World as Laboratory

The idea in the 1930s and â¬Ü40s was to build a grand system by which peopleâ¬s actions and behaviors, eventually even their thoughts, could be predicted and controlled. To cure societyâ¬s ills was the goal. That the early â¬Ssocial scientistsâ¬ý ran men, then animals through mazes, strapping them to galvanic skin response recorders and â¬Spunishment grillsâ¬ý in the process, seemed a small price to pay. With WWII came federal money and new techniques as vast amounts of information...
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The idea in the 1930s and â¬Ü40s was to build a grand system by which peopleâ¬s actions and behaviors, eventually even their thoughts, could be predicted and controlled. To cure societyâ¬s ills was the goal. That the early â¬Ssocial scientistsâ¬ý ran men, then animals through mazes, strapping them to galvanic skin response recorders and â¬Spunishment grillsâ¬ý in the process, seemed a small price to pay. With WWII came federal money and new techniques as vast amounts of information were collected, filed, and fed to computers so that everything from preferences to loyalty could be measured, targeted, studied, and changed. And with the advent of the cold war, decades of basically benevolent programs took a sinister turn. With CIA encouragement, and using drugs and psychosurgery, scientists turned to brainwashing, interrogation techniques, and remote-control behavior. Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history thatâ¬s not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of â¬Sspinâ¬ý practiced from marketers to politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.