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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
5 stars for the subject matter - but only 3 for the content, July 25, 2006
Considering the incendiary nature of the topic (social control, brainwashing, forcible interrogations, chemical coercion) the euphemistic title of this book says much about how the content is treated. Mice, mazes and men - sounds harmless, no outrage there. Yet the history of how American behaviorists extrapolating from the techniques of B.F. Skinner (who oddly receives little mention) & Joseph Mengele (whose failed sleep-coma experiments were copied in the CIA's MK-ULTRA program) receives no mention at all.
Reading along through all the chapters, the actual "what can I take with me" information is very light, although the lengthy descriptions of many of the behaviorists' personal histories are more than sufficient. For all the talk about rat maze experiments and their importance, few are actually discussed in detail and fewer still are the facts actually learned from these.
In Part Three, "Files: Out Of The Laboratory" much is made of how -large- the files on human cultures collected at Yale were, and how -exhaustively- they were cataloged - but few examples are given of the data itself, who the data-gatherers were, and what protocols these data gatherers followed in their world travels, if anything.
And what practical techniques, exactly, did the modern beneficiaries of all this Cold-War experimenting (public relations, advertising, pollsters, marketing, government, the State Department) get out all of this? Entire books have been written on the techniques of persuasion used by each of these groups yet in "World As Laboratory" the reader walks away with very little in terms of concrete, practical modern-day examples.
The "thriller" part of the book, of course is Chapter 10's "The Impossible Experiment" documenting the CIA's brainwashing and drug experiments which rank among the most putrid of shames ever perpitrated upon American citizens by their own government. Yet, while related subjects such as Stanley Milgram's experiments are given great coverage, the equally important (and horrifying) Stanford Prison experiments are glossed over in just a couple paragraphs.
If you're wondering how Rebecca wraps this all up in her Conclusions, one need only refer to title of the book again - ultimately, the author is sympathetic, and even slightly admiring, of the scientific amoralists portrayed in the book. And although she tries to reassure the reader that attempts to create a Manchurian Candidate were unreliable and inconsistent at best, one can't help but feel that Rebecca is (mildly) rooting for the wrong team.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lessons from Questionable Experiments, March 29, 2006
You want people to do your bidding; it's only natural. And governments, of course, would like other governments to do their bidding, but they'd like to have their own people do their bidding, too. How can this sort of influence best be strengthened? Well, perhaps it would be best to go to the people who study stimuli, responses, drives, and so on, to see what makes people tick. And if the researchers have a good idea of what influences people, then surely they are the ones to consult about actually doing the influencing. It has already been done, of course, and historian and anthropologist Rebecca Lemov has documented the history of such research and attempts at control in World as Laboratory: Mice, Mazes, and Men (Hill and Wang). It is an extraordinary story about very smart guys doing experiments, some of which were quite stupid and some which caused a great deal of suffering (to both animals and humans) to see how subjects could be made to learn the right way to behave. Lemov demonstrates that this was not some ivory tower effort at great remove, but a movement whose results are still with us.
The book starts with rat experiments. Regardless of how you feel about putting rats through such trials, the astonishing fact is that rats were so wonderfully controllable that the researchers assumed that if they just knew the right conditions to administer to humans, they could, as Lemov writes, "... explain the full range of human behavior and make it predictable and therefore controllable." Scientists were sure that if they could make rats do something, they could make humans do it, too. Then they could explain such phenomena as love and union organizing, looking at internal states in an objective, perhaps mathematical way. Some of the most benign experiments on humans were the Hawthorne experiments, which found that just paying experimental attention to humans helped their morale. Other experiments were less benign. Psychiatric patients got LSD or induced comas, without their permission or knowledge. Some got a recorded message like "You killed your mother" piped into their ears thousands of times. However, turning people into ciphers might be easy, but it also isn't very useful. Despite the interest and funding of such organizations as the CIA, researchers kept coming up against a very real problem in getting people to do what the researchers (or government) wanted them to do, or reveal what they wanted them to reveal: a real change in behavior does not happen without full and willing cooperation. There is one mention in the book of Abu Ghraib, but no reader will be able to avoid thinking of it frequently.
The bizarre experiments thus had a hopeful lesson. Brainwashing can be simply done, but it is useless simply to brainwash a person if you expect to control that person. You could create a vegetable, but that was useless; when researchers tried to instill, rather than erase, behavior, as one veteran of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program wrote, they failed eventually because "...the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic." In all these grand plans for controlling people for society's good, no one could overcome the great obstacle that not only are people not rats, they are individuals, and no one plan is going to accomplish change for them all. Lemov shows that besides this failure, there is a legacy of such scientific effort: focus groups, consumer research, political polling. It isn't nearly as close to control as the scientists described here wanted to get, and let's be glad of that.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Psychology Beyond Skinner, February 6, 2007
This review is from: World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (Paperback)
I greatly enjoyed and appreciated Ms. Lemov's review of the evolution of behavioral psychology and the analysis of its weaknesses. As a student of B.F. Skinner at Harvard in the 1950s, I have had a lifelong interest in this subject.
First, Ms. Lemov exposes the basic risks and dangers of "behavioral engineering" and "control" in democratic societies. She also reveals the inadequate appreciation by behaviorists of the distinctions between the nature of humans and that of other animals. This failure was a fatal flaw in the behavioral concepts. Most significantly, if one accepts the concept of the need for "social engineering," the behaviorists never provided a persuasive set of social goals that should be attained by such methods. What is the point of social engineering and control with no clearcut ends in mind?
For anyone interested in the history of psychology, this book is a "must read."
James M Gregg,
Potomac, Maryland
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