Engineering utopia

In his first speech to the Division of Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association in 1947, Gordon W. Allport (1947) saw social psychology from a different perspective than his prior mentor and older brother, Floyd. The “difference, uneasiness, and tension” (Nicholson, 2000, p. 463) between these two pioneers of social psychology reflected the conflicting perspectives that drove the field's evolution.

Gordon proclaimed that social psychology's primary purpose is to create a utopia by solving humanity's perpetual problems, including war, discrimination, violence, and hopelessness. Today, the perennial ills social psychology attempts to cure include sexism, homophobia, racism, conflict, diversity, and social injustice. “We believe we have a contribution to make in interpreting and in remedying some of the serious social dislocations of today” (p. 182). Gordon’s perspective sounds familiar to religious proclamations for “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” Contrary to his brother’s proposition for a value-free science, Gordon argued for a practice to improve and enlarge “man’s moral sense and betterment of human relationships on an international scale” (p. 183).

As a founding father of contemporary social psychology, Allport’s declaration suggests three critical assumptions of the field, according to David Kipnis (1994):

• “Psychologists know what is best for society.”
• Social psychologists “have the right to decide what constitutes social diseases and how best to eliminate them.”
• Social psychologists have “the right to change social behavior without the consent of the people” it is trying to change (p. 40).

Such assumptions positioned social psychology against myriad religious and political philosophies that held the same beliefs.

Striking chords similar to Marxist utopian ideology in a society that distrusted autocratic control and rejected socialism, Johnson (1993; Kipnis, 1994) argued that Allport’s declaration blocked federal research support for social psychology. However, the depression and World War II catalyzed heightened interest in understanding human social behavior and solving social problems. This a “golden age” (Sewell, 1989, p. 1) for social psychology.

After World War II, the Department of Defense poured money into understanding World War II's social causes and consequences. Among the questions, social psychologists explored with federal funding: How did the Nazis influence the German population to participate in the Holocaust? What was behind the effectiveness of Japanese brainwashing programs? What was the influence of strategic bombings on the morale of Japanese and German civilians? How did the American soldier adjust to civilian life? (Weingarten, 2007).

What does not seem evident in the literature was whether the research generated understanding that would prevent a recurrence or provided social control technologies that government could use on populations. Pepitone (1981) asserted that Allport’s philosophy had practical qualities, but it “did not address specific social problems.”

###