A sheet of metal with two square holes cut into it lies on a table-top, with a piece of rope attached to it. At the end of the rope, dangling from the table, there is an iron weight. At a given moment, a lever will be pulled, releasing the sheet of metal, which is then pulled violently across the tabletop by the weight. As it moves, the square holes quickly pass over an image drawn on the tabletop below, revealing it to an observer for a split second, and then concealing it again. The observer calculates precisely how long the image was revealed and makes a record of what impression, if any, it made on the eye.
This is how ‘tachistoscopes’ worked in Germany in the 1850s.1 At the time, they were used by physiologists researching human vision. Optical research examined various aspects of seeing, including light, depth perception, afterimages and how a pair of eyes constructed the image in three dimensions. The eye was to be probed and tested in search of different responses.
Today’s equivalent of a tachistoscope can operate, relatively cheaply, via an ordinary computer webcam. The movement of the eye can be tracked, as can the dilation of the pupil. The length of time that the eye settles on a particular image, or part of an image, can be timed to the nearest millisecond. Private companies, with names like Affectiva and Realeyes, deliver commercial services to clients wanting to know how to win and keep the attention of their audiences. These techniques often operate within more extensive face-scanning programmes, which promise to unlock the secrets of our emotional states. Face-scanning technology is spreading into everyday situations, such as supermarkets and bus stops, to help tailor messages appropriately for individuals. Of course, these twenty-first-century tachistoscopes are not being employed for purely scientific purposes. More often than not, eye tracking of this sort is done in the service of market research and targeted advertising.
Since the late 1990s, market researchers have become increasingly fixated upon our eyes and faces for tell-tale signs of what we might buy. Underlying this has been a growing belief that consumption is driven primarily by emotions. A 1994 book by the Portuguese American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, entitled Descartes’ Error, exerted a profound influence across the advertising and market research industries. On the basis of brain scans, Damasio argued that rationality and emotion are not alternative or opposing functions of the brain, but on the contrary, that emotions are a condition of behaving in a rational way. For example, individuals who’d suffered brain damage hampering their emotional capacities were also discovered to be incapable of taking more calculated, rational decisions.
Damasio is now spoken of in hushed tones as the forefather of a mini-enlightenment in marketing theory and science. Gradually at first, but gaining momentum with the arrival of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink, every leading advertising and market research guru has come to view the emotional aspects of the mind and brain as the target for their ad campaigns and research. This has yielded such dubious legacies as neuromarketing and scent logos. Psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt push this further, to analyse the emotional underpinnings of moral and political choices.2
In a way, this sounds a little surprising. We have long known that advertisers target our unconscious desires and insecurities in their efforts to get us to buy their products. It was in 1957 that The Hidden Persuaders first claimed to pull back the curtain and reveal the manipulations and tricks that the ad-men were practicing on us. Perhaps it’s just that advertising theory is unusually fad-based, and emotions are back ‘in’ again right now but will soon be usurped by another concept. There is also the fact that advertisers have long resisted the portrayal of them as ‘hidden persuaders’, insisting that it is impossible to get someone to buy something he doesn’t ‘really’ want. What’s new?
To many market researchers, the dawn of neuroscience has fundamentally changed things. According to the more optimistic among them, scientists are close to discovering the brain’s ‘buy button’, that specific area of mushy grey matter that triggers us to put an item in our shopping basket.3 The neuroscience of emotions potentially means that advertisers are no longer faced with a choice between thinking creatively and thinking scientifically: they can identify what forms of image, sound and smell produce emotional attachments to specific brands. Add to this advances in the computerized coding of eye movement and facial muscles, and you have the apparatus to really know what people are feeling. Some are using hormonal testing, to add to the mix.
So much technological progress has led to a surge of scientific exuberance in the market research community. Discovering whether or not an advertisement actually works in targeting a specific emotion and, with it, the propensity to buy something, is now a real possibility. An objective, quantitative science of desire seems feasible.
Various new findings are emerging as a result. The South African advertising guru Erik du Plessis has convinced many businesses – most crucially, Facebook – that whether or not we ‘like’ something exerts the greatest emotional influence over what we will then do.4 Another study has shown that fear is what drives people to buy products from big-name brands.5 Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist, has discovered that most of the pleasure associated with buying something occurs during the anticipation of receiving it, and has advised companies to structure their sales practices accordingly.6 Ways of reducing the ‘pain’ of the price tag – such as minimizing the number of syllables in the price when spoken – are also explored.7 The psychological pain of spending money is reduced when the customer uses a credit card than when they pay with cash.8
Positive psychologists and happiness economists make a great play of the fact that money and material possessions don’t lead to an increase in our mental well-being. But these experts are in a minority, compared to the vast assemblage of consumer psychologists, consumer neuroscientists and market researchers all dedicated to ensuring that we do achieve some degree of emotional satisfaction by spending money.
Less and less about our shopping habits is being left to chance. Advertisers will still swear that the ‘hidden persuaders’ image of them is inaccurate and unfair. After all, the emotions being targeted, generated and researched are not ‘fake’ in any way. This is not about lying to people. On the contrary, emotion has become the market research industry’s preferred version of happiness or pleasure, as they existed for Bentham and his followers. It is the solid neural, chemical or psychological reality which underpins everything else that we experience or think is going on. Most importantly, it is what leads us to get our credit cards out of our pockets. But in a way that Jevons might have respected, we don’t do so under the influence of lies or advertising ideology, but because we really will receive a quantity of positive feelings as a result. That, at least, is the claim.
As market research becomes increasingly swept up in this scientific exuberance, a number of questions are going unanswered. What precisely is an emotion anyway? It is all very well saying that it is a visible occurrence in the brain, but that doesn’t help us understand what we mean by the term, or by specific words such as ‘anxiety’, ‘joy’, ‘fear’, ‘happiness’, ‘hate’, ‘like’ and so on. It is difficult to imagine how one would explain or describe these occurrences to someone who had never experienced them, no matter how good one’s instruments of detection were.
Furthermore, it is deeply unclear within this new neuroindustrial complex where precisely agency lies. Are consumers considered to be sovereign, autonomous beings, whose emotions are constitutive of their free will and personality? Or are they passive vessels, who get emotionally buffeted by the images, sounds and smells that come before them? Marketers would hesitate to declare the latter, and yet their methods are scarcely compatible with the former view either. Maybe they don’t really know. Accrediting decision-making to the brain is the preferred way of ducking this philosophical dilemma.
While the scanning technology that promises to unlock the secrets of our feelings is dazzlingly new, the philosophical and ethical questions that result from it are quite old. This points us to a recurring pattern within psychological research that dates back to those first optical tachistoscopes of the 1850s, and it concerns the mesmerizing lure of mind-reading technologies. With every wave of new methods and instruments for scanning the thought processes or sensations of others, so there occurs a resultant belief that hard science has ousted philosophy and ethics once and for all. At the same time, there is always the hope that it is possible to understand another human being without talking to them.
But on each occasion, there is still some residual vision of what freedom and consciousness really mean that escapes scientific validation. When psychologists, neuroscientists or market researchers claim to have liberated their discipline from moral or philosophical considerations once and for all, the question has to be posed – so where do you get your understanding of humanity from, including its various emotional states, drives and moods? From your own intuition? And what feeds that?
In the years since those first tachistoscopes were introduced, the answer has become increasingly plain. The residual notion of freedom that structures how this science progresses is the freedom to shop. If that is the case then contemporary neuromarketing and facial coding might rightly be accused of being a circular venture. What they discover in the synapses of our brains and the flickering of our eyes is not raw data, to be injected afresh into advertising designs, but is unavoidably interpreted through a consumerist philosophy.
Therefore we need to examine the history of psychology and the history of consumerism as intertwined projects. Technology is absolutely integral to this entanglement. It is thanks to technical methods and instruments, from the tachistoscope onwards, that psychology can claim to be its own objective science in the first place. The seductive power of such instruments has allowed certain individuals to declare that philosophy and ethics are no longer needed. It is here that much of the Benthamite promise of a scientific politics has been channelled, a politics in which hard expertise over the feelings of others replaces the messiness and ambiguity of dialogue. But behind this version is not national government in pursuit of a public interest, rather a corporation in pursuit of a private one.
Between philosophy and the body
In 1879, a former physiologist and occasional philosopher named Wilhelm Wundt declared that a certain part of his office at Leipzig University had become off limits. Henceforth, it would be used for carrying out experiments, not unlike the ones he’d helped arrange when working as an assistant to the great German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in Heidelberg during the 1860s. He’d also practised physiological experiments on human muscles while training to be a doctor. Wundt was never short of self-confidence, and at one point promised to reveal the truth of muscular reflex once and for all.
But Wundt also had philosophical ambitions, which he didn’t intend to relinquish entirely for the sake of the natural sciences. He was convinced that, while mental processes could occur spontaneously, they also occurred at a certain ‘speed’, which could in principle be measured. The purpose of his new experimental space was to explore such philosophical questions, using techniques and instruments that he’d picked up from the physical sciences. Human subjects would be used, just as they had been when he was testing muscular responses.
That sealed-off area of Wundt’s office is now recognized as the world’s first-ever psychology laboratory. The physical delineation of the laboratory was highly symbolic, resulting in a disciplinary separation of psychology from the areas of theory and science on which it had previously been dependent. Forms of psychological research had been conducted across Europe since the early nineteenth century, often including elements of experimentation, as exemplified by Fechner’s weight lifting. But these were conducted from within physiological and/or philosophical traditions of enquiry, and were typically carried out by researchers upon themselves, meaning they relied on introspection for their data. Wundt’s achievement was to distinguish psychology as a discipline of its own, potentially separate from both physiology and philosophy.
In doing this, he made a statement with profound and far-reaching implications for how we understand ourselves and others. What Wundt effectively implied was that the psyche hovers in its own specific domain, between the realm of natural biology and that of philosophical ideas. Bentham had established a sharp binary opposition between the matters of ‘reality’ (for which read natural science) and those of nonsensical ‘fiction’ (for which read metaphysics). Wundt was adding a third option: a form of reality which we can acquire knowledge of but isn’t reducible to the laws of nature. This includes the various categories that we recognize as ‘psychological’ today: ‘mood’, ‘attitude’, ‘morale’, ‘personality’, ‘emotion’, ‘intelligence’ and so on.
How could these apparently intangible, conceptual entities become an object of scientific investigation? Wundt was keen to avoid resorting to introspection of the sort that many English psychologists had used during the 1850s and 1860s. The purpose of the laboratory was to study mental processes in a more objective fashion than that. He and his assistants built various tools to test the response of experimental subjects to different stimuli. They also borrowed various instruments from physiology and physics labs to time neural reflexes. And they built their own version of a tachistoscope, which was used to time how long it took to get a person’s attention. The eyes were a crucial area of study for the pioneering psychologists, but not merely in a physiological sense. Now they provided a glimpse of thinking itself.
Much of what went on in Wundt’s lab would have appeared very similar to what was going on in physiological experiments on the body. Pulse rate and blood pressure were among the measurable indicators of inner emotional states. One of the key differences – which also distinguishes this early psychological research from what would come later – was that the subjects being experimented on were scholarly associates and students of Wundt. They were fully aware of what the experiments were seeking to test and contributed their own subjective insights to the findings.
The perspective of the experimental subject was important here, and there was no sense in which they were being manipulated. Conscious thought processes needed to be respected in their own right and not reduced to naturalistic questions of cause and effect. For instance, the speed of conscious reaction (when the subject became aware of something) could be compared to the speed of unconscious reaction (when the physical reflex occurred). Wundt’s challenge was to avoid collapsing his research back into physiology, but also to avoid idle, untestable philosophical speculation. In truth, he was combining an element of both in the hope of achieving more than the sum of those two parts.
As the aesthetic theorist Jonathan Crary has argued, Wundt’s focus upon the eyes and attention was indicative of a profound philosophical shift that was underway during the late nineteenth century.9 The conditions of subjective experience, which had been matters of philosophical speculation since the seventeenth century, were gradually being rendered bodily, and therefore visible to the expert eye. Wundt did not dispense with the philosophical notion of ‘consciousness’, but he was happy to elide it with that of ‘field of vision’. In doing so, the shift from a conceptual language to a scientific one was accelerated. The capacity to experience the outside world was no longer something God-given, lying invisibly within all human beings, but a function of the human body. As such, it could be seen, tested, known and influenced.
Despite the symbolic separation of the psychology lab from his office, Wundt himself never achieved an entirely clear delineation of psychological research. In Germany, psychology remained closely associated with philosophy right up until the First World War. In the early twentieth century, in the final years of his career, Wundt drifted back into philosophy, but also into the terrain of sociology. Zigzagging his way between methods he’d picked up from physical research, and metaphysical questions of consciousness, Wundt nevertheless produced some important psychological theories.
He identified three different measurable ways in which the emotions can vary: pleasure–displeasure, tension–composure, excitement–composure.10 This may sound crude, but already the contrast between the mental insights of psychology and those of economics was becoming pronounced. According to Wundt, our instinctive emotional responses to things are critical in determining the choices we make. Human beings are far more complicated than mere calculators of pleasure, and the dawn of psychological experimentation revealed how.
In extending experimental instruments beyond the study of the human body and into terrain previously dominated by philosophers, Wundt’s place in history was guaranteed. Many philosophers and economists merely fantasized about instruments capable of measuring thought, but Wundt actually built and used them. The path he carved between physiology and philosophy was only possible thanks to this new equipment and the authority he claimed for himself in applying it to the study of other minds. Today, neuroscience might appear to be bringing the Wundt project to a close: we no longer need to access the mind via the eyes or any other part of the body, but believe we can go direct to the brain. The very idea of the mind, as a knowable yet immaterial entity, is, as a result, in question.
Yet there is also an underlying intellectual honesty in Wundt’s approach. He never claimed to be escaping profound philosophical dilemmas; the mind was not reducible to the body, but nor was it entirely separate from it either. Thinking and consciousness exert their own influence over how we act and the symptoms our bodies display. Our free will is not an illusion. For this reason, Wundt refused to purge psychology of philosophical language, much to the chagrin of one particular group of his students.
Migrating methods
Wundt’s lab turned him into an academic celebrity. It made him an object of fascination for visitors to Leipzig and an appealing patron for ambitious young scholars. Numerous graduate students flocked to work with Wundt, and he oversaw the completion of an astonishing 187 doctoral research projects over the course of his career. Over the 1880s and 1890s, Leipzig was the focal point for anyone interested in the emerging discipline of experimental psychology.
These scientific developments in Germany coincided with the most transformative period in American history. Between 1860 and 1890, the population of the United States trebled, due to an influx of immigrants, largely into cities. The end of the Civil War saw a large population of African Americans migrate from the former slave states to the rapidly industrializing cities of the North-east and Midwest. Coinciding with this was an unprecedented wave of business mergers, leading to the creation of what we now recognize as the modern corporation. This in turn required that a new cadre of professional managers be produced to oversee these huge enterprises.
In a relatively short space of time, America went from being a largely agrarian economy of Anglo-Saxon small landowners (still romanticized by many conservatives today), to being an urban, industrial economy, driven by large, professionally managed businesses, which sucked in labour from impoverished parts of Europe at great speed. The identity crisis this caused in a society that had been founded on the basis of local, democratic participation among landowners and slave-owners was profound.
A further development during this period was the foundation of a number of new American universities, including Cornell, Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Right from the beginning, many of these institutions had close relationships with the business world, which became closer still as the century wore on, and the wealth and benefaction of corporations increased. To support the emerging managerial class, the world’s first business school, Wharton Pennsylvania, was established in 1881. With the scale of domestic markets growing, thanks to the spread of railroads across the United States, businesses were increasingly hungry for knowledge they could use, especially regarding consumers.11 Some crude market research techniques were in existence by the 1860s, including newspaper straw polls and primitive survey techniques, plus a few advertising agencies had already been established. There were even some basic theories of consumer behaviour, borrowed largely from economics. But this was all clumsy stuff.
Who would teach in all of these new universities? Where would they acquire their expertise? German universities were also growing rapidly during this period and offered a crucial source of scientific training for a new generation of American scholars. Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War, fifty thousand Americans travelled to Germany and Austria to undertake university degrees and research training to bring back to the United States.12 This represents one of the biggest exports of intellectual capital in history, especially in areas such as chemistry, physiology and the new field of psychology.
Among this number was a collection of relatively junior American psychologists, eager to discover more about the celebrated goings-on in Wundt’s laboratory. They included William James, the godfather of American psychology and brother of the novelist, Henry; Walter Dill Scott and Harlow Gale, the first psychological theorists of advertising; James McKeen Cattell, who went on to become an influential figure in New York’s Madison Avenue advertising industry; and G. Stanley Hall, later founder of the American Journal of Psychology, who bequeathed us the term ‘morale’.
The period spent by these Americans in Germany was not an altogether happy one. William James had initially struck up a long-distance relationship with Wundt, but on arrival in Leipzig became increasingly contemptuous of Wundt’s continuing metaphysical language, which he deemed unscientific and mystical. Hall was even more horrified by all of the philosophical jargon and soon dropped out to return home. There is some indication that the low level animosity between the visitors and their host was mutual. Wundt complained that the Americans were basically economists, who assumed that human beings were slaves to external incentives, and not actually possessing free will at all. He described McKeen Cattell as ‘typically American’, which was not intended as a compliment.
What did impress James and his cohort, however, was the technology that Wundt had assembled. They looked in awe at the finely tuned tachistoscopes and other timing devices which Wundt put to work in his laboratory. They studied the physical layout of the lab itself and drew careful diagrams of its arrangement. Much of the intellectual narrative accompanying these instruments was left well alone, but the devices and space were an inspiration. Much of it was copied directly once the American visitors returned home; indeed the first psychology labs at Harvard, Cornell, Chicago, Clark, Berkeley and Stanford all clearly betrayed the influence of Wundt.13 In addition to copying the floor plan and many of the instruments, they even tempted some of Wundt’s students across the Atlantic: James persuaded Hugo Munsterberg to migrate to the United States, where he established the first psychology lab at Harvard and went on to become a prominent figure in the field of industrial psychology.
‘What do they want, these English psychologists?’ Friedrich Nietzsche had mused in his 1887 work, The Genealogy of Morals. The question was intended for the Benthamites and Darwinists of his day, such as Sully, Jevons and Edgeworth. Why were they so obsessed with understanding fluctuations in pleasure? If the same question had been put to their American contemporaries, as they feverishly hunted down new methods and designs to bring back from Germany, the answer would have been much easier to divine. Crudely put, they wanted to provide a set of tools for managers.
American psychology had no philosophical heritage. It was born into a world of big business and rapid social change, which risked spiralling out of control. If it couldn’t offer to alleviate the problems that were afflicting American industry and society, then it had no reason to exist at all. That, at any rate, was the view expressed by leaders of the new league of universities, who were eager to please their corporate benefactors. In the early twentieth century, psychology made an explicit pitch to act as the ‘master science’ through which the American dream might yet be rescued.14 If individual decision-making itself could be reduced to a hard science, with quasi-natural laws and statistics, then it might still be possible for a multinational, multi-ethnic, industrial, mass society to function, while still upholding the core Enlightenment principle of liberty on which the republic had been founded.
The journey time between the founding of American psychology and its application to business problems was extremely short. If we date modern psychology back to that moment in 1879, when Wundt drew a symbolic line around his laboratory, it was only another twenty years before the field of consumer psychology emerged. By 1900, James McKeen Cattell and Harlow Gale had returned from Leipzig and were carrying out their own experiments with tachistoscopes, specifically to understand how individuals responded to different advertisements. Using Wundt’s tools, they hoped to understand not only consumer reactions to different advertisements, but also their emotions. Publishing in 1903 and 1908 respectively, Walter Dill Scott produced the first two classic works of advertising theory, The Theory of Advertising and The Psychology of Advertising. Cattell later established The Psychological Corporation, a business consultancy tailoring academic research for clients, after he was dismissed from Columbia University in 1917 due to his opposition to the draft.
None of this would have been possible without Wundt, but these former students were less than loyal to his legacy. With the entry of America into the First World War, anti-German sentiment saw many American psychologists attempt to scrub the Leipzig chapter from their history.15 They believed that they had put Wundt and his metaphysics behind them, and the road ahead was purely scientific. It was never a coincidence that this was precisely what American business wanted to hear. Shortly before his death, William James expressed some regrets at quite how anti-philosophical American psychology had become. He worried that the mysteries and spontaneity of the mind risked being obscured by so much emphasis on observation and measurement, especially where it was in the service of business. But, by that standard, things were about to get a whole lot worse.
Is it possible to study and understand human beings, without allowing abstract concepts such as ‘the will’ or ‘experience’ to enter one’s assessment? Can they be understood, without letting them speak for themselves? Clutching their various measurement devices and timing gauges, many of the first generation of American psychologists may have hoped that the answer to these questions was ‘yes’. But some ambivalence remained. They may have moved well away from either philosophy or introspection, but the objects of their study, such as attention and emotion, were still somewhat abstract, and presumed something innately human. There was still a more radical option that they hadn’t considered. What if psychologists were to try and forget that they were studying human beings altogether?
The invention of human behaviour
In 1913, an animal psychologist named John B. Watson gave a lecture at Columbia University, which would serve as a manifesto for one of the most influential scientific traditions of the twentieth century: behaviourism. Watson was making a clear pitch for its and his supremacy, not only within American psychology, but in the various areas of policy and management which it was seeking to shape.16 ‘If psychology would follow the plan I suggest, the educator, the physician, the jurist and the businessman could utilize our data in a practical way, as soon as we are able, experimentally, to obtain them’. A more explicit offer of scholarly complicity with power is harder to imagine.
Within two years of the Columbia address, Watson had become president of the American Psychological Association. The remarkable thing is that by this stage he had never even studied a single human being. If the purpose of American psychology was to take Wundt’s methods and then get rid of all the metaphysical jargon, elevating a man whose only scientific experiments had been on white rats to the most prestigious position in the discipline was a stroke of genius.
In the early twenty-first century, the term ‘behaviour’ is everywhere. ‘Behaviour change’ preoccupies policy-makers, in their efforts to combat obesity, environmental degradation and civic disengagement. ‘Health behaviours’ regarding nutrition and exercise allegedly hold the key to controlling spiralling healthcare budgets. ‘Behavioural economics’ and ‘behavioural finance’ indicate the ways in which people miscalculate the optimal use of their time and money, as popularized in the best-selling Nudge, whose two authors advise presidents around the world. We are encouraged to learn tricks to alter our own ‘behaviour’ (or ‘nudge ourselves’, as some experts put it), to help us pursue more active, resilient lifestyles.17
In 2010, the British government opened a ‘Behavioural Insights Unit’ to bring such findings into policy-making. This unit has been so successful that in 2013 it was part-privatized to enable it to offer commercial consultancy to governments around the world. In 2014, a $17 million gift from the Pershing Square family philanthropic trust led to the launch of the Harvard Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative, aimed at pushing the science of behaviour to the next level. Brain sciences occupy the current frontier for the investigation of what really leads us to behave as we do.
Contained within each of these policy projects is a single ideal: that individual activity might be diverted towards goals selected by elite powers, but without either naked coercion or democratic deliberation. Behaviourism stretches Bentham’s dream of a scientific politics to its limit, imagining that beneath the illusion of individual freedom lie the cold mechanics of cause and effect, observable only to the expert eye. When we put our faith in ‘behavioural’ solutions, we withdraw it from democratic ones to an equal and opposite extent.
Until the 1920s, however, the term ‘behaviour’ would have been scarcely associated with people at all. It would have made perfect sense to talk of the behaviour of a plant or an animal. Doctors might have used the term to refer to the behaviour of a particular body part or organ.18 This tells us something important about contemporary appeals to ‘behavioural science’. When this category is being invoked, there is no specific recognition that the behaviour in question is displayed by a person, as opposed to anything else that reacts to stimuli. The behaviourist believes that observation can tell us everything we need to know, while interpretation or understanding of actions or choices can be sidestepped altogether.
This was exactly why Watson believed the concept held such huge promise for psychology, if it was serious about becoming a science. In 1917 (by which point he had finally made the switch to the study of human subjects) he made his position brutally clear:
The reader will find no discussion of consciousness and no reference to such terms as sensation, perception, attention, will, image and the like. These terms are in good repute, but I have found that I can get along without them both in carrying out investigations and in presenting psychology as a system to my students. I frankly do not know what they mean.19
This was not merely anti-philosophical. It was virtually anti-psychological, at least in the sense that we typically understand psychology. His rubbishing of abstract mental concepts – ‘sensation, perception …’ – has strong echoes of Bentham. But Bentham didn’t have a psychology lab and couldn’t progress without a little speculation regarding the nature of human motives. Watson was calling his colleagues’ bluff: if you really want to be a proper science, cleansed of metaphysics, then you have to give up everything that can’t be observed scientifically. The search for hard, objective reality of the psyche would now be the exclusive preserve of specialists, with specialist equipment.
Watson revelled in provocation. He declared that ‘thinking’ was no less observable an activity than baseball, scoffing at the privilege that philosophers attached to subjective experience. He famously proclaimed that, since there was no such thing as ‘personality’ or ‘innate’ ability, he could take a child from any background and turn him into a successful businessman or sportsman, purely through conditioning. Humans were like white rats, which responded to their environment and whatever stimuli came their way. Our actions could not be scientifically attributed to us, as free-thinking, autonomous persons; rather they could only be explained in terms of other aspects of our environment or previous environmental factors that have trained us to behave that way.
There is something subtly seductive about this vision, which may account for its enduring popularity in spite of its technocratic ideal. ‘Nudging’ has been criticized on grounds of ‘paternalism’, but of course paternalism can also be comforting. The sense that someone else is taking the important decisions, that we have been relieved of full responsibility for our actions, can come as a relief. To learn that I’m ‘hard-wired’ or conditioned to take certain decisions may represent a welcome break from the constant modern demand to exercise free will. If our actions are shaped by our environment, nature or upbringing, at least we’re part of some larger collective, even if it is only visible to experts. The problem is that we often have little idea what those experts want.
Watson’s appearance on the academic stage prefigured a bonfire of metaphysical language. The science of behaviour would either dominate all rival areas of scholarly expertise (such as sociology, management, public policy) or simply destroy them altogether (the fate intended for philosophy). Was this really intellectual progress of any sort? Only if the natural sciences are viewed as the sole model for sensible and honest debate. And implicit in Watson’s agenda was an even greater reverence for the capabilities of technology than even his forbears had displayed, following their return from Leipzig.
What he was effectively promising was this: using exceptional powers of experimentation, the psychological observer will reveal everything that can be known about human beings, and all other claims (such as those made by the person being studied) are entirely irrelevant. In that sense, behaviourism was only possible if the practice of psychology was re-founded on a fundamental power imbalance, between the status of the psychologist and that of the ordinary layperson.
In Watson’s hands, psychology would become a tool of expert manipulation. Wundt had assumed that it was more revealing to experiment on subjects who understood what was being tested. This was why he conducted experiments on his own students and associates: they could contribute informed insights to the research. Watson assumed the opposite. To discover how the human animal responded to different stimuli, and might be re-programmed to respond differently, it was far more revealing to use subjects who were entirely ignorant of what was being tested and how. This would also ensure that psychology could deliver on its promise of practical utility, in the hands of marketers, policy-makers and managers. If psychology were to help keep the sprawling, complex mass of American society under some sort of control, it was no use acquiring insights from studies that were only valid in relation to the behaviour of other psychologists.
For these reasons, behaviourism runs inevitably into problems of research ethics. It is not just that behavioural experiments seek to manipulate; they also work through a modicum of deception. Even where informed consent is used, the subjects must remain partly ignorant of exactly what is being tested, or else there is the fear that they might adjust their behaviour accordingly. The goal is to minimize conscious understanding of what is going on.
Nevertheless – if one can still be bothered to think this way – a familiar philosophical contradiction arises once more. Is the autonomous, critical, conscious mind really eliminated from this psychological science? Within the behaviourist worldview, the general public are not unlike white rats, whose inner thought processes are effectively non-existent, until they become observable in some way. But the thoughts of the psychologist are far from irrelevant and are communicated via academic articles, lectures, books, policy reports and conversations. Behaviourism only succeeds in eliminating all forms of ‘theory’ or interpretation, to the extent that it privileges the perspective of one single scientific discipline and profession, and trashes all others. In that respect, the eradication of metaphysics can only succeed as a tangible, political project, in which the vast majority of people have no legitimate view (be it scientific or otherwise) to be taken into account.
The buying animal
Behaviourism was ready-made for clients in the government and private sector. It didn’t take much to help it spread to Madison Avenue and beyond, although the journey was accelerated by an event of professional disgrace. In the period after World War One, Watson was a highly celebrated academic at Johns Hopkins University, winning large research grants and pay rises. But in 1920, it emerged that he’d been having an affair with a young graduate student and assistant, Rosalie Rayner.20 Unfortunately for him, the Rayners were a revered Maryland family, who had made generous donations to Johns Hopkins. News of the affair spread fast, making national newspapers, which even published a letter between Watson and Rayner.
Given the somewhat nihilistic view of human nature that underpinned Watson’s research agenda, some observers could not help but make a connection. His colleague, Adolf Meyer, who would later exert a powerful influence over the American psychiatric profession, was of this view:
I cannot help seeing in the whole matter a practical illustration of the lack of responsibility to have a definite philosophy, the implications of not recognising meanings, the emphasis on the emancipation of science from ethics.21
Watson, evidently, had failed to avoid ‘responding’ to the physical ‘stimulus’ represented by Rosalie Rayner, but behaviourism did not cut it as a defence. Johns Hopkins forced him out, and he left Baltimore for New York.
By 1920, the advertising industry was fully alert to the potential riches offered by psychology. At the forefront of this movement was the Madison Avenue firm J. Walter Thompson (JWT), whose president at the time, Stanley Resor, pledged to turn his business into a ‘university of advertising’. ‘Scientific advertising’ was all the rage. Resor was especially bullish about the emerging possibilities. ‘Advertising’, he argued, ‘is educational work, mass education’. The great advertising campaigns of the future would send messages directly to their passive recipients, who would respond accordingly in their shopping habits. What this new ‘university’ needed were the scientists to provide them with the data on how to do this.
Resor was specifically seeking someone who could advise them on the psychology of ‘appeal’, believing that successful ads triggered that particular emotional response. Perhaps recognizing that he needed a scholar of flexible morals, he initially contacted another recently disgraced academic, William I. Thomas, who had been kicked out of the University of Chicago sociology department for his own extramarital affair. Thomas viewed Madison Avenue as too grubby a business, so he passed them on to Watson, a personal friend of his. Resor had found his man.
That same year, Watson joined JWT as an account executive, on a salary four times what he was earning at Johns Hopkins. As part of the new position, he had to undergo some training, including travelling the backwaters of Tennessee, trying to sell coffee, and working several months behind the counter at Macy’s in New York. With that out of the way, he was free to start applying his behaviourist doctrines to the design of advertising campaigns, and advising his JWT colleagues on how to trigger the right responses.
The most crucial thing for advertisers to remember, Watson implored his colleagues, was that they are not selling a product at all, but seeking to produce a psychological response. The product is simply a vehicle with which to do this, along with the advertising campaign. Consumers can be conditioned to do anything if the environmental factors are designed in the right way. Don’t appeal to the consumer’s existing emotions and desires, Watson urged, but trigger new ones. As part of a contract with Johnson & Johnson, he explored ways of marketing washing powder in terms of the emotions experienced by mothers, such as anxiety, fear and the desire for purity. He is also credited with identifying celebrity endorsements as an effective route to achieving consumer attachments to brands.
These were exactly the sort of messages and methods that Resor was hoping to receive. In 1924, Watson was made a vice president of JWT. Looking down on Lexington Avenue, from his office high up in JWT’s headquarters near Grand Central Station, he had far outstripped the fame and fortune of any psychologist who had remained in the academy.
But Watson’s hubris was problematic. Business had bought into the notion that psychology could reveal everything that managers needed to know in order to sell their products effectively. Watson was content to stoke up this optimism further. ‘Love, fear, and rage are the same in Italy, Abyssinia and Canada,’ he bragged. He was confident that he knew how to trigger any emotion in any situation, purely through designing the ‘stimulus’ in the right way. From the perspective of the advertiser and the marketer, this was a hugely seductive way of understanding their task. But it was all one-way traffic: psychological stimuli would be chucked at the public, and they would respond accordingly in the supermarket aisles. What if they didn’t? What if Watson’s own understanding of ‘love, fear and rage’ wasn’t the same as other people’s? How would businesses find out?
To complete the science of advertising, it was necessary that some form of feedback was also built into the system that would bring information back to the marketer. This could also be understood in behavioural terms, that is, whether a given ad directly prompted a certain response. For instance, discount coupons could be included in newspaper advertisements, to be cut out and used to purchase the product in question. This feedback mechanism would allow the marketer to discover which ads stimulated the best response. Seventy years later, the rise of online advertising and e-commerce would make such behavioural analysis of marketing effectiveness far more widespread: the response of the person viewing an ad is that much easier to assess, in terms of click-throughs and purchases.
In the 1920s, the risk of Resor and Watson’s scientific exuberance was that they overlooked what members of the public actually thought and felt, so confident were they that they could dictate emotional responses from scratch. Corporate America could not depend on this leap of faith alone. Behaviourism’s radically scientific view of the mind suggested there was nothing to fear here. There was nothing lurking, hidden, in the dark recesses of the mind that actually existed beyond what could be observed by psychologists. In fact, the very idea of the ‘mind’ was just a philosophical distraction.
The worry this generates is that a brand (or, for that matter, a politician or ideology or policy) might have become unappealing in ways that are apparent to the public but not yet to scientists and elites. The science of desire also required discovering what people wanted, finding out what they hoped for, in addition to trying to shape it. Doing this required an unusual psychological technique that Watson had hoped to abandon: speaking to people.
Glimpsing democracy
Watson could not help but notice that humans have a tendency to speak. He referred to this as ‘verbal behaviour’. He was even prepared to accept that it could play a role in psychological research, though a deeply regrettable one. He ruefully reflected that:
We suffer in psychology today greatly because methods for observing what goes on in another individual’s internal mechanisms in general are lacking. This is the reason we have to depend in part at least upon his own report of what is taking place. We are gradually breaking away from this inexact method; we shall break away very rapidly when the need is more generally recognized.22
What Bentham called the ‘tyranny of sounds’ frustrates the behaviourist as much as the utilitarian. Today, the facial-coders, neuromarketers and eye-trackers are living Watson’s dream of ‘breaking away’ from subjective reports of experience, and finding supposedly more objective routes to our internal states.
Before behavioural psychology or market research achieved this ‘break-away’ feat, they found themselves in some quite unusual alliances. In the process, business came to understand people not only as passive recipients of corporate ‘education’ or ‘stimuli’, but as active, tentatively political actors with judgements about the world around them. If the task was to find out what people felt, wanted or thought, going out and asking them risked revealing some far more radical responses than JWT or Watson would have been prepared to countenance. What if they were sick of mass-produced goods? What if they didn’t want lots more advertising? What if, above all, they wanted a say?
As the craze for psychological analysis swept American business over the course of the 1920s, large foundations such as Rockefeller and Carnegie looked to fund cutting-edge forms of market research. Statisticians had just invented randomized sampling methods, which greatly improved the authority of surveys as representations of large populations.23 Before sampling methods became available, surveys were very much skewed in terms of who happened to respond to them. They gave a flavour of opinion, but this couldn’t claim to be typical. The foundations offered to fund researchers who would put the new sampling techniques to work in the service of better market intelligence on the part of US corporations. But they were frustrated to discover that most of the individuals or organizations capable of delivering this type of knowledge were political activists, socialists and sociologists.24
Since social surveys had first been conducted in Europe in the 1880s, they had tended to be carried out in pursuit of progressive political agendas. Charles Booth in East London, or W. E. B. Du Bois in Philadelphia, set the stage for quantitative sociological research, which would go out and find how ordinary people lived, by seeing them in their domestic environments and asking them questions. The techniques for doing this work became increasingly professionalized with the establishment of progressive institutions such as the London School of Economics and the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC.
As the statistical techniques of social research developed, they became a matter of public fascination in their own right. One of the studies funded by Rockefeller became a national obsession, debated across the mainstream media. Conducted by a socialist husband and wife, Robert and Helen Lynd, from 1924 onwards, the ‘Middletown Studies’ produced a series of best-selling publications. The research purported to hold up a mirror to American society, revealing banal yet fascinating details of the minutiae of how people went about their day-to-day lives. The researchers were hopeful that people would read these studies and challenge the culture of consumerism that was engulfing them.
The Rockefeller Foundation believed that they were helping to identify new ways of connecting social values to corporate agendas. The Lynds believed they were helping to raise class-consciousness. At the intersection of the market and democratic socialism, the new survey techniques could serve either and both goals at the same time. Following a sequel 1937 study, ‘Middletown in Transition’, one sales journal announced that ‘the only two books that are absolutely necessary for an advertising man are the Bible and Middletown!’25 A new form of shared national self-consciousness had occurred, and its political implications were entirely open-ended.
These sorts of unlikely ideological alliances became a feature of how psychological surveys would advance over the course of the 1930s. The same techniques of enquiry moved seamlessly among market research departments, sociology, socialist campaigns and the media. In one of the more extreme ideological balancing acts, the émigré Frankfurt School Marxist Theodor Adorno was hired to work on another Rockefeller-funded research project, to study CBS radio audiences, along with the psychologists Hadley Cantril, Paul Lazarsfeld and a future president of CBS, Frank Stanton. Adorno had no immediate objection to the use of survey methods, which he saw as potentially emancipatory. He recognized that surveys had the capacity to challenge the dominance of the market, as a form of collective expression. But he was quickly appalled by the more simplistic aspect of the research, in which individuals were invited to push buttons marked ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ when played different types of music. He left the project, which was soon redesigned to serve the needs of the CBS marketing department more closely.
In Britain, market research was pioneered by a number of left-wing intellectuals and campaigners, including the philanthropist Joseph Rowntree and the Labour Party advisor Mark Abrams.26 Like the Lynds, figures such as Abrams were openly critical of advertising and consumer culture, yet never gave up on the idea that market research could be used in a more noble fashion. With more objective knowledge of how people really lived, perhaps business might focus on serving real desires and needs, and not manufacturing new ones. A British equivalent of the Middletown studies, The Mass Observation Project, was launched in 1937.
In defiance of the behaviourist prejudice that humans are automatons to be programmed, these survey specialists had come to view individuals as the bearers of their own personal ‘attitudes’, towards anything from Coca-Cola, to the Catholic Church, to the government. These attitudes were psychological phenomena that were amenable to quantification. As someone with an ‘attitude’, I am able to tell you how much I like a given product or institution on a scale of -5 to +5. But crucially, in ways that defy the behaviourist prejudice, I alone am best placed to know what that attitude is, and any scientist who wishes to know will have to ask me. Button-pressing machines for the capturing of attitudes (like the ‘worm’ that reveals how the audience feels during a presidential debate, or the Facebook ‘like’ button) cut out the use of speech from attitudinal research, but not the judgement of the attitude-holder. This was the crypto-democratic underbelly of how market research developed as the Great Depression took hold, and elites grew increasingly concerned as to what the masses had in mind.
Understanding the attitudes of radio audiences, newspaper readers and the voting public became big business over the course of the 1930s. It also became big politics. In 1929 and 1931, President Herbert Hoover commissioned surveys on social trends and consumer habits, partly in the hope of understanding what level of political unrest might be brewing. This variety of political knowledge soon became commercially available, with the establishment of George Gallup’s opinion-polling company in 1935. When Gallup predicted the outcome of the 1936 presidential election with uncanny accuracy, the prestige of his techniques soared. President Franklin Roosevelt was a compulsive commissioner of polls from then on, and hired Hadley Cantril (formerly of the CBS radio research project) as his in-house pollster.
Anti-capitalism for sale
Once the judgement and voice of the ordinary person is admitted into market research, things can start to shift in a democratic direction. This is an unpredictable and – from the perspective of a corporation, government or advertising account executive – worrying situation. It contains the possibility that drove the Lynds to conduct the Middletown studies, or Abrams’s market research activities, namely that people may report a negative attitude towards consumerism, or even towards capitalism itself.
On the other hand, it is precisely the capacity to detect such threats that made these techniques indispensable for corporations and governments. Roosevelt may have conducted endless polls on how the public perceived his policies, but he never once altered a policy in response. Cantril revealed that every commission for a new attitudinal study also included the requirement for advice on ‘how the attitude might be corrected’, for which read ‘propaganda’.27
Combine an effective survey technique with a ruthless behaviourist approach to advertising and you have a complete information loop. Messages go out to the public, individuals respond via behaviour and surveys, and information then returns to the message-sender. Each element of this has changed dramatically since the 1930s. The emphasis on mass society and the attitude of the general public came to appear dated in the post-war period, as smaller consumer niches started to appear and multiply. In place of the mass survey, another crypto-democratic form of consultation came to the fore, namely the ‘focus group’. The rise of digital ‘data analytics’ represents the latest phase in this evolution. Meanwhile, the current neuromarketing frontiers of behaviourism make John B. Watson look positively innocent by comparison.
What has remained constant, however, is the interplay and tension between behaviourist technique and quasi-democratic forms of consumer voice. The behaviourist does not want to hear what people feel, want or demand; he wants to discover ways of producing feelings, wants or demands, as objective entities which can be seen. This way, he believes he can eliminate the subject from psychology altogether, producing an entirely scientific basis for business practices such as advertising. The problem is that he ends up reliant on his own presupposition about what these feelings mean, drawing on his own experiences and ideals about what rational behaviour might look like. No amount of data can explain what ‘happiness’ or ‘fear’ means to someone who has never experienced them himself. If the researcher happens to be located in an advertising agency or a business school, terms like ‘choice’, ‘desire’, ‘emotion’ and ‘rationality’ take on an unavoidably consumerist hue. Behaviourism and the advertising industry are necessarily parasitic on pre-existing spaces and techniques of deliberation, or else they have no way of escaping their own presuppositions or discovering what other people’s emotions and desires actually mean.
The advertiser who does listen, on the other hand, may be somewhat disturbed by what she hears. She may discover that people want a form of ‘authenticity’ or ‘community’ or sheer ‘reality’ that no product or advert can deliver. The challenge then becomes one of how to package up critical, political, democratic ideals in ways that can be safely delivered via products or public policies, without disrupting the status quo. Elements of anti-capitalist politics, which promise an uncommodified, more honest existence, have long been a fixture of advertising copy. As far back as the 1930s, advertisements contained images of pre-industrial, communal and family life, which seemed to be imperilled by the chaos of the industrial American city.28 By the 1960s, counter-cultural imagery was featuring in commercials, even before the counter-culture had fully emerged.29 Under the influence of market research, political ideals are quietly converted into economic desire. The cold mechanics of marketing and the critique of capitalism are locked into a constant feedback loop, such that there is no remaining idea of what freedom might look like, beyond that of consumption.
In utilitarian terms, the trick of marketing is to maintain a careful balance between happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain. The market must be designed as a space in which desires can be pursued but never fully satisfied, or else the hunger for consumption will dwindle. Marketers speak of various emotions today, including ‘liking’ and ‘happiness’, but these positive ones can never be the end of the matter. ‘Anxiety’ and ‘fear’ are also important parts of the mix, or else the shopper may find a degree of peace and comfort which requires no further satisfaction.
In the twenty-first century, popular psychologists and neuroscientists are doing a roaring trade, as consultants and authors, in promising to reveal the ‘truth’ of how we take decisions, how influence works, and what will deliver the target emotions and moods. The need to ask people what they want tends to diminish somewhat during these upturns in behaviourist excitement, as it did during Watson’s day. The Benthamite distrust of language as an indicator of our feelings is manifest in how the neuromarketers claim to bypass what we say we feel, directly to the feeling itself.
The plausibility of this project is built on various strategic acts of forgetting or not seeing, of both history and political possibility. History falls by the wayside, or else somebody might notice that the waves of scientific marketing exuberance tend to resemble each other, yet never quite deliver on what they originally promised to. The dream of rendering people completely predictable and controllable is always dashed, and that rather low-tech alternative form of engagement – dialogue – is reintroduced in some form or other. And politics disappears, to the extent that, whenever dialogue does come back in, it does so within safely administered routines and spaces, where political desire can appear but not translate into political transformation.
The power of human speech is, ultimately, necessary for consumer culture to be sustained. A science built on the study of white rats, combined with clever tools for peering at our eyes and other body parts, is not, in the final instance, adequate for selling products. Less still is it adequate for the management of human beings in workplaces. For this latter purpose, yet another set of techniques, instruments and measuring devices is required, of which ‘happiness’ evaluations are the latest instalment.