The Happiness Industry Page 8

  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