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Production
DEAN R. GERSTEIN
Herbert Hoover, in his preface to the report of the President's Research
Committee on Social Trends (1933), explained that he had asked a "group
of eminent scientists to examine into the feasibility of a national survey of
social trends . . . to undertake the researches and make . . . a complete,
impartial examination of the facts." Hoover noted that the committee's
report on the findings compiled by their many experts "should serve to
help all of us to see where social stresses are occurring and where major
efforts should be undertaken to deal with them constructively. " ~ The focus
of this distinguished committee of social scientists (the term behavioral
science had not yet gained currency) and the hundreds of consultants who
contributed to the report was to document the state of the nation, especially
in terms of changing institutions, and to make such recommendations as
seemed appropriate for public policy or private action. The most notable
aspect of the 1,600-page report was its unified view (President's Research
Committee on Social Trends, 1933, pp. xii-xiii):
lithe members of the committee were Wesley C. Mitchell, chair, Charles E. Merriam, vice-
chair, Shelby M. Hanison, secretary-treasurer, Alice Hamilton, Howard W. Odum, and William
F. Ogburn. The executive staff included Ogburn as director of research, Odum as assistant director
of research, and Edward Eyre Hunt as executive secretary. Although President Hoover initiated
and appointed the research committee, funding for its investigations was provided by the Rockefeller
Foundation. Substantial services and personnel were provided by the Social Science Research
Council and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The list of acknowledgments of other
institutions and individuals assisting in the work ran to 12 pages. For accounts of the complex
dynamics of the committee, see Karl (1969, 1974).
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DEAN R. GERSTEIN
It may indeed be said that the primary value of the report is to be found in the effort
to interrelate the disjointed factors and elements in the social life of America, in the
attempt to view the situation as a whole . . . as a national union the parts of which too
often are isolated, not only in scientific studies but in everyday affairs.... It is the
express purpose of this review of findings to unite such problems as Pose of economics,
government, religion, education, in a comprehensive study of social movements and
tendencies, to direct attention to the importance of balance among the factors of change.
That attempt to bring the entire range of social science and what we now
call behavioral science to bear on a comprehensive array of national issues
in the United States was unprecedented and, in fact, remains unique.2 It is
difficult even to imagine a comparable effort being undertaken today. This
is not for lack of individuals with the intellectual range and authority of
Ogburn, whose unifying view the report largely reflects and with whom it
is most often identified. Rather, the theoretical and philosophical presup-
positions that could undergird a comprehensive mobilization of scientific
knowledge in He interest of national planning and reform presuppositions
shared in important respects even by the one-time radical activist Ogburn
and the conservative engineer Hoover no longer hold sway. The sheer
size of the research base and the scope of government action have broadened
immensely, while the disciplines and government bureaus have fissioned
into a multitude of specialties, whose skepticism about the value of any
unified effort would be an enormous barrier even were there a will to try
it.
This volume therefore does not try to develop and unify more recent
research findings and make recommendations concerning national trends.
Our aim is to spotlight a number of important changes within behavioral
and social science research itself. Our procedure is not, strictly speaking,
a historical one; the following chapters do not constitute formal histories
of science, by which one means the careful tracking through time of events,
ideas, institutions, and persons as these interact to produce continuities and
changes from one scientific era to another. Rather, our intention is to select
certain discoveries and advances that have occurred over the last half
2A series of studies camed out by federal mandate in the mid- and late 1960s involved some
tasks similar to those of the research committee, but no single study had nearly so broad a mandate.
These efforts included the Advisory Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral Sci-
ences (1968); the Behavioral and Social Sciences Survey Committee (1969); and the Special
Commission on the Social Sciences of the National Science Board (1969). There was also strong
behavioral and social science representation during this period in the work of special-purpose
national commissions on such subjects as pornography, law enforcement and criminal justice, and
marijuana and drug abuse.
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INTRODUCTION
3
century and to show in what ways they clearly distinguish the present from
the past.
The Ogburn report did not address itself primarily to the state of the art
in fields whose practitioners were involved in its preparation. Yet it provides
a unique window on certain major contours of thinking in certain fields at
that time. The authors of the following chapters have drawn portraits of
current research on major topics and contrasted these with earlier periods,
particularly the era of Hoover's presidency. The subjects range from theories
of large-scale social change to shifts in understanding the visual process;
within this span fall such topics as economic modeling, ability testing,
criminology, children's learning, and phonology. All these research fields
were active a half-century ago, but in every case the science has changed
markedly. The changes can be summarized as advances in methodology
and advances in theory.
An increasingly extensive, precise array of methods is now used in
behavioral and social science research. These methods of gathering, or-
ganizing, and querying data cut much closer than before to the core of
individual and collective human behavior, enabling researchers and others
who use the methods to look into ranges of phenomena not hitherto ac-
cessible to direct observation, analysis, or experiment. Examples of these
methodological advances are numerous. Current, detailed, accurate em-
ployment/unemployment numbers simply did not exist at the time of the
Ogburn report-the work force was counted only by the decennial census,
and then only in terms of "usual occupations." The best estimates of the
distribution of income in the United States available to Ogburn's research
committee in 1930-1931 were based on special data collected by the Na-
tional Bureau of Economic Research in 1918. Similarly, the Ogburn report's
chapter on the changing opinions and attitudes of the public is based entirely
^A^~ ~ ~;~1~ in Gina main. hooks and newspapers;
the direct scaling and sample surveys of people's attitudes and opinions
had not yet been invented. Indeed, methods for generating most of the
frequently updated indicator series taken for granted by modern researchers,
public officials, corporate decisionmakers, and evening news watchers did
not begin to appear until the 1930s. Exact statistical and quasi-experimental
research on penal deterrence, the preventive relationship between punish-
ment and crime, did not begin until the 1960s. In the study of mind and
behavior, the microelectrode, optical devices such as the Ames window,
the sound spectrograph (invented at Bell Laboratories during World War
II), and computers, including new mathematical software for efficient so-
lution of large-scale statistical equations, radically changed the character
of research undertakings.
In parallel with but independent of these methodological advances, the
Ull a~,~,~lil~llL;3 V1 I 8~,.,~ ,.,,.__ ~,
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DEAN R. GERSTEIN
vies in behavioral and social science have become far more attuned to the
complexity, subtlety, and persistence of variable, subjective phenomena
such as ideas, values, emotions, and images. The classical traditions of
Western thought that dominated behavioral and social theory earlier in the
century insisted either that subjective phenomena were immediate reflec-
tions of material reality, simply summarizing objective experience, or that
subjective phenomena formed a separate and mysterious realm, inaccessible
to measurement or rigorous analysis. In contrast, many current theories and
empirical inquiries guided by them involve an increasingly detailed picture
of the origins, character, and relations between people's internal represen-
tations, values, and attachments, and their behavior toward objects, insti-
tutions, and persons. The theoretical work of Keynes on macroeconomics,
Chomsky on language generation, Simon on decisionmaking, and Deming
on statistical quality control emphasizes the importance of human agency
in effecting performances and outcomes.
These advances have not occurred without friction. In any field, new
approaches are connected to earlier disputes and are always controversial.
Theoretical arguments are seldom concluded by the progress of research;
instead the debate shifts over time to different and more sophisticated
grounds. Theories are more often mproved than disproved.
The themes of increasing methodological precision and theoretical so-
phistication weave through each chapter of the report. The 10 chapters are
ordered under 3 headings: Understanding Social Change, Numbers and
Decisionmaking, and Discovering the Mind at Work. While any division
is to some extent arbitrary, these headings are meant to emphasize some
of the major lines of advance in the last half-century.
Social change was, of course, the main focus of the Ogburn report.
Ogburn's own studies of technological innovation and its consequences
were highly influential in their day and continue to underlie important
segments of contemporary popular thought, although much of his perspec-
tive has since been modified by investigators seeking to understand social
changes for which Ogburn's theories did not account.
The role of numbers in decisionmaking, particularly in the ever-changing
landscape of American markets and political institutions, was a second
overriding theme of the Ogburn report. This theme is taken up in this volume
in several contexts: the role played by statistical agencies and information
in democratic politics, the importance of probabilistic perceptions in me-
diating the deterrent effects of punishment on crime, and the distinctive
calculi of values and probabilities that shape individual decisionmaking. In
each instance, the authors are as much concerned with the way that long-
term advances in knowledge interact with decisionmaking processes as they
are with particular applications of knowledge to decisions.
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INTRODUCTION
s
The final section on the mind at work covers a range of discoveries in
subjects that were not nearly as prominent 50 years ago and received little
attention in the Ogburn report but have become centrally important in the
behavioral sciences: individual development, conceptual and linguistic per-
formance, and perception. The theoretical debates between behaviorist ver-
sus cognitive or information-processing approaches have been an important
motor of progress in each of these areas.
UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL CHANGE
In the opening chapter, Neil J. Smelser compares assumptions of the
Ogburn report about the relation between social science and society with
present-day assumptions. Even as the methods of behavioral and social
science research have become more sophisticated and precise between 1933
and 1983, its aspirations to social influence and power have become less
grand. What resolves this seeming paradox is the shift from a social en-
gineering view, which posited a direct link between learning facts and taking
action, to a view that recognizes the necessarily "uncertain connection"
between knowledge and policy (Lynn, 19781.
In the social engineering view, objective facts ultimately govern social
action, whereas researchers now see factual knowledge as only one com-
ponent in a complicated set of determining processes. Rather than taking
facts as eternal truths residing in the world waiting to be observed, facts
are now understood as compelling interpretive statements reached by com-
paring the results of more or less precise measurements undertaken within
a theoretical scheme. While Ogburn thought the practice of social science
was essentially a matter of patiently, methodically collecting enough sta-
tistical data to be certain of the situation, rather than jumping to conclusions
based on irrational wishes or prejudices, researchers now see the continuing
need to develop, test, and incrementally improve the precision and inter-
relation of research methods, measurements, and theoretical systems.
Ogburn and many of his colleagues held that once the facts were finally,
clearly known, one would not have to worry independently about the will
to act on them, since well-observed facts would not admit of conflicting
interpretations and would convince people to abandon irrational prejudices
or fantasies. After several decades of increasingly detailed work on the uses
of scientific knowledge, this view is now known to be oversimple. Many
factors intervene between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the social
pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness: competition for power between dif-
ferent social groups, conflict over values, and barriers imposed by the
relative autonomy of different social spheres. Conflicts over policy derive
from fundamental cultural values and differences in social position as well
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DEAN R. GERSTEIN
as more evanescent ignorance or error. Collective action is seen as a problem
of resource mobilization and leadership, hardly an automatic response to
scientific evidence. In short, as the social and behavioral science research
base has become much stronger, it is also much more clearly understood
why policy and politics can never rest on scientific research alone.
In the next chapter, Albert J. Reiss, Jr., examines a reciprocal relationship
that lay directly at the core of Ogburn's interests, the relationship between
social science innovations and broader social changes. Ogburn was a pioneer
in formulating the theory that the lead elements in social change are material
or mechanical inventions such as the steam engine, radio, and elevator
(without which there would be no skyscrapers), while cultural inventions
are largely reactive, tending simply to permit social institutions to adjust
to new material circumstances. Reiss notes that behavioral and social science
research has led to many technical inventions that have affected and changed
society. He cites the examples of human testing, sample surveys, quality
control methods, and cohort analyses. While perhaps not as dramatic as
the technological impact of the automobile or the transistor, these inventions
have profoundly affected modern life.
Ogburn and most of his contemporaries thought that social science was
an essentially neutral activity that evolved on its own; they did not know
how thoroughly even such basic scientific matters as the measurement of
population grew out of social needs and later were adapted to scientific
ones. Social change can greatly affect the measures and concepts of social
science, which are in turn increasingly important in shaping the understand-
ing of and response to change. For example, the massive levels of job-
lessness experienced during the Great Depression substantially changed the
way in which the work force was measured. Decennial surveys of workers'
"usual occupation" were supplanted by monthly surveys of current em-
ployment status. In turn, these measures were vital to managing the wartime
economy and subsequently to local, state, national, and corporate planning
and analysis.
Reiss concludes that current studies of social change could be improved
by attending more to organizational and other collective variables in contrast
to the prevalent bias toward measures of individual behaviors, and by
reorienting various aspects of the national statistical system. Such reorien-
tation might not only provide better indications about domestic social trends
but also aid in comparisons between the United States and other advanced
industrial societies.
Carrying this last theme several steps further, Michael T. Hannan takes
up questions of organizational change, delineating certain recent innovations
in organizational research. His central concern is with issues of inertia
versus change and homogeneity versus diversity: how populations of or
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INTRODUCTION
7
ganizations respond to shifting or uncertain environments. In Ogburn's era
and most of the years since, the dominant lines of organizational analysis have
been based on the study of executive decisionmaking and its consequences.
Theories of rational adaptation proposed that organizational leaders could see
changes arising in the environment and make more or less sensible plans to
adjust to them, presupposing that organizations comply with their leaders'
intentions. Theories of random transformation proposed instead that organi-
zational change is loosely coupled with environmental changes, because or-
ganizations are rife with internal politics, which makes compliance with lepers'
intentions an uncertain matter, and because planning in uncertain environments
is a highly precarious, often hit-or-miss business. Hannan outlines a new
approach that treats populations of organizations in an evolutionary and eco-
logical perspective. This type of research examines the scale and frequency
of changes in socioeconomic conditions, how these changes affect the fortunes
of generalist versus specialist organizations, which conditions force organi-
zations to conform to a standard model, and which encourage diversity of
forms. This approach takes the organizational species as the unit and asks how
well different species survive specifiable changes in competitive or other en-
vironmental conditions.
Hannan points out that Ogburn considered social organizations highly
inertial, resistant to change in their accustomed routines and motions. The
Ogburnian prescription to overcome this inertia-application of pressure
from above in the form of planning based on superior statistical systems-
strikes present-day students of organization (in the United States, at least)
as unlikely. Organizational inertia is too strong and experienced managers
are too clever at finding ways to absorb such pressure without making
fundamental changes. Hannan concludes that more research needs to be
done on sources of organizational diversity and creation, since there is
substantial reason to think that in uncertain environments, new or atypical
organizations will be more successful in meeting the demands of the sit-
uation than older, standardized ones. Rather than searching for sources of
transformation of organizations, analysis of change would be based on
examining whole populations of organizations to determine their rates of
birth and death and degree of heterogeneity. In this respect Hannan is at
one with Reiss's prescription, that more studies should be conducted on
organizations rather than on individuals.
Lawrence R. Klein reviews the growth of macroeconomic models and
forecasts, which apply some of the most highly regarded and dramatic
advances in social theory and measurement to near-term socioeconomic
change. Klein traces the beginning of macroeconomic model-building from
the 1930s. Macroeconomic models as we know them now, involving hundreds
of aggregate equations and frequently updated series of economic indicators,
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DEAN R. GERSTEIN
simply did not exist then. Analyses of the business cycle, apart from isolated
pioneering attempts at modeling, were based on very general principles and
on trends of isolated economic variables, rather than on attempts to relate
these series to each other. Neither today's detailed statistics nor a usable
theory was available to try to predict such things as the level of employment
or interest rates. The relationship between these items and such extant series
. , .
as commodity price indexes, and aggregate product measures such as gross
national product, were not even guessed at.
The chapter on economic organization in the Ogburn report, by Edwin
F. Gay and Leo Wolman, attempted to locate the causes of the Great
Depression in a combination of cyclical and noncyclical factors: the ex-
traordinary government debt that arose during World War I, which the
federal government devoted much of the 1920s to retiring (actually reducing
that indebtedness by about 40 percent); the shift in consumer purchasing
patterns from perishables to durables, whose replacement could easily be
postponed, making consumer markets far more volatile; excessive business
investment in mergers, the creation of holding companies, and other fi-
nancial combinations; poor banking practices, particularly the willingness
to devote ever-increasing credit resources to loans on real estate and in-
dustrial securities (these, in turn, being subject to episodes of speculative
frenzy) and to extension of consumer credit; an overall depression of ag-
ricultural prices; and an "unsound international commercial policy" based
ultimately on the need of defeated Germany to finance enormous war re-
parations. What is missing from this perspective, for moderns used to
hearing economic analysts tie up the stock market, foreign affairs, interest
rates, and shifts in employment in a single paragraph, is any sense of how
these items interact.
Keynes's general theory suggested in 1936 a relatively compact way to
express in a small number of equations the relations between large aggre-
gates such as the overall supply of money, the gross national product, total
investment, the average interest rate, and overall employment. National
and international economic indicator series, which became available in
increasing numbers shortly before, during, and after World War II, provided
increasingly informative statistics on which to fit these models. The strategy
of macroeconomic model-building was perfected in principle after World
War II, but it became clear that more accurate forecasts required more
detailed systems of equations. These could be constructed in a preliminary
way with the statistics then available, but there were severe computational
limits, which were resolved only after high-speed computer capabilities
(hardware) and appropriate new mathematical algorithms (software) com-
bined after the mid-1960s to enable the rapid solution of hundred-equation
and even several-thousand-equation models.
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INTRODUCTION
9
Economists have used mathematical models to discard crude versions of
a number of macroeconomic theories and to develop more sophisticated
ones. But the models do not yet permit unambiguous choices between the
more sophisticated versions of several competing theories about the basic
workings of the macroeconomy. The typical macroeconomic model fits the
observed data on which its specific numerical coefficients are estimated,
but when the fitted model is then applied to generate predictions in other
cases, it works much less precisely, being satisfactory in some instances
but not others.
An obvious aim for users of macroeconomic models is to employ the
models to control economies the way engineering controls keep physical
systems on an even keel. This has proven very difficult. Looking to the
future, Klein notes that, while pure statistical analysis of economic time
series currently competes with macro models, it would be useful to find a
way to combine them and to incorporate many more social, political, and
demographic variables in economic analysis. This is the kind of unifying
recommendation that Ogburn might have applauded. But today the emphasis
is on the testing and refinement of theories as the primary use for such
elaborate constructions of social data; applications such as planning would
be thought appropriate only well down the road.
NUMBERS AND DECISIONMAKING
Kenneth Prewitt considers the growth and complex impact on American
democratic politics of many of the public statistical systems discussed in
the previous chapters. Noting the close linkage of these statistical systems
to the research interests and products of behavioral and social science,
Prewitt focuses on the role of statistical enterprises in such intensely practical
problems as electoral accountability, political agenda-setting, and public
resource allocation. Numbers or, more exactly, statistical systems that count
various aspects of social action and provide numerical indicators of what
is occurring in society play an essential role in at least three underpinnings
of successfully democratic states: as vehicles for assessing the performance
of government policies and programs; as ways of setting agendas by iden-
tifying or documenting particular interests; and as instruments for allocating
government resources, for example, by statistical definitions of rights or
entitlements, as in the allocation of federal funds according to "percentages
of people living below the poverty line" in a congressional district. Prewitt
indicates that social scientists who develop statistical methods and data-
gathering surveys essentially for research purposes are also by virtue of this
professional expertise the "keepers of the number system," responsible for
seeing that the best kind of counting is done. He adds that this role entails
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DEAN R. GERSTEIN
a responsibility to educate the public, including officials, about what the
numbers mean-their strengths as well as their limits.
If we compare the concerns documented by Prewitt with the Ogburn
report, and particularly the concluding chapter on government and society
by Charles E. Merriam, we are struck at once by the new significance of
number systems in mediating political accountability, representativeness,
and framing of the political agenda. Merriam clearly notes these problems
and suggests that scientific investigations of human behavior may have
broad political significance in the future; he also stresses the enormity of
the problems facing government then due to the economic transformations
and crises of the period. Merriam did not, however, share Ogburn's en-
thusiasm for statistics as a possible solution to social conflict, a basis of
coordination and planning that might harmonize diverse interests. Prewitt's
chapter in important respects combines the legacies of Ogburn's and Mer-
riam's conflicting views. Prewitt confirms Ogburn's sense of the potential
power of number systems but couples it with Merriam's sense that the larger
question is how these and other instruments of governance would be put
to use in regulating new relations being formed among the government, the
electorate, and large economic organizations.
Focusing on a quite specific issue of social policy, H. Laurence Ross
and Gary D. LaFree review recent studies on the power and limits of induced
change in formal criminal justice operations to deter street crime and drunk
driving. They emphasize how the public perception versus the organiza-
tional actuality of criminal sanctions can effect the results of changes in
the law. Before 1960, virtually no empirical, quantitative evidence existed
on the effectiveness of increasing levels of deterrent threat as a method for
reducing rates of street crimes or drunk driving. Criminology in the earlier
period did not analyze the effects of punishment in its various real stages
of implementation (e.g., rates of police patrolling, apprehension, convic-
tion, sentencing, etc.) on the prevalence of crime. The chapter on crime
and punishment in the Ogburn report, by Edwin H. Sutherland and C. E.
GehLke, presented statistics on the increased severity of the penalties per-
mitted by law and the increased sizes of police forces. But their principal
emphasis was to document that no "crime wave" was evident in the period
1900-1930, that rates of offending were fairly level except for the new
crimes of automobile traffic offenses and liquor distribution. Questions of
rehabilitation were the main ones identified for future research.
Ross and LaFree believe that the practicable research agenda on reha-
bilitation has largely been exhausted, with fairly negative results. They
document a series of recent studies on deterring crime that led to the
following results. Increasing the perceived certainty of apprehension for
criminal behavior by funding more police foot patrols or well-publicized
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INTRODUCTION
11
anti-drunk-driving patrol measures does cut the rate of offending, al-
though at least in the case of drunk driving the desired effect seems to be
short-lived. There is serious question whether statutory provisions providing
for increased severity of sentences for offenders can alone have any effect.
Drawing their policy analysis to a close, Ross and LaFree conclude that
manipulation of sanctions appears to be of little independent value, while
increased police activity is expensive to achieve. They recommend explo-
ration of alternatives that reduce the damage to victims of street crimes or
drunk driving, e.g., measures such as victim compensation or more crash-
worthy vehicles and roads. Other alternatives, not discussed by Ross and
LaFree, include neighborhood volunteer patrols and efforts to change public
attitudes and policies on server behavior that can inhibit drink driving.
Ross and LaFree emphasize that individual perceptions of risk in practical
situations can determine in part how policy intentions are translated into
attitudes and behaviors. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky investigate
the ways in which individual decisions are influenced by persistent attitudes
on risk-taking and the value of gains versus losses, as well as by variable
ways to construct mental accounts of personal behavior, such as expenditure
decisions. Kahneman and Tversky see a smooth relationship between the
rationalist principles of decisionmaking formulated in the eighteenth century
by Bernoulli and the prescriptive theories of rational choice propounded by
van Neumann and Morgenstern in 1947. The notion that one could make
decisions by rational, logical, robust quantitative analysis is an appropriate
behavioral complement to Ogburn's emphasis on statistical systems and
planning. Even Robert Lynd's iconoclastic chapter in the Ogburn report on
consumer behavior seeks solutions to the ambiguities of market choice in
the development of informational consumer advisory groups. But the co-
nundrums that have come to dominate behavioral analysis of decisionmak-
ing in recent years-the "prisoner's dilemma," Arrow's "impossibility
theorem," behavioral experiments contradicting van Neumann and Mor-
genstern's principles depart dramatically from prescriptive rationalist psy
chology.
Kahneman, Tversky, and others are developing an empirical understand-
ing of individual choice behavior that involves measurable quantities such
as dollars or numbers of deaths. These choices are conceived to have two
levels. At one level, that of analyzing risky choices, individuals faced with
a decision, seen for simplicity as a series of binary options, must make two
kinds of subjective computations or estimates regarding the possible out-
comes of the decision. One set of estimates concerns the probability that
a given choice at present will lead to one or another future outcome; the
other set of estimates concerns how desirable each outcome seems at present.
The desirabilities of the possible outcomes weighted by their probabilities
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DEAN R. GERSTElN
of occurrence should govern the decision. But persons studied by Kahne-
man, Tversky, and other psychologists tend to have two kinds of systematic
biases. First, they tend to overweight low-probability or high-probability
outcomes and to underweight moderate probabilities. Second, they tend to
be loss-averse: more negative about losing a certain amount of money than
they are positive about gaining the same amount. The net result is that,
when faced with making choices involving risk, people usually prefer to
take a sure gain rather than to gamble for a greater gain (versus none). But
with similar amounts at stake, they would rather pass up a sure loss in
order to gamble on a greater loss (versus none).
One also has to consider a second level of decisionmaking called mental
accounting. There is more than one way to frame a choice in terms of
relative gains versus losses this largely has to do with what one chooses
to think of as the zero point. The way that a choice is presented, the frame
built around the choice, may influence the decision. In other words, decision
weights may not be robust. People do not necessarily make the same choice
when faced with the same objective options framed in different ways,
especially if the different frames take advantage of the biases that are built
into people's ways of computing desirability and probability. For example:
it is more attractive to frame property or medical insurance premiums as
the cost of avoiding highly improbable but very large losses than to frame
them as a sure loss taken in preference to gambling against a range of
smaller to larger, mostly improbable losses. Sellers of insurance do better
appealing to people's aversion to catastrophe than indicating how sums paid
as premiums balance against the costs and probabilities of ordinary illnesses
or accidents. The psychophysics of chance and value cause people to
over value what they already have compared with what they would pay
to obtain the same possessions or chances anew and to engage in anomalous
spending behavior depending on how, in their own minds, they think about
each expenditure: as a direct trade-off of one purchase for another; as the
current cost of the item relative to a possibly higher or lower cost at another
place or time; or as a net reduction in their overall assets.
DISCOVERING THE MIND AT WORK
The research covered by Kahneman and Tversky reveals an important
analytical linchpin in theories on how individual choices are composed into
social, political, and economic trends: the assumption of rationality as a
characteristic of the sovereign consumer, autonomous citizen, or competent
manager or worker. This assumption has turned into an increasingly com-
plex field of study in itself. The final triplet of essays in this volume looks
directly into the processes that constitute individual thought and complex
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INTRODUCTION
13
symbolic behavior, covering research on such tasks as calculation, visual
interpretation, communication, and problem solving.
In contrast to the major significance of studies of perceptual and cognitive
processes today, these research areas were little attended to in constructing
the Ogburn report. It is instructive to read the chapter on education in the
Ogburn report, by Charles H. Judd. Judd noted that schools were largely
replacing earlier economic employment in industry or on the farm as a
locus of children's activities outside the family. His report urged more
scientific study of education but nearly all the attention to research stressed
the move to less formal teaching methods in lieu of recitation and rote and
the use of psychological tests to assess the state of learning of the individual
student. Other chapters on the family, youth, and childhood paid little
attention to cognitive matters, concentrating instead on personality and child
welfare.
Rochel Gelman and Ann L. Brown discuss the revisions in theory and
method that have occurred in recent years in research on numerical, spatial,
linguistic, and conceptual capabilities of children from infancy through
school age, including the pedagogical processes by which in-school and
out-of-school learning takes place or bogs down. They place learning in
the context of interaction between the growing child and the environment-
initially the physical and family environment, later the school. Studies of
infants and preschoolers show that innate cognitive faculties are far more
sharply developed at early ages than is apparent from the limited physical
capacities that infants have, and that "child's play" is more sophisticated
in its use of cognitive skills than was thought. Recent studies indicate that
infants have rudimentary computational abilities, appreciation of the mul-
tivalent character of objects, and a strong interest in learning about the
world, and that preschoolers are "tireless explorers" and theorists who
generally place high values on learning, planning, thinking, and construc-
tion of mental and physical competences.
Gelman and Brown look at a full range of cognitive matters, including
the relations between quantitative reasoning, linguistic concepts, and visual
perception. Advances in knowledge have resulted from a combination of
methodological improvements (some using new technical devices), deter-
mination to study aspects of infant and child behavior with far more attention
to detail than previously, and withdrawal from earlier theoretical presump-
tions that the infant's mind must be a blank slate. Modern theory proceeds
from the idea that complex mental constructs do not arise from simple
associative learning or prewiring in the brain, but rather from a series of
active search-and-learn processes that evolve along with sets of subjective
inferential principles.
A major problem for schools is to retain the natural curiosity and theory
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14
DEAN R. GERSTEIN
building capabilities of the child and turn these to the mastery of more
explicit, formal bodies of knowledge through appropriate teaching strate-
gies. Many of the standard pedagogical practices in modern classrooms
asking questions to which the teacher already knows the answer, insisting
on appropriate "turn-bidding" behavior, teaching facts through nonnar-
rative rote and without contexts for use beyond quizzes designed to measure
individual performance differ substantially from teaching sequences the
child may have experienced prior to and outside school, such as appren-
ticeship, free play, story or song learning, and role exchange. Gelman and
Brown point out that to broaden in-school teaching methods, the character
of out-of-school learning situations should be recognized and better ex-
ploited, possibly decreasing the number of children who become failure-
oriented (liable to develop defensive behavior and "dumb" self-concepts
that weigh heavily against success in school) rather than mastery-oriented
(able to be constructively self-critical and to learn from rather than be afraid
of making mistakes in the course of mastering new material).
Michael Studdert-Kennedy analyzes current understanding of the manner
in which humans encode and decode words, phrases, and meaningful com-
munications from the highly complex and variable tones of speech and
motions of sign languages, and he reviews the evidence that linguistic
competence, the ability to make these reversible codifications between ideas
and expressions, is a distinct "module" in the brain. He describes the
emergence of a new kind of research on language centering around the
theoretical revolution introduced in the 1950s by Noam Chomsky. The
principal result of that revolution has been to look for the faculty of language
deeper within the human mind than had occurred under the behavioristic
interpretation of language as something impressed on the mind as though
on a blank slate, or within the descriptive tradition, dominant at the time
of the Ogburn report, which was devoted to characterizing the major lan-
guage groups, their evolution, and the seemingly endless variety of dialects.
The current two-level notion of language sees it as a merged product of
a phonological lexicon, or cross-registry of syllabic sounds and their root
meanings, and a syntactic generator, which produces as well as decodes
grammatical sentences. Both levels involve repeated sampling of a finite
set of rules and devices to produce an infinity of possible utterances (mean-
ingful sound sequences). The failures in applied linguistic research after
World War II to produce machines that could translate texts automatically
from one language to another, read to the blind, or convert speech into
written text, were highly instructive in progress toward current conceptions
of language. Studdert-Kennedy reveals how the sound spectrograph per-
mitted discovery of the complex aural interlayering of syllables in actual
speech, and how studies of aphasias led researchers to the idea that language
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INTRODUCTION
15
competence may be a basic faculty of mind, largely specialized in one
hemisphere of the brain. Most interesting are suggestions that children are
predisposed, biologically as well as in other ways, to search actively for
language structure within a series of grammatical constraints, and that this
search leads to rapid learning.
Studdert-Kennedy points to the importance of a few revolutionary ad-
vances in theory and methods in the study of language: the invention in
the 1940s of the sound spectrograph and related mechanical devices to
record and display detailed data on sound patterns; Chomsky's theories of
syntactic structure in the l950s; and the linguistic study of sign language
beginning in the 1960s. In each instance, the advance broke open an older
tradition that had considered the task of the brain in producing and decoding
speech a conceptually simple one, learned by associative principles that
activated the wiring pattern of the brain, which in turn was directly linked
to the organs of speech production (mouth and throat) and speech perception
(auditory channels).
In the final chapter, Julian Hochberg discusses how the impacts of social
demands and supporting technologies have affected our understanding of
vision; in particular, how the play of light on the eye leads to the mental
construction of three-dimensional images even when the objects in sight
are only two-dimensional pictures made of paint, ink, film, or electronic
projections in varying degrees of realism or abstractness. The relationship
between picture and object has attracted the interest of artists and philos-
ophers for centuries, but beginning in 1850 or so this became a special
province of psychologists. For many years the study was dominated by
ideas derived from Helmholtz's theory of color vision: that vision is a mosaic
of three-way color perceptors on the two-dimensional surface of the retina,
which reproduce a sensory pattern mapping the light reflected by objects
in the scene, which the brain perceives in three dimensions using automatic
computational procedures (unconscious inferences) learned through pre-
vious experience with scenes in the world.
Hochberg focuses on several particulars: that it would be advantageous,
but probably mistaken, to assume the existence of a strong neuropsycho-
logical ability to discover relatively rigid objects in the visual field; that
certain types of optical illusions persistently fool the eye by making us see
deformations of object rigidity that do not in fact occur; and that two
technologies, the microelectrode and the computer in particular, He per-
ception-emulating and picture-generating capacities of computers have
had significant impact on the study of visual processes. Hochberg reviews
evidence showing that living visual circuitry perceives more than just dots
of color and that a variety of feature detectors are directly wired into the
retina or the visual cortex, for example, provisions for detecting edges and
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16 DEAN R. GERSTEIN
for perception of depth through parallax revealed by motion. Hochberg
reviews the evidence that something else is present: an autonomous not
automatic ability to create and manipulate in the mind's eye real or hy-
pothetical images of objects and fields of objects. The constraints and
capacities of subjective imaging, and its relation to the increasingly better
understood character of optical biophysics, becomes more interesting and
salient as automatically generated interactive computer graphics become
more widely available and essential for both practical and scientific tasks.
CONCLUSION
Scientific research on social life and behavior has always had to deal
with the variability of subjective phenomena and the varying nature and
preoccupations of successive historical periods. Both the need to address
these challenges directly and the difficulties of doing so are better known
now than they were 50 years ago. Remarkable strides in advancing the
knowledge base have depended on the increasing precision and scope of
measurement techniques and data-generating technologies and on funda-
mentally improved theoretical concepts, which direct research and codify
new knowledge. In this respect the advances of the past 50 years have been
impressive and revealing. The social sciences have striven to incorporate
the varieties of observed social form as intrinsic parts of social theory, and
behavioral sciences have focused on the real complexity of reproducible
mental and physical performance. Both have participated in and benefited
from the advances of modern mathematics and electronics, and both have
generated new inventions that have diffused widely through modern society.
Greater precision and more sophisticated theory have brought with them
a greater understanding that all measures and concepts are sensitive to the
contexts and purposes in which they are employed. When placing a newly
contrived magnifying lens over some sample of human behavior, it is only
by repeated and subtle variation of the angles, as well as imagining and
testing many possible explanations for what is seen, that one can approach
certainty of having found more than just a distorted reflection of the viewer's
own physiognomy and wishes. At the same time, the subjects we inspect
most closely are often those to which the times impart the greatest urgency.
And in turn, these subjects profoundly influence the speed as well as the
manner in which the first lenses are ground. Macroeconomic model-building
was impelled by the disaster of the Great Depression and the need to
mobilize a wartime economy. The first numerical computer was built to
break Nazi military codes. The scaled intelligence test was developed to
identify retarded French schoolchildren. In each case there was a wealth
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INTRODUCTION
17
of earlier ideas and researches, yet the breakthrough was at once a scientific
and a practical achievement that went well beyond its original intentions.
Because they are embedded in social and technological change, subject
to the unpredictable incidence of scientific ingenuity and driven by the
competition of differing theoretical ideas, the achievements of behavioral
and social science research are not rigidly predictable as to when they will
occur, how Hey will appear, or what Hey might lead to. The chapters of
this volume show that much has been learned in 50 years and that benefits
have flowed from this new knowledge. There is in this knowledge a counsel
of patience and challenge: the study of behavior and social life may be
slowed or quickened, but it cannot, as Ogburn believed it could, be guided
down orderly avenues of social equilibration or reform. One can expect the
overall sphere of knowledge to expand; the area within it, of subjects well
understood, to increase. But the expanding perimeter of subjects only par-
tially understood is ever volatile win new kinds of data, new twists on
older controversies, new ideas to be reckoned with. And beyond the realm
of the known and the disputed lie far larger terntories, unexplored and
barely imagined.
Behavioral and social science remains an endless frontier.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
social change
