Everyone within reach of a radio loudspeaker or a newspaper headline knows of the tremendous advances made by science during the war: atomic bombs, radiocontrolled planes, rockets and radar, DDT, new ways of preventing disease, better ways of curing them, etc., etc. But even a very careful reader of magazines would get almost no notion of what the social sciences did and learned in the war, if anything.
It is not merely that the social sciences are backward; they simply do not lend themselves to obvious dramatics. They do not offer staggering figures (“one bomb equals 20,000 tons of TNT”), or pictures (“a gadget that can stop a tank”), or immediate personal relevance (“this may save you from cancer”). Their most important discoveries are as simple, nontechnical, and “common-sensical” as their detractors say they are. So were the discoveries of the 16th-and 17th-century physicists and doctors that helped destroy a feudal order and create a bourgeois one. Today key posts in Western society are increasingly occupied by “managers,” whose power is derived from their skill in handling men and machines rather than from any direct control over our economy. This being so, the social sciences, with their war-developed techniques, may well influence future history as importantly as have the physical and biological sciences.
Be that as it may, their war experiences will almost certainly transform the social sciences themselves. Most of the leading American social scientists were employed on government projects, and had access to men, materials, and money such as they never had before. Some of their war-work was only a continuation of their pre-war specialization. Much of it was in the new field of “human relations” or “applied anthropology,” to whose development all the traditional disciplines have contributed, and which belongs to no particular one of them. It is this field, precisely, that may become of crucial interest to the “managers.”
When the Japanese were evacuated from California, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists—we will call them “human-relations scientists”—were called in to advise the camp administrations on how to prevent strikes, riots, and rebellions. When a huge labor turnover threatened war production, human-relations scientists were asked to make studies and propose remedies. When the American armed forces moved into Pacific islands and prepared to occupy Germany and Japan, human-relations scientists showed how the occupations could be carried out with the least unrest among the native populations and with the fewest troops.
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Human-relations scientists were not just particularly Bright and intuitive administrators. They were academicians, social scientists who had worked out certain generalizations about human behavior and were applying them to the problem of making people satisfied under adverse conditions. And where their advice was followed they certainly seem to have proved the effectiveness of their “know-how.”
This new science—or rather, this practical application of an older science—had been in the making since the more astute British colonial administrations began to attach “government anthropologists” to their staffs twenty or more years ago. A student of native customs and beliefs, they had discovered, could tell them when a minor regulation violated deeper native beliefs, and he could sometimes suggest a substitute that would achieve the same end with less trouble. In the Southwest Pacific, for example, the anthropologists had a hand in getting the natives to substitute wild pigs for human beings on certain ceremonial occasions.
But how did the psychologists and sociologists, never concerned with primitive peoples, get involved in such “applied anthropology?”
A few years before the war all the social scientists had begun borrowing each other’s data, techniques, and conclusions. The anthropologists and sociologists had reached a point in their studies of primitive culture and social structure where they were forced to focus on the individual—a field properly belonging to the psychologists; while similarly the psychologists, in their studies of the individual, had finally been forced to expand their focus to the culture and social structure—properly the domain of the anthropologists and sociologists. Not without conflict, a new field of study was staked out in the borderline area where society and individual met. Besides primitive peoples, the principal “laboratories” of this new study became factories, rural areas, and Negro communities. These were chosen on no “theoretical” basis. Research needs money; and it so happened that the Western Electric Company was willing to pay for research in its factories, while the Department of Agriculture needed more pertinent information on rural social life, and various foundations concerned with the problems of the American Negro were ready to finance the study of that problem.
Applied anthropology thus moved out of the jungles and into the factories, fields, and cities.
We can easily see how the highly theoretical question of the interaction between individual, culture, and social structure became of very practical interest to Western Electric and the Department of Agriculture. The industry wanted to know how to raise workers’ output; it started its project with physiological tests of fatigue; but when it was discovered that the physiological states of workers have no relation to their output, social scientists replaced the physiologists. “Rational” psychological incentives such as higher wages and better working conditions, they found out, were less important than “irrational” factors—how workers got along with their fellow workers, foremen, and families, and what cliques they belonged to. The Department of Agriculture, on its part, wanted farmers to take scientific advice and to cooperate with plans to reduce or increase output and conserve soil. Here, too, the humanrelations scientists discovered that rational calculation played a very small part in behavior. A Department agent might have conducted the finest demonstration farm for years right under the noses of farmers, and still have been ignored completely. Once, however, the human-relations scientist discovered how the community functioned and made decisions—through its leadership and its own opinion-molders, for instance—and approached it as its structure indicated, the agent would be flooded with requests for information.
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So before the war, this rather abstract sociological work already seemed to be producing practical results. Consequently, when we entered the war and 120,000 bewildered, frightened, frustrated, and angry Japanese—for reasons we will not go into here—found themselves in half-finished camps in the Western deserts facing a smaller number of hurriedly collected white administrators, it seemed a good idea to send in some human-relations scientists to help prevent unpleasant occurrences. In the end this obscure comer of the vast panorama of war became one of the best laboratories the science of human relations had ever worked in: The first significant book on the social sciences during the war, a landmark in the history of applied social science, Alexander H. Leighton’s The Governing of Men, (Princeton University Press, 1945) tells us about it.
Dr. Leighton, a psychiatrist who had studied Navajo and Eskimo societies, was sent to the Relocation Camp for evacuated Japanese at Poston, Arizona in June 1942, by the Office of Indian Affairs, which ran it. He was to set up a research unit, to advise the administrative officials, and make general observations useful in operating similar camps in occupied territory. (Even then, perhaps, it was clear that concentration camps were about to become the living quarters of a considerable part of humanity, even on “our side.”)
Two-thirds of Dr. Leighton’s book chronicles the first year of life at Poston from the point of view of the applied social scientist. For him, the attitudes of the incoming evacuees were of prime importance. He found them distrustful of the government, which had broken its promises to them again and again, and of all its agencies; uncertain of what would happen to them, and afraid that it would be even worse than the evacuation (in which they had lost jobs, businesses, homes, farms, and property); angry at the disregard of their rights as citizens, frustrated at their inability to help themselves, and bewildered and confused at the disappearance of familiar institutions and lifelong habits and customs. Dr. Leighton describes the different cultural groups among the evacuees: the Japanese-born Issei, the American-born Nisei, and the American-born and Japanese-educated Kibei, and shows us that whether a man was Issei, Nisei, or Kibei had a lot to do with the way he felt and expressed these attitudes.
With the same objectivity, he analyzes the white administrators: we find among them “people-minded” officials, for whom the evacuees are human beings with the same range of traits as any other human beings, and “stereotype-minded” administrators, for whom “a Jap is a Jap.” Dr. Leighton describes how the frustrations of the evacuees were intensified by confused and inefficient administration, from Washington down. The barracks are not completed in time, the lumber for partitions never arrives, there are no hospital supplies, the heat is unbearable (the daily maximum did not drop below 100° once in three months), whole families and more are crowded into single rooms, payment for work ($13 to $19 a month) is delayed for months, and then reduced by bureaucratic interpretations, there are no coolers, and babies in the hospital die of dehydration—and when the sudden cold of autumn in the desert comes, there are no heaters. All along, the efforts of the evacuees to set up self-government are hampered and frustrated by changes in directives from Washington and by the contempt and disdain of the “stereotype-minded” officials.
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For applied social scientists, it was of no great importance whether or not the grievances of the evacuees were just. Many of them were indeed imaginary: Leighton describes the evacuees warming themselves around fires, talking about their “injustices” and “piling one thing on top of another to create accumulations of indignation that grew into monsters out of all true proportion.” His interest here is in their reactions as such, not in their objective foundation. The reactions were real enough, and led to action.
Earlier, after he had told the story of the evacuation by means of verbatim quotations and newspaper stories, Dr. Leighton states:
Some of the quotations are probably not true statements of fact, but, fact or not, all are true statements of feeling—and that is the point that is of critical significance in the present report. The behavior of the Japanese after they arrived in the Relocation Center was not so much determined by what had recently happened to them as by what they thought had happened to them.
The administrator has to deal with people as they are, not as they should be. ‘People ought . . . ’ is a phrase he would do well to drop from his thinking and his vocabulary. He may modify his plans to suit the attitudes of the people, or he may modify the attitudes to meet his plans through education and other means, or he may do both.
The Poston administration changed neither plans nor attitudes. “With individual human beings, severe and prolonged frustration frequently leads to aggression in some form.” In November, when two evacuees were arrested—unjustly, many felt—all the other evacuees went on strike, displaying an energy and cohesion in action they had never shown before. They established an effective system of selfgovernment for the first time. The official council, limited to the younger Nisei group by Washington decree, had never won the respect of the camp and it was swept away in the first few hours of excitement.
How treat the outbreak? The “stereotypeminded” officials were all for calling in the military and “shooting the Japs down in their tracks.” But the “people-minded” group prevailed. They negotiated with the elected leaders of the strikers, and got down to questions deeper than that of the two arrested men (who were released for lack of evidence). The result of the strike, paradoxically enough, was to establish real cooperation between the evacuees and the administration. The energy displayed in the strike was harnessed to the end of creating an effective self-government, which, despite Washington rulings, included the older and respected Issei, as well as the younger Nisei.
The work of the Poston research unit itself is mentioned only in an appendix, which seems unfortunate. The social scientists, aware of the constructive possibilities of the strike as well as of the danger of suppressing it without relieving the underlying frustrations, supported the “people-minded” officials and received much credit—mostly undeserved, according to Dr. Leighton—for the peaceful outcome of the strike.
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The remaining third of the book generalizes the experiences at Poston. In numbered principles and recommendations we are given what seem to be the most effective ways of administering groups of individuals living under stress. These rules should be applicable to all situations requiring the organization of people—whether it is running a war factory, a colony of newly resettled farmers, or a displaced persons camp, or governing the people of an occupied area. (Applied social scientists in the other fields give rather similar principles. Applied Anthropology for Spring 1945, devoted to a report by Burleigh B. Gardner and William F. Whyte on “The Man in the Middle: Position and Problems of the Foreman,” contains recommendations for good human relations in industry that often parallel Dr. Leighton’s. Another full account of life in a relocation camp, which supplements The Governing of Men at a few points, is G. Gordon Brown’s” Final Report” on the Gila River project, in the Fall 1945 Applied Anthropology.)
These principles and recommendations may appear platitudes as baldly presented here. Human relations, often called “social engineering,” do not lend themselves to precise blueprints. But not because, as many people think, “human beings are so unpredictable.” Leighton ingeniously points out the real reason: “With a bridge or a building the entire structure can be laid out in advance in the form of a blueprint. For a community this may not be, because the foundations on which the structure is raised and the materials used in the building (that is, the individual people, their needs, reactions, beliefs, and social organization) are in a state of equilibrium that alters as the work progresses. Only by frequent checking for results and for changes in the material can human society be guided in a desired direction . . . “ Leighton shows that clinical medicine has the same problem. There, too, a course of treatment cannot be plotted out in advance, but must be continually altered “so that both the effects of spontaneous alteration and the results of treatment can be taken into account.”
It is because of this that these principles appear vague. They cannot be precise rules; they can only indicate the directions it would be well to follow. Only in their elaboration and application may one see how ingenious they are. We will try to give the main points and some of the flavor of Leighton’s principles.
(1) The administrative situation must be seen as a whole. Within the limits of the task set by higher authority—in this case the setting up of a functioning and satisfied community—we must see how all factors, both of past conditioning and present situation, affect individuals, sub-groups, and the community as a whole. We must consider not only the “real” situation, “real” physical surroundings and “real” administrative restraints, but how the systems of belief (culture) of those governed modify the way they see this real situation and how their social structure either prevents or makes possible their doing something about it. If there are no work incentives it may not be enough merely to supply work to a community demoralized by idleness; and it may not be enough to offer wage incentives when there are no social incentives. The whole situation governs, and must be considered:
(2) Seeing the situation as a whole means seeing the administrative authority as part of the situation. Its members, too, are human. And we must be aware likewise of their reactions to stress, their systems of belief, and their social structure. Administrators as well as governed will respond to frustration with aggression, and will only be able to interpret events by their own system of beliefs. It is as natural for them, under stress, to see the striking Japanese as enemy agents as it is for the Japanese to strike.
(3) In the stress situation the chief problem is handling aggression peaceably. If possible, of course, the underlying frustrations should be relieved. (In Poston the simplest way of reducing frustrations would have been to send the Japanese back to their homes, jobs, and farms.) But we must also consider ways of channelling the aggressions, since the given policy may make frustration inevitable.
It is well known, for example, that uncertainty about the future heightens feelings of frustration. Consequently, Dr. Leighton advises administrators to have good lines of communication to those they govern, and to use them as often as possible. The administration should also try to create useful outlets for aggression, such as parliamentary bodies and leisure-time activities. Religious activities, too, may be useful “in creating emotional states of satisfaction, [tending to] mitigate general fear, anger, and restlessness.” And if an outbreak of aggression does occur, the administration should take advantage of the feelings of relief that are sure to follow and not pile up new frustrations by punishment.
(4) When the administration introduces changes of whatever sort, some of the things it should do are:
- take into account the systems of belief and social organization of the governed, with an eye to whether these make it possible for them to understand and accept the change;
- identify and work through the basic social units of the governed—that is, those informal groups of people who know and normally interact upon each other: cliques, friends, people brought together by common personal interests, etc. These are the “natural building blocks” of society, and it is easier to effect changes through them and their leaders than through the community “as a whole” or some formal organization in it.
- introduce the change by stages; the equilibrium of social groups is so complex that we may discover that only a little quantity of change is sufficient to produce the results we want, or that the whole change will produce an unsuspected and undesirable result.
- realize the limitations of “rational” appeals—or appeals that seem “rational” to the administrators. “To blame people for being moved more by feeling than by thought is like blaming . . . rivers for running down hill. The administrator’s job is to accept these things as they are . . . turn them to advantage if possible, but never ignore them.”
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Perhaps the reader has reacted to this account with feelings ranging from discomfort to outrage. Such reactions are shared, at least to some degree, by some human-relations scientists themselves (see Morris Edward Opler’s “Social Science and Democratic Policy” in the Summer 1945 Applied Anthropology).
In general opinion, Japanese relocation is now recognized to have been one of the most unjust and inhuman actions ever carried out by our government. After having given the Japanese Americans repeated assurances that they had nothing to fear, the government suddenly gave in to the professional Japanese-baiters on the Pacific Coast and liquidated the entire Japanese community. No selectiveness was exercised as between loyal and disloyal, citizen or alien; no question of military security was involved (those Japanese because of whose supposed sabotage the Californian Japanese were uprooted, the Japanese Hawaiians, were untouched); all Japanese on the Pacific coast, purely on the basis of race, were removed from homes, jobs, careers, and farms, and sent to concentration camps. Dr. Leighton gives quotations from the stories of a few individual Japanese; anyone reading them will wonder how unique an historical event, in basic assumptions, the race policy of the Nazis was after all. One cannot help wondering where the liberal organizations and press and the minorities-defense organizations were when all this was taking place.
However, more is lacking to the human-relations approach than a proper display of moral indignation. When the social scientists moved out of the universities and into living communities for the purpose of changing the lives of those communities, they raised a host of problems for themselves. They have not yet tried, except in a few cases, to pose these problems explicitly, and they are far from answering them.
How do human-relations scientists understand their new role? From the evidence in Applied Anthropology, the most important journal for human relations, they seem to think of themselves as “trouble-shooters,” less frequently as “social engineers.” Their experience with government and industry has made them sharply aware of the differences between policy-making and administration, and of their own limited role as mere aides to administration. Congress, an agency, or a board of directors makes policy; an administrator or manager enforces it; and the human-relations scientist irons out the kinks. When a program fails to work, he discovers what channels in community social organization would lead fastest to the winning over of the recalcitrant individuals.
On a different and higher level, he may show how a policy that might be paying economically or otherwise is at the same time destroying institutions and leading to insecurity and frustration. Yet the human-relations scientist carefully avoids interfering with policy, or even administration in the broadest sense.
As Laura Thompson points out in the June 1944 Applied Anthropology (“New Perspectives in Applied Anthropology”), his knowledge does, however, enable the social scientist to do more; he can set intelligent goals for a society, and find out the means of reaching them. Are such roles to be avoided? “Are practical social scientists to become technicians for hire to the highest bidder?” Dr. Thompson asks. “Or are they to develop a code of professional ethics which will orient their work toward the formulation and implementation of specific longrange goals?” Dr. Thompson prefers the latter alternative.
Her position implies that the social scientist should judge policy in accordance with his “professional ethics” and “long-range goals.” Otherwise, his ethics would be meaningless. And his ethical judgment might mean, for example, refusing to assist in Japanese relocation. Human-relations scientists could not, if they held Dr. Thompson’s position, collaborate with the administration of a death camp. (Those who consider themselves as only “social engineers” would not do such a thing either, I am sure. But collaboration in such situations is a logical consequence of refusing to judge policy.)
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But Dr. Thompson’s position also has its difficulties. Our democratic society does not like experts who presume to tell it what is best for it. At one time every citizen was—at least theoretically—competent in the skills necessary for any government office. Then government functions became complicated, and experts, far from the people and beyond their control, replaced or supplemented popularly elected officials. The new human-relations scientist, who is only a better expert, must expect to feel the force of a long legacy of liberal distrust of the experts. Once every worker, too, could run his own workshop. Then the workshops became larger, their operations more complicated, and the meaning of his work became lost to him. Now he looks with fear, perhaps hatred, upon the time-study engineer, the management’s expert who comes around with strange tests and an unintelligible jargon. Will he look more kindly upon the humanrelations scientist, who may only be trying to help him re-invest his work with meaning?
Basically, what is and what should be the relation of the social scientist to the object of his skills? Dr. Leighton, when commenting on the human need to know the meaning of an act in order to carry it out well, says: “This does not mean that each man must be convinced of the correctness of an aim as a result of careful reasoning, but only that he must be convinced.” This would seem to mean that it is all right to get people to do things by giving them false reasons for doing it. But even if the things we want to get them to do are good for them, even if they will be happier for it, this attitude has obvious dangers. We feel that manipulation is wrong because it violates the highest value in our democratic culture, which lies in the dignity of each individual and in his right to his own choices about his own destiny. And that in turn involves the right to knowledge of the facts. We also believe that when people act without knowing the real reasons why, they act irrationally and can do terrible things. If we, who think ourselves good, train them to act irrationally, others who are bad can use our training for their own ends.
The manipulation of human beings has a much longer history than the science of human relations. That science can now make it more efficient. But to use it in this way involves us in an unhappy paradox; for science historically has been, and from its nature should be, the way to break the power of manipulation, the dominance of one group ovelanother.
The physical sciences helped break the power of priestly and magical manipulation.
The human sciences first entered the social arena on a major scale in the late g9th century, when historians, psychologists, and social thinkers worked toward transforming our society by demonstrating how it worked. To attempt to change society by giving men insight into its workings would seem an infinitely more worthy task for science than to help try to preserve it by strengthening the power of manipulation.
The answer to the problem of the democratically uncontrolled expert and the conscienceless manipulator is easy to state and almost impossible to realize. When people know as much as experts, then there will no longer be need of them; when the manipulated know as much as the manipulators, then the manipulators will lose their power. The “knowing” that people need is of a special kind: it is thinking scientifically and understanding some of the important results of scientific thinking.
To be sure, one does not now know how a scientific and critical outlook on society, rare enough among scientists, can be cultivated so widely among people as to make manipulation for bad ends ineffectual, and all manipulation eventually unnecessary. But any such efforts are surely crucially valuable: popular writings on race and culture such as those by Boas, Benedict, and Weltfish, the literature of the Jewish defense organizations,1 and periodicals like the Journal of Social Issues and Ideas for Action, in which social scientists experiment in presenting their results to larger social groups. The volume of such publications, in comparison with the prejudiced, stupid, authoritarian, and unscientific assertions that make up most of the content of mass media, is infinitesimal. But it is all to the good.
The answers to the most important questions raised here may seem platitudinous. This only means they are still extremely vague. But these are the questions the human-relations scientists should consider if they are not to become—or remain—the unconscious perpetuators of forms of social life they intellectually oppose, the unconscious tools of forces that are intrinsically unscientific.
It is not too early for the social scientists to begin to ask themselves some of the questions that the atom physicists are now desperately asking themselves, perhaps a little late.
