The Happiness Industry (10 page)

Within two years of the Columbia address, Watson had become president of the American Psychological Association. The remarkable thing is that by this stage he had never even studied a single human being. If the purpose of American psychology was to take Wundt's methods and then get rid of all the metaphysical jargon, elevating a man whose only scientific experiments had been on white rats to the most prestigious position in the discipline was a stroke of genius.

In the early twenty-first century, the term ‘behaviour' is everywhere. ‘Behaviour change' preoccupies policy-makers, in their efforts to combat obesity, environmental degradation and civic disengagement. ‘Health behaviours' regarding nutrition and exercise allegedly hold the key to controlling spiralling healthcare budgets. ‘Behavioural economics' and ‘behavioural finance'
indicate the ways in which people miscalculate the optimal use of their time and money, as popularized in the best-selling
Nudge
, whose two authors advise presidents around the world. We are encouraged to learn tricks to alter our own ‘behaviour' (or ‘nudge ourselves', as some experts put it), to help us pursue more active, resilient lifestyles.
¹⁷

In 2010, the British government opened a ‘Behavioural Insights Unit' to bring such findings into policy-making. This unit has been so successful that in 2013 it was part-privatized to enable it to offer commercial consultancy to governments around the world. In 2014, a $17 million gift from the Pershing Square family philanthropic trust led to the launch of the Harvard Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative, aimed at pushing the science of behaviour to the next level. Brain sciences occupy the current frontier for the investigation of what
really
leads us to behave as we do.

Contained within each of these policy projects is a single ideal: that individual activity might be diverted towards goals selected by elite powers, but without either naked coercion or democratic deliberation. Behaviourism stretches Bentham's dream of a scientific politics to its limit, imagining that beneath the illusion of individual freedom lie the cold mechanics of cause and effect, observable only to the expert eye. When we put our faith in ‘behavioural' solutions, we withdraw it from democratic ones to an equal and opposite extent.

Until the 1920s, however, the term ‘behaviour' would have been scarcely associated with people at all. It would have made perfect sense to talk of the behaviour of a plant or an animal. Doctors might have used the term to refer to the behaviour of a particular body part or organ.
¹⁸
This tells us something important about contemporary appeals to ‘behavioural science'. When
this category is being invoked, there is no specific recognition that the behaviour in question is displayed by a person, as opposed to anything else that reacts to stimuli. The behaviourist believes that observation can tell us everything we need to know, while interpretation or understanding of actions or choices can be sidestepped altogether.

This was exactly why Watson believed the concept held such huge promise for psychology, if it was serious about becoming a science. In 1917 (by which point he had finally made the switch to the study of human subjects) he made his position brutally clear:

The reader will find no discussion of consciousness and no reference to such terms as sensation, perception, attention, will, image and the like. These terms are in good repute, but I have found that I can get along without them both in carrying out investigations and in presenting psychology as a system to my students. I frankly do not know what they mean.
¹⁹

This was not merely anti-philosophical. It was virtually anti-psychological, at least in the sense that we typically understand psychology. His rubbishing of abstract mental concepts – ‘sensation, perception …' – has strong echoes of Bentham. But Bentham didn't have a psychology lab and couldn't progress without a little speculation regarding the nature of human motives. Watson was calling his colleagues' bluff: if you really want to be a proper science, cleansed of metaphysics, then you have to give up everything that can't be observed scientifically. The search for hard, objective
reality
of the psyche would now be the exclusive preserve of specialists, with specialist equipment.

Watson revelled in provocation. He declared that ‘thinking' was no less observable an activity than baseball, scoffing at the privilege that philosophers attached to subjective experience. He famously proclaimed that, since there was no such thing as ‘personality' or ‘innate' ability, he could take a child from any background and turn him into a successful businessman or sportsman, purely through conditioning. Humans were like white rats, which responded to their environment and whatever stimuli came their way. Our actions could not be scientifically attributed to us, as free-thinking, autonomous persons; rather they could only be explained in terms of other aspects of our environment or previous environmental factors that have trained us to behave that way.

There is something subtly seductive about this vision, which may account for its enduring popularity in spite of its technocratic ideal. ‘Nudging' has been criticized on grounds of ‘paternalism', but of course paternalism can also be comforting. The sense that someone else is taking the important decisions, that we have been relieved of full responsibility for our actions, can come as a relief. To learn that I'm ‘hard-wired' or conditioned to take certain decisions may represent a welcome break from the constant modern demand to exercise free will. If our actions are shaped by our environment, nature or upbringing, at least we're part of some larger collective, even if it is only visible to experts. The problem is that we often have little idea what those experts want.

Watson's appearance on the academic stage prefigured a bonfire of metaphysical language. The science of behaviour would either dominate all rival areas of scholarly expertise (such as sociology, management, public policy) or simply destroy them altogether (the fate intended for philosophy). Was this really
intellectual progress of any sort? Only if the natural sciences are viewed as the sole model for sensible and honest debate. And implicit in Watson's agenda was an even greater reverence for the capabilities of technology than even his forbears had displayed, following their return from Leipzig.

What he was effectively promising was this: using exceptional powers of experimentation, the psychological observer will reveal
everything
that can be known about human beings, and all other claims (such as those made by the person being studied) are entirely irrelevant. In that sense, behaviourism was only possible if the practice of psychology was re-founded on a fundamental power imbalance, between the status of the psychologist and that of the ordinary layperson.

In Watson's hands, psychology would become a tool of expert manipulation. Wundt had assumed that it was more revealing to experiment on subjects who understood what was being tested. This was why he conducted experiments on his own students and associates: they could contribute informed insights to the research. Watson assumed the opposite. To discover how the human animal responded to different stimuli, and might be re-programmed to respond differently, it was far more revealing to use subjects who were entirely ignorant of what was being tested and how. This would also ensure that psychology could deliver on its promise of practical utility, in the hands of marketers, policy-makers and managers. If psychology were to help keep the sprawling, complex mass of American society under some sort of control, it was no use acquiring insights from studies that were only valid in relation to the behaviour of other psychologists.

For these reasons, behaviourism runs inevitably into problems of research ethics. It is not just that behavioural experiments seek
to manipulate; they also work through a modicum of deception. Even where informed consent is used, the subjects must remain partly ignorant of exactly what is being tested, or else there is the fear that they might adjust their behaviour accordingly. The goal is to minimize conscious understanding of what is going on.

Nevertheless – if one can still be bothered to think this way – a familiar philosophical contradiction arises once more. Is the autonomous, critical, conscious mind
really
eliminated from this psychological science? Within the behaviourist worldview, the general public are not unlike white rats, whose inner thought processes are effectively non-existent, until they become observable in some way. But the thoughts of the psychologist are far from irrelevant and are communicated via academic articles, lectures, books, policy reports and conversations. Behaviourism only succeeds in eliminating all forms of ‘theory' or interpretation, to the extent that it privileges the perspective of one single scientific discipline and profession, and trashes all others. In that respect, the eradication of metaphysics can only succeed as a tangible, political project, in which the vast majority of people have no legitimate view (be it scientific or otherwise) to be taken into account.

The buying animal

Behaviourism was ready-made for clients in the government and private sector. It didn't take much to help it spread to Madison Avenue and beyond, although the journey was accelerated by an event of professional disgrace. In the period after World War One, Watson was a highly celebrated academic at Johns Hopkins University, winning large research grants and pay rises. But in
1920, it emerged that he'd been having an affair with a young graduate student and assistant, Rosalie Rayner.
²⁰
Unfortunately for him, the Rayners were a revered Maryland family, who had made generous donations to Johns Hopkins. News of the affair spread fast, making national newspapers, which even published a letter between Watson and Rayner.

Given the somewhat nihilistic view of human nature that underpinned Watson's research agenda, some observers could not help but make a connection. His colleague, Adolf Meyer, who would later exert a powerful influence over the American psychiatric profession, was of this view:

I cannot help seeing in the whole matter a practical illustration of the lack of responsibility to have a definite philosophy, the implications of not recognising meanings, the emphasis on the emancipation of science from ethics.
²¹

Watson, evidently, had failed to avoid ‘responding' to the physical ‘stimulus' represented by Rosalie Rayner, but behaviourism did not cut it as a defence. Johns Hopkins forced him out, and he left Baltimore for New York.

By 1920, the advertising industry was fully alert to the potential riches offered by psychology. At the forefront of this movement was the Madison Avenue firm J. Walter Thompson (JWT), whose president at the time, Stanley Resor, pledged to turn his business into a ‘university of advertising'. ‘Scientific advertising' was all the rage. Resor was especially bullish about the emerging possibilities. ‘Advertising', he argued, ‘is educational work, mass education'. The great advertising campaigns of the future would send messages directly to their passive recipients, who would respond accordingly in their shopping habits.
What this new ‘university' needed were the scientists to provide them with the data on how to do this.

Resor was specifically seeking someone who could advise them on the psychology of ‘appeal', believing that successful ads triggered that particular emotional response. Perhaps recognizing that he needed a scholar of flexible morals, he initially contacted another recently disgraced academic, William I. Thomas, who had been kicked out of the University of Chicago sociology department for his own extramarital affair. Thomas viewed Madison Avenue as too grubby a business, so he passed them on to Watson, a personal friend of his. Resor had found his man.

That same year, Watson joined JWT as an account executive, on a salary four times what he was earning at Johns Hopkins. As part of the new position, he had to undergo some training, including travelling the backwaters of Tennessee, trying to sell coffee, and working several months behind the counter at Macy's in New York. With that out of the way, he was free to start applying his behaviourist doctrines to the design of advertising campaigns, and advising his JWT colleagues on how to trigger the right responses.

The most crucial thing for advertisers to remember, Watson implored his colleagues, was that they are not selling a product at all, but seeking to produce a psychological response. The product is simply a vehicle with which to do this, along with the advertising campaign. Consumers can be conditioned to do anything if the environmental factors are designed in the right way. Don't appeal to the consumer's existing emotions and desires, Watson urged, but
trigger new ones
. As part of a contract with Johnson & Johnson, he explored ways of marketing washing powder in terms of the emotions experienced by mothers, such as anxiety,
fear and the desire for purity. He is also credited with identifying celebrity endorsements as an effective route to achieving consumer attachments to brands.

These were exactly the sort of messages and methods that Resor was hoping to receive. In 1924, Watson was made a vice president of JWT. Looking down on Lexington Avenue, from his office high up in JWT's headquarters near Grand Central Station, he had far outstripped the fame and fortune of any psychologist who had remained in the academy.

But Watson's hubris was problematic. Business had bought into the notion that psychology could reveal everything that managers needed to know in order to sell their products effectively. Watson was content to stoke up this optimism further. ‘Love, fear, and rage are the same in Italy, Abyssinia and Canada,' he bragged. He was confident that he knew how to trigger any emotion in any situation, purely through designing the ‘stimulus' in the right way. From the perspective of the advertiser and the marketer, this was a hugely seductive way of understanding their task. But it was all one-way traffic: psychological stimuli would be chucked at the public, and they would respond accordingly in the supermarket aisles. What if they didn't? What if Watson's own understanding of ‘love, fear and rage' wasn't the same as other people's? How would businesses find out?