Dissertation Research: Thinking About Thinking in Cold War America

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project is concerned with the cognitive revolution, the post WWII decline of behaviorist hegemony in psychology and the emergence of the metaphoric linkage of human thought and computer systems. It will contextualize the re-emergence of explicit discussion of thought and mind in experimental psychology in several ways. First, it will focus closely on Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, the first organized institutional setting for cognitive science. The project will examine the ways in which the Center's interdisciplinary research interests produced and relied on its eclectic social environment. It will also consider how the Center's interdisciplinary structure interacted with the broader academic political situation at Harvard. Second, it will examine how the broader social and cultural milieu contributed to and drew from the newly emergent cognitive theories. This project will connect psychological research on rationality with the widespread political discourse on the equivalence of rationality and American democracy. It will do so by showing how government agencies and private foundations justified their support for cognitive psychology in the same way that they justified support for other cold war programs such as international development. With funding from this project, several collections in the Harvard University Archives will be consulted. These collections will include the Center's organizational files, the papers of university administrators, and faculty associated with the Center. In addition, the following archive holdings will be examined: the papers at the Jean Piaget Archive in Geneva, Switzerland, the grant files of the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation in New York City, the organization files of Yale's Institute of Human Relations, the personal papers of Peter Dow, and the papers of the Social Science Research Council at the Rockefeller Archive Center.