.S. psychological operations during the Korean War, which were extensively recycled with government sponsorship in both scholarly and popular forms in several languages.⁸

2. Several major studies for the USIA, including an “evaluation” of that agency performed while Schramm was chair of a citizens’ committee advocating expanded USIA operations.9

3. Analysis and consulting throughout the 1950s concerning the ostensibly private (but in reality CIA-directed) Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation projects for the National Security Council and for Radio Liberation itself.¹⁰

4. Service as chair of the Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Panel on Special Operations, which specialized in planning for propaganda, psychological warfare, and covert operations.¹¹

5. A post on the highly influential Defense Science Board.¹²

6. USIA and Voice of America sponsorship for Schramm’s The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (1954), Four Working Papers on Propaganda Theory (1955), The Science of Human Communication (1963), and perhaps of other general-circulation textbooks.¹³

7. Extensive contracting with the Office of Naval Research.¹⁴

8. Later in life, paid participation in a series of U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) programs seeking to define mass media development in El Salvador, Colombia, and other countries.¹⁵

Taken as a whole, the presently available portions of Schramm’s writings establish that government psychological operations played a central role in his career at precisely the time that Schramm “almost single-handedly defin[ed] the paradigm widely used for decades in communication research,” as Tankard puts it.¹⁶

Government-funded psychological warfare programs—and the concepts about communication and national security intrinsic to those projects—provided what has come to be called positive feedback in the social construction of scientific knowledge in communication studies. The term positive feedback, which is drawn from systems analysis, refers to the relationship between the overall behavior of so-called information industries, on the one hand, and the formats or technical standards adopted in those industries, on the other.

The problematic aspect of positive feedback, according to MIT’s W. Brian Arthur, is that it can produce a phase lock that restricts the emergence of new knowledge, and which tends to confine intellectual innovation to established formats. “Early superiority [of an idea] is no guarantee of long-term fitness,” Arthur writes. “Standards that are established early (such as the 1950s-vintage computer language FORTRAN) can be hard for later ones to dislodge, no matter how superior the would-be successors may be.”17 Well-entrenched formats or standards of knowledge can create closed systems of ideas that change only when they encounter more powerful external forces or collapse of their own weight, Arthur contends.

Such “formats” for ideas can be usefully understood as components of what Todd Gitlin calls the “dominant paradigm”¹⁸ and Steven Chaffee terms the “zeitgeist” of mass communication studies.¹⁹ Put briefly, any paradigm or zeitgeist embraces the professional consensus of knowledge concerning what a research subject “is,” tools for examining it, a more-or-less defined research agenda, and a body of tacitly accepted rules for distinguishing “responsible” from “irresponsible” points of view on the subject at hand.²⁰

The history of U.S. government spending on psychological warfare suggests that a positive feedback cycle existed in the “knowledge-based industry” of U.S. social science. Government spending on communication research stressed those aspects of the field that were regarded as of near-term value to the agencies paying the bills—agencies principally concerned with propaganda, intelligence, and military affairs. This restrictive tendency was reinforced by resource limitations, the necessity to justify federal agency budgets before a suspicious Congress, fear of McCarthyism, and the belief that immediate measures were necessary to confront the Soviet Union. Quantitative social science was particularly well suited to this government market. It conveyed the impression of being “hard” science and its stress on statistics often permitted reform-minded social scientists to sidestep political roadblocks created by Congress and by the powerful nativist lobbies in the United States. Government funding clearly had considerable impact on the development and testing of some of the most popular conceptual “formats” of mass communication research of the 1950s, such as Dodd’s diffusion studies, Lerner’s development studies, and others.

The path of scientific discovery in U.S. communication research was not decided in advance by the government or anyone else, of course. Although government funding did not determine what could be said by social scientists, it did play a major role in determining who would do the “authoritative” talking about communication and an indirect role in determining who would enjoy access to the academic media necessary to be heard by others in the field. This “positive feedback” for psychological warfare projects consisted initially of money, in the form of government contracts, which in turn brought other benefits: the opportunity to participate in a social network of academics with great influence within the profession (as Clausen’s sociometric study establishes), ready access to scholarly journals for publication of results (as is seen in Dodd’s Project Revere bibliography), invitations to participate in conference panels, university and professorial appointments, and similar opportunities for self-reinforcing status within the profession.21

Within this context, it is appropriate to review the scientific legacy left by government-funded psychological warfare research between 1945 and 1960. This inheritance can be seen in at least nine areas of mass communication studies:

1. Effects research.

2. Studies of the national communication systems of the Soviet Union and other countries regarded as problematic by U.S. policymakers.

3. Refinement of scaling techniques used in opinion questionnaires and in the algorithms employed to derive useful data from them.

4. Creation of opinion research and audience research techniques useful outside the United States, particularly in areas hostile to U.S. observers.

5. Early diffusion research.

6. Early development theory research.

7. Wilbur Schramm’s articulation of the “zeitgeist” of the field of mass communication research and education.

8. Contributions to the refinement of “reference group” and “two-step” communication theories.

9. Contributions to “motivation” research and similar maintenance-of-morale techniques widely employed in commercial public relations.

The research into communication effects was particularly important, both for psychological warfare projects and for the development of communication studies as a distinct field of inquiry. The government played a crucial, albeit indirect role in the seminal American Soldier series of reports and in the related Yale studies led by Carl Hovland. All of the data collection for the American Soldier series, the costly data entry onto IBM punch cards, early theoretical development, salaries, and much of the overhead involved in the production of these reports were financed by the army during World War II in programs whose object was the maintenance of morale and discipline of the U.S. armed forces.22 The postwar analysis of the data by Hovland and his team—vitally important, yet the least expensive feature of the project—was underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation.²³ As discussed earlier, even the ostensibly “private” segment of the American Soldier project was carried out in coordination and with substantial overlap in personnel with contemporaneous psychological warfare projects. Data and conclusions derived from the Hovland experiments on issues such as source credibility, the effects of one-sided and two-sided propaganda on various audiences, the motivational impact of fear and atrocities, and the duration of opinion change, among others, became central to the elaboration of U.S. communication studies for most of the 1950s.²⁴

Detailed studies of the national communication systems of countries regarded as targets for U.S. persuasion efforts also became an important focus of early mass communication studies. This led to detailed, relatively sophisticated studies of mass communication in the Soviet Union, its various constituent republics (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.), the Eastern European satellite states, countries on the Soviet periphery (Iran, Turkey, etc.), and countries regarded as politically problematic by U.S. security agencies (France, Italy, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, etc.). The studies of the Soviet communication system conducted in the mid-1950s by the Bureau of Social Science Research²⁵ appear to have been among the first reasonably comprehensive studies of a national communications system in the sense that phrase is used in the modern academic lexicon.²⁶

Turning to methodological developments, psychological warfare programs underwrote the development of several quantitative methodologies that remain basic to mass communication studies and to what is euphemistically termed public communication research (i.e., public relations). These include much of the original work involved in the elaboration of content analysis as a quantitative research technique; contributions to the refinement of survey research via support of leading survey organizations; financing the development of experimental and quasi-experimental research techniques by Stouffer, Hovland, and others; underwriting the development of scaling techniques by Likert, Stouffer, and others; and financing several of the first efforts to employ computers in social science research.²⁷ Military and propaganda agencies also underwrote efforts by Ithiel de Sola Pool, Wilbur Schramm, and others to devise specialized research techniques suitable for deriving intelligence on public opinion and media usage from “denied” populations, particularly inside the Soviet Union.²⁸ These techniques have some broader applicability to the study of hostile subcultures generally—criminals, the very poor, the very rich, and so on—but have been most frequently employed in budget justifications for U.S. foreign propaganda programs.29

In the area of diffusion research, U.S. Air Force propaganda programs played a vital role in the diffusion studies by Dodd, DeFleur, and other sociologists at the University of Washington. Lowery and DeFleur conclude with some justification that these studies constitute one of several “milestones” in mass communication studies.³⁰ In this case, the air force underwrote virtually the entire cost of the program, selected airdropped leaflets as the experimental stimulus, provided the means for delivery of the stimulus, and contributed significantly to the selection of those aspects of the “diffusion” phenomenon that would be subjected to study. It is evident that Dodd and his colleagues required the umbrella of authority provided by the air force in order to win permission to carry out the experiments in the first place.

The substantial role of psychological warfare programs observed in diffusion studies can also be seen in the early years of what is known as development theory. This aspect of communication theory has evolved considerably over the years,³¹ but during the 1950s its intellectual center was the CENIS program at MIT. The central text for this trend was for years Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society, based on the Voice of America studies in the Middle East. Lerner and three other prominent development theorists, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Guy Pauker, and Everett Hagan, became CENIS staffers during the late 1950s.³² Each was an active consultant and lecturer on communication issues as applied to U.S. counterinsurgency programs in the Third World.³³

The work of Wilbur Schramm, who was clearly one of the single most influential articulators of the dominant paradigm of mass communication research of the 1950s, was so closely bound up with U.S. psychological warfare projects that it is often difficult to determine where Schramm’s “educational” work began and his “national security” work left off. As noted a moment ago, Schramm’s Manichaean vision of the U.S.–Soviet conflict was integral to his success as a government contractor and to his highly influential articulation of what Chaffee called the Zeitgeist of modern mass communication research.³⁴

Turning now to two of the most influential trends of mass communication research during the 1950s, it is possible to track a limited contribution of psychological warfare projects to the development of “two-step” and the related “reference group” communication theories. These schools—personified by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz and by Robert Merton and Herbert Hyman, respectively—were primarily products of “civilian” research, so to speak, such as studies of communication and voting behavior in the United States.35 Nevertheless, contemporary observers such as Bruce Lannes Smith concluded that government-funded psychological warfare studies also played an important role in the elaboration of both theories. Writing in early 1956, Smith paired Hans Speier’s work in psychological warfare with Paul Lazarsfeld’s election studies as the two most important intellectual sources of what would eventually come to be called “two-step” media theory. Both Speier and Lazarsfeld were concerned that “politically influential communications do not typically reach the broader strata of society through direct operation of the mass media,” Smith wrote, “but are instead typically mediated through individuals or groups, whom Speier has named ‘social relay points’ and whom Lazarsfeld has called ‘opinion leaders.’”³⁶ Smith credits the BASR’s studies in the Middle East on behalf of the Voice of America as an important testbed for Lazarsfeld’s studies of the two-step concept.³⁷ Similarly, he attributes most of the elaboration of “reference group” theory to Robert Merton and Herbert Hyman but then goes on to cite the Shils and Janowitz studies of World War II–era Wehrmacht disintegration and the CENIS program in international communications as influential contributors to the understanding of the reference group concept.³⁸ Stanley Bigman’s studies for the USIA also contributed to the articulation of “personal influence” theories well before the publication of Katz and Lazarsfeld’s pivotal Personal Influence in 1955.³⁹

Finally, psychological warfare programs also made limited contributions to the development of “motivation” research and certain public relations techniques widely used in civilian commerce. The field of industrial motivation research has been largely commercial in its origin and financing. But there are obvious conceptual similarities between a government’s efforts to maintain military and civilian morale and management programs for enforcing employee morale inside a major corporation. Stouffer’s pioneering studies in this field had a military origin, it will be recalled. During the 1950s, corporate image advertising was also explicitly viewed as a form of “intra-societal psychological warfare,” as Public Opinion Quarterly put it, borrowed from the government for use with U.S. audiences.⁴⁰ Similarly, Herbert Krugman, a prominent commentator on motivational research during the 1950s, cited the government’s enthusiasm for psychological warfare as one of six contributors to advancing motivation research techniques—although Krugman was less than sanguine about some of the government’s early claims for its effectiveness.41

Thus the U.S. government’s psychological warfare programs between 1945 and 1960 played either direct or indirect roles in several of the most important initiatives in mass communication research of the period. Much of the foundation for effects research was a product of World War II psychological warfare. Several of the innovations in experimental and quasi-experimental research methodologies and in quantitative content analysis that proved to be fundamental to the crystallization of mass communication research into a distinct field of inquiry can be traced to research programs underwritten by U.S. military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies. Similarly, the substantial majority of cold war–era studies of foreign communication systems, message diffusion, and development theory were shaped by the perceived U.S. national security needs of the day.

There were at least three basic features to the relationship between government-funded psychological warfare programs and U.S. mass communication research between 1945 and 1960. First, U.S. psychological warfare was in part an applied form of mass communication theory. U.S. social science, including mass communication research, helped elaborate rationales for coercing groups targeted by the U.S. government and Western Industrial culture generally. It developed relatively sophisticated techniques used in attempts to exercise that dominion. As Wilbur Schramm noted in 1954, “propaganda”—that fixation of so much communication research of the day—“is an instrument of social control.”⁴²

Second, the government’s psychological warfare programs provided a very large fraction of the funding available for mass communication research throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s. Key research centers such as the Bureau of Applied Social Research and the Institute for Social Research owed their survival to contracts with military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies, particularly during the crucial years of the early 1950s when communication studies emerged as a distinct discipline.

Next, the data show that the government projects did not determine what scientists could say—but they did strongly influence who would do the talking. The relative independence from direct interference with research results was a desirable aspect of military-funded social research from the point of view of the scientists,43 and U.S. academics sometimes brought the contracting agency research results that were not welcome.⁴⁴ Having said that, though, it is also clear that government contracts helped organize and feed the informal networks of scientists who dominated the field of U.S. communication research throughout the decade, as Clausen’s study showed.⁴⁵

Despite its claims, communication studies in the United States have not typically been neutral, objective, or even held at arm’s length from the political and economic powers of the day. Instead, communication studies entwined themselves with the existing institutions of power, just as have, say, the mainstream study of economics or atomic physics, whose inbreeding with the political and military establishment are so extensive as to have become common knowledge.

The claim of psychological warfare advocates has long been that this form of coercion would be cheaper, more flexible, and sometimes less brutal than conventional war, or that it could actually mitigate or avoid conflicts. They contended that U.S. use of these tactics abroad would be conducive to the emergence of the humanitarian and democratic values that the U.S. government, and most of the American academic community, professes to support.

The problem with such claims, however, is that the supposed beneficiaries of U.S.-sponsored psychological warfare in a long list of countries are worse off today than ever before. The majority of the people in many of the principal battlegrounds—Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Turkey, Indonesia, and more recently Panama and the former Soviet Union come to mind—are in truth poorer today both materially and spiritually, less democratic, less free, and often living in worse health and greater terror than before this purportedly benign form of intervention began. Even some traditionally conservative leaders, notably Pope John Paul II, have concluded that the decades of superpower competition in the Third World—in which psychological warfare has been a central strategy—have left profound devastation in their wake.⁴⁶

Discussion of psychological warfare remains controversial because reexamination of its record leads in short order to a heretical conclusion: The role of the United States in world affairs during our lifetimes has often been rapacious, destructive, tolerant of genocide, and willing to sacrifice countless people in the pursuit of a chimera of security that has grown ever more remote. Rethinking psychological warfare’s role in communication studies, in turn, requires reconsideration of where contemporary Western ideology comes from, whose interests it serves, and the role that social scientists play in its propagation. Such discussions have always upset those who are content with the present order of things. For the rest of us, though, they permit a glimmer of hope.