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octavia_cade 's review for:
Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960
by Christopher Simpson
Extremely interesting and very well-researched book, but I'm not sure the title is particularly accurate - or perhaps it's just me. I picked it up, thinking that it would be an explanation of how psychology is used to create various levels of effective propaganda. Thinking, too, that a book which purports to be about psychological warfare would actually, you know, go into examples of this. It doesn't really do either, and it took me a while to stop being frustrated with what the book said it was and what it actually was.
What it actually is can be summed up in short quote from chapter 5, wherein America's National Science Foundation, in 1952, found that "over 96% of all reported federal funding for social science at that time was drawn from the U.S. military". I don't know whether I was more shocked at the parlous state of mid-century research funding in general, or that fact that so much of that funding was military in nature... and this was just the beginning. This book is about what happens to an academic and research environment when funding is so monolithic. Researchers want to please the funders - because they're pretty much the only source of money - and so they begin to focus more on things that please the funders, who then think "What useful information, we must encourage more research here" and then people who take a different approach don't get their articles published, and don't get teaching positions, and it all becomes very incestuous and chronically, chronically limited. Yet as Simpson points out, most of these researchers didn't think of themselves as bought... but there was an unconscious move, almost en masse, to a central set of opinions, and how depressing for science that such naivete is present in those who are supposed to be trained in scepticism (and who apparently had no such training in ethics). Because, as Simpson points out, the psychological warfare and propaganda designed to be used against other nations, designed to limit casualties and help bring about what the researchers and their government considered to be positive change... actually helped to worsen pretty much every country it was used in.
Sadly, there's no much indication that this ever occurred, even after the fact, to those researchers who essentially created the theories of mass communication to begin with. After all, professionally at least, they were rewarded very well for it.
What it actually is can be summed up in short quote from chapter 5, wherein America's National Science Foundation, in 1952, found that "over 96% of all reported federal funding for social science at that time was drawn from the U.S. military". I don't know whether I was more shocked at the parlous state of mid-century research funding in general, or that fact that so much of that funding was military in nature... and this was just the beginning. This book is about what happens to an academic and research environment when funding is so monolithic. Researchers want to please the funders - because they're pretty much the only source of money - and so they begin to focus more on things that please the funders, who then think "What useful information, we must encourage more research here" and then people who take a different approach don't get their articles published, and don't get teaching positions, and it all becomes very incestuous and chronically, chronically limited. Yet as Simpson points out, most of these researchers didn't think of themselves as bought... but there was an unconscious move, almost en masse, to a central set of opinions, and how depressing for science that such naivete is present in those who are supposed to be trained in scepticism (and who apparently had no such training in ethics). Because, as Simpson points out, the psychological warfare and propaganda designed to be used against other nations, designed to limit casualties and help bring about what the researchers and their government considered to be positive change... actually helped to worsen pretty much every country it was used in.
Sadly, there's no much indication that this ever occurred, even after the fact, to those researchers who essentially created the theories of mass communication to begin with. After all, professionally at least, they were rewarded very well for it.