Toward an Environmental History of Psychology: A Conversation with Michael Pettit

The Inspiration: A Toronto Raccoon, photo by Michael Pettit

The Forum for the History of Science in America's newsletter regularly prints conversations between accomplished scholars in the history of American science and younger historians. In the most recent number, (PDF available here) FHSA editor, Dan Bouk (Me!), claimed the privilege to speak with 2011 FHSA Article Prize winner, Michael Pettit.

We enjoyed ourselves and hope you'll enjoy listening in, so to speak. There is something for everyone: Raccoons (so cute!);  history of psychology and the human sciences (so cerebral!); Canadian institutions for HOS (so interdisciplinary!); and even a few musings on the intersection of HOS with environmental science (so relevant to the discussion Lukas introduced here!)


Bouk: Mike, I can see why the committee awarded you the FHSA article prize for 2011. Yours is a fascinating article (download here). One thing that struck me was that it lives in liminal spaces in a variety of ways: you talk about comparative psychologists on the edge of a behavioral revolution, about semi-domesticated raccoons that were not pets and yet not quite wild, about an animal (the raccoon) that thrives on the edges of human society, and about studies that get caught between an ascendant lab culture on one side and "nature faker" controversies among naturalists on the other. Did you go into this paper expecting to tell story about psychology at the margins?

Pettit: Thanks for the kind words about my article. As a historian, I do tend towards studying the margins of scientific fields and telling stories of failure. This has been a common feature of a number of pieces I have written over the years. I don't think I have ever directly written about anyone who is typically considered a canonical figure in the history of science. I seem to write screwball comedies rather than epics or tragedies.

Michael Pettit

The immediate impetus for the article comes from living in Toronto, a city with a particularly dense raccoon population. The city-issued compost bins have a lock on them to make them raccoon proof. This strategy worked for a week or two. People have devised all kinds of alternative means of securing their garbage. Thinking about these locks, I wondered why no one had ever used the raccoon in a puzzle box experiment, the foundational experiment in comparative psychology. After doing a little searching in databases, I soon found out that they had and I knew I had a story I wanted to tell.

Bouk: Raccoons are really quite remarkable animals! Changing direction a bit, I was interested throughout the paper in the relative invisibility of rabies. Raccoons in your presentation seemed less threatening than we often fear them to be these days. Those pictures of experimenters "playing" with raccoons strike us today as particularly odd for this reason. It led me to wonder when the fear of rabies came to dominate Americans' perceptions of raccoons.

But what I really want to ask you about are two other aspects of your response: puzzle boxes and Toronto. Let's start with puzzle boxes. I thought I saw you making an implicit argument about a transition from standardized experiments (puzzle boxes) in the comparative framework, to standardized animal subjects in the behaviorist model. Is that right? Did Thorndike think his puzzle box would yield different results for different species? If so, was the point of the comparative psychology project largely one of ranking species within some linear hierarchy based on competence with a puzzle box? Or is it more complicated than that?

Pettit: I too was struck by the absence of discussions of rabies in my sources. Jessica Wang recently published a fascinating article dealing with the intertwined histories of rabies, dogs, and animal control policy in New York City. I was surprised that raccoons do not appear in her story.

The comparative psychology of this era was definitely grounded in scala naturae type arguments. This is particularly apparent in the 1935 Handbook of Social Psychology edited by Carl Murchison, which presents a picture of social psychology that is totally unrecognizable today. It consisted of chapters on various racial groups and chapters on the social behaviour of various species written by both psychologists and zoologists.

I am not sure if the transition is one of exchanging standardization in apparatus for standardization of organisms. Behaviorism was predicated on the importance of control and was famous for its apparatus (e.g. Skinner box). The European ethologists repeatedly attacked American behaviorism for studying animals under artificial conditions. What interests me more is how model organisms function differently in the behavioral sciences. What happens when standardized organisms start behaving in unstandardized, unexpected ways? How do different scientists view and theorize such behaviors differently?

Bouk: So we're back to an interest in the margins, to the uncontrollable, to the screwball comedies. Now I would like to move on to the topic of Toronto. How much does it matter, do you think, that you're doing history of the United States from the outside? Does your Canadian position impact your scholarship in any particular way? Do you think you get a different sense of what the "history of science in America" looks like because, unlike most FHSA members (who hail from all over the world, but are very heavily concentrated in US institutions) you work in Toronto?

Pettit: I find that in many US history graduate programs in history there is a pretty firm line between those who study the United States and those that didn't. One of the things I liked most about my graduate cohort was that no one region dominated as we spent a lot of time together talking about history. I think this instilled an implicit comparative perspective even when I wasn't doing explicit comparative history. I think one disadvantage is that I may be more likely to speak of a singular American culture than I think most Americanists would. They tend to see it as quite fragmented along lines of identity, politics, and region.

Toronto is a great place to do history of science these days. There are about ten faculty members in the region who work on some aspect of the history of psychology. At York, the new STS graduate program and research institute underscore the wonderful relationships which exist among historians, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists studying science. Finally, there has been more regional integration with workshops and conferences among universities in Southern Ontario. All these relations shape my thinking for the better.

Bouk: Speaking of shaping your thinking, where is your thinking taking you next? That is, what are you working on now?

Pettit: The raccoon article was a bit of a transition piece for me. I had just finished the writing of my first book, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press at the end of this year). Like the book, the raccoon article is interested in how psychology as a discipline was carved out of a series encounters with various trickster figures. My current project examines how various scientists and social reformers have grappled with and represented animal sexual behavior from the 1920s to 1970s. It focuses on the question: under what historical conditions and to whom do queer forms of life and behaviors become legible and for whom are they ignored and marginalized? Somewhat implicit in the raccoon article is the idea that one can write an ecocritical or environmental history of psychology. This is a perspective that is becoming more prominent in the current project. Recently, I have been spending a fair bit of time tracing the history of tilapia as different species of the fish move out of African lakes and rivers into American animal behavior labs and simultaneously become a central feature Pacific Rim aquaculture. These interests are also reflected in a new course I am currently designing at York on global health histories designed for health majors.

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Ease on Down Them Cyborg Highways . . .

Last week’s announcement that Nevada had OK’d Google to license driverless cars in the state reminded me of another story from last year in which an agency within the US federal government claimed that cell phone use is addictive. As autonomous vehicles and partly autonomous technologies—such as frontal crash warning systems that apply the brakes for you if you are about to rear-end someone—continue to improve, advocates of these technologies may well see opportunistic advantage in current talk about distraction and distractibility.  

Look, Mom, No Hands!

I am particularly interested in what historians of science and technology and STS scholars have to add to these debates. More specifically, when I read and hear news stories on these topics, I see a dynamic that has become a central obsession of mine, and  which forms the basis of my book manuscript on the history of auto regulation. As we redefine how we understand problems, we also often change our notions of how to solve them. Shifting scientific notions of risk and of human nature often play an important role in reframing problems; they also play an essential part in how we conceive of solutions. In the instance of cell phone use, by intensifying this pre-existing image of our addiction to electronic devices, federal agencies can establish two things simultaneously: ideas of the distracted driver as a delinquent person who risks the lives of others and notions of how to remedy this perceived threat.  In our current situation, distraction (could) = autonomous vehicles (read, robots)—well, potentially . . . if actors, powers, and forces align to make it so. 

Here are some thoughts on how our current discussions play out against a historical backdrop.

During the week of December 13^th, 2011, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), after months of study, recommended a total ban on cell phone use by drivers.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) blamed distracted driving for 3,092 deaths in 2010. A government report estimated that 120,000 drivers sent text messages daily in 2010, a one-year increase of fifty percent. In this context, various interest groups and government agencies have called for increased scrutiny of cell phone use in cars. Of distracted driving, Robert Sumwait, a member of the NTSB, said, “This is becoming an epidemic.”

NHTSA's So-Called "Social Norming Logo"

Unwittingly perhaps, Sumwait echoed sentiments that were embodied over fifty years ago in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1959 article “Epidemic on the Highways.” Moynihan explored the phenomenon of crash deaths through the metaphor of disease, and the article had an important influence. It was part of the movement—along with Ralph Nader’s more famous book Unsafe at Any Speed—that led to the adoption of federal safety standards in the United States in 1966. Other metaphors for death by automobile have abounded throughout the years. Early after the car’s introduction, people cast it as the “Devil-Wagon” that would tempt young, virile (and rich) men to speed recklessly, endangering themselves and others. During the 1960s, politicians, including President Lyndon Johnson, repeatedly pointed out that more people were dying in automotive accidents than in the Vietnam War. Viewing traffic deaths as a public health issue has always held a certain power, however; it enabled federal control to enter new, previously sacred and sovereign, spaces. Metaphors of health have repeatedly taken center in debates over automobiles. The dual movement of medical knowledge and power reached its culmination when President Johnson appointed a medical doctor, an epidemiologist, to head the nation’s first federal auto safety agency. 

The NTSB’s recent rhetoric reflects a very particular kind of medical metaphor, however, namely that of addiction. “[Distracted driving] is becoming the new DUI [Driving Under the Influence],” Robert Sumwait said. This turn to addiction allows safety advocates to draw on a long history of combatting drunk driving, which was seemingly born with the car. (Was there an earlier tradition of taking the horse or the sleigh for a late-night, drunken joyride?) From the automobile’s earliest days, people associated it with dangerous risk-taking of drunkards. While states and localities passed many anti-drunk driving laws in the first half of the 20th century, it was not until the 1980s that organizations, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, began to form around the issue. Drunk-driving attained a new, heightened level of public consciousness. Meanwhile, over the course of the 20th century, experts and advocates, spurred on by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, began to envision addiction in medical terms. 

An Ad Campaign Seen on Billboards Throughout the Midwest (and Perhaps Elsewhere)

Popular media often describe people’s relationships to their cell phones and other consumer electronics as one of “addiction” or “dependence.” People winkingly refer to their Blackberry smartphones as “Crackberries” and recount stories of children throwing tantrums on vacations while experiencing digital withdrawal. Billboards throughout the United States proclaim, “Don’t drive while InTEXTicated.” The National Safety Council, which has been addressing road safety since roughly 1919, began a billboard campaign called “Death by Cellphone” that features photographs of people killed by distracted drivers.  

Policy makers marshal a number of social and biological sciences, from neuroscience to psychology, to create a “scientific” characterization of driver distraction. While this discourse views distraction as nearly universal human trait, the sciences equally paint the image of the distracted driver as a kind of person that requires restraint. It is particularly interesting to think about how sciences from the neuroscience-behavioral economics-Nudge nexus (previously discussed on American Science here) may play a role in shaping discussions of these issues.

For now, the NTSB is relying on the age-old methods of moralizing and public shaming to dissuade distraction. Deborah Hersman, the chairwoman of the NTSB, likened distracted driving to cigarette smoking. “We have to get to a point where [distracted driving] is no longer in vogue,” she said. Yet, she also added a stronger admonishment, “If you can’t control your impulses, you need to lock your phone in your trunk.” Stronger nostrums are on the horizon, however. If the NTSB were able to encourage Congress to set a nation-wide ban on cell phone use—which is highly unlikely for both political and constitutional reasons—we can imagine a host of technologies being brought to bear on the problem: including surveillance systems and perhaps even in-car cellphone jamming devices. The promise of automated, robotic cars lies off in the distance, but is already being studied for its safety potentials by the Department of Transportation. Someday, the problems caused by our personal cellphones could be solved by another technology, our own personal robot chauffer who will drive us quietly, safely, and peacefully down the cyborg highway.

The NTSB’s endorsement of a total ban of cell phone use while driving lit up the blogosphere. Conservative writers reacted with mockery and scorn. The picture of the open American road and the private car speeding down it has long been useful to and lucrative for auto companies, filmmakers, and, with the coming of NASCAR, media and sporting companies. But some subcultures and people have embraced the car’s supposed liberating potential, and if federal agencies begin to frame distracted driving as addiction consistently, we can imagine how the lines of battle will shape up. In the present political climate of Tea Partiers and anti-government vitriol, the issue of distracted driving could provide a rich and bloody battleground between freedom-lovers and nudge-artists.

How are History of Sci/Med/Tech and History of Capitalism Teaching One Another?

Continuing our ruminations on the history of capitalism and its relationship to the history of science/med/tech or to STS (here) (here) (and here), I think we might find some useful categories of analysis in Jeffrey Sklansky's recent historiographical essay from Modern Intellectual History (Vol. 9, no. 1, 2012). Sklansky's piece, "The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism," (requires subscription) does what great historiographical works should do: it covers and categorizes a wide literature using analytical categories that shed new light on the assembled works; it reads recent scholarly trends perceptively; and it points the way toward fruitful new avenues of research and analysis. I'll summarize Sklansky's approach to each of these aspects, but for our purposes, I will note this first: Sklansky's analysis suggests to me that the history of capitalism as currently practiced already shares deep affinities with our own dominant historical and methodological approaches.

Framing his essay, Sklansky explains the difference between the "old" and "new" histories of capitalism, being very careful throughout to avoid any claim that the new is better or smarter, or anything of the sort: it is simply a new avenue of investigation that raises interesting research questions and speaks to our contemporary sensibilities and concerns. The old history of capitalism, dominant only a few decades ago, focused on "proletarianization," on the process of making wage laborers. The new history of capitalism, Sklansky argues, shifts its emphasis toward "commodification":

The ceaseless process of churning work and wealth into prices and profits effectively converts qualities into quantities, rendering all things countable and commensurable by subjecting them to a single standard of pecuniary value. Joining material life to the abstract power of capital, commodification requires for its comprehension a more capacious kind of historical inquiry, transcending the old division of labor between intellectual and social history. (234)

He goes on to explain attention to commodification forces historians to think about "implicit notions and norms" alongside "formal intellectual systems such as Newtonian mechanics and neoclassical economics."(234)

Why make this shift? For one, it allows for some productive synthesis. Take for example, the idea of commodified labor. Unlike proletarianization, which assumed a move toward wage labor, applying commodification as a lens for thinking about labor allows for narratives of capitalism that include non-wage labor, including chattel slaves, as well as "paupers, prisoners, 'coolies,' peons, sailors, servants, contract laborers, sharecroppers...."(237) Given the significance of slavery historiography over the last generation, it makes sense that any history of capitalism should be capable of thinking about slavery as part of the system, rather than as something exceptional.

A more important reason for the shift may have to do with our prevailing political economies. The story of proletarianization meant more to historians bringing to the past questions raised by their own experience of post-WWII industrial unionism. In our own financialized times, as industrial corporations increasingly and worryingly recede into the past, historians have begun to ask more about the importance of finance, and really of money, over the last few hundred years.

Sklansky divides the existing scholarship into three categories: works "conceiving capitalism" as a:

1. "form of selfhood or way of being,"
2. "a system of representation or way of seeing, and"
3. "a framework of trust or way of believing." (234)

Number 2 should strike a particular chord with us. Sklansky points to (among others) Lorraine Daston, Ted Porter, Mary Poovey, and John Carson as examples of people who demonstrate the power of new conceptual apparatuses, often constructed with the sciences, to facilitate the reduction of a complex material world into something that can be bought, sold, and traded in markets, to allow "economic actors and activities in all their irreducible particularity [to be] broken down and reconstituted in terms of commensurable units of quantitative value."(243) Number 1 should sound familiar too, since our field has been paying more heed to scientific selves as of late. And while Sklansky draws few parallels from number 3 to any literature from the history of SciMedTech, I can't help but think that the movement Sklansky sees to "blur the boundary between selling and speculating, finance and fraud" is related to our own commitments to treat "pseudoscience" as a suspect label, which dates back at least to Shapin's decision to take phrenology seriously in the 1970s.

Sklansky closes the essay with a call for increased attention to capitalism as a "way of ruling, of establishing and exercising social power."(246) His idea here is not so much that we should imagine William Graham Sumner's "captains of industry" to be in charge of everything as it is that we should recognize the way that capitalism created new social and cultural forms that mediate power relations, for everyone from the wealthiest financier to the poorest whaleman. This looks to me like a Foucauldian approach, with the "microphysics of power" originating and evolving in shifting political economies. More specifically, Sklansky points to Ken Alder's Engineering the Revolution to suggest the ways that states shape industries, markets, and ideology all at once; he points as well to work that shows capital to act as a kind of quasi-state, and to histories of social thought like those by Howard Brick and Dan Rodgers that tie political/economic and intellectual change together.

On the whole, the trend Sklansky sees appears to have been made possible in large part by creative intellectual appropriation: Daston, Porter, Carson, Alder etc. are not "historians of capitalism." But Sklansky is right in seeing their work as consonant with and constitutive of the project of the history of capitalism. Up to this point, history of capitalism seems largely to have been working in parallel to or even borrowing from the science-studies-turn in history of science.

But I have high hopes that the history of capitalism will increasingly be a resource for us to draw upon, that in the process of appropriating STS for its own purposes, the history of capitalism will show us new ways to think about changes in science, medicine, and technology that are more aware of political economy.

A Craft Economy: Technology, Aesthetics, and Beer

Yesterday, I awoke to two announcements. First, Steve Shapin is giving a talk in England at the end of the month called "The Tastes of Wine: Towards a Cultural History." Second, next week is "American Craft Beer Week." Here's the announcement for that:

These two events have more in common than alcohol and my inbox. Shapin's argument that oenophiles constitute an evolving "taste community" is increasingly true for craft beer in the United States. While not amenable to Shapin's longue-durée approach, craft brewing provides an alternative view of technology, economics, and aesthetics – capitalism, you might say! – with a peculiarly American flavor.

Check out that promotional video. It's all flags and amber waves of grain – Benedict Anderson in a pint glass. And the pride is well-placed: as announced at last week's Craft Brewer's Conference, the industry posted a 15% retail spike in 2011, reaching 5% of the domestic market by volume and topping 2,000 breweries for the first time. (There are lots of write-ups on the "beer bubble" – for a start, try this and this.) 

Craft Beer capped off another growth year in 2011

Why is this of interest for readers of AmericanScience? Well, beyond its neat economics – including a re-localization of an industry that Prohibition had pared down to a few national distributors – I think there are two things we might consider relevant.

The first has to do with connoisseurs. If we take Shapin's point that taste shapes scientific inquiry and gustatory behavior alike, the beer industry affords a window onto shifting standards and social stratification that wine simply can't provide. While it's no surprise that oenophiles have elaborate systems for evaluating wines (and one another), the ever-expanding Beer Advocate – a review hub and "taste community" of its own – might be a little less familiar. The shifts in vocabulary and behavior Shapin likes are happening way faster in the craft beer community – and around a product that until recently was viewed by consumers and detractors alike as wine's simpler alternative.

Yes, I did a Google Image search for "wine snob."

The rapid rise in beer connoisseurship – witness NYT wine reviewer Eric Asimov adding beer to his repertoire – even has some worried it's abandoning its populist roots. But for scholars interested, like Shapin, in "descriptive and evaluative vocabularies," the industry's ascent offers an untapped (sorry) resource for the study of "languages of connoisseurship," gustatory or otherwise. 

The second point of interest has to do with a technology: the can. A decade ago, there were precisely zero craft brewers canning their beer. And then, as the saying goes, there was Dale's. While Oskar Blues spent a while as the sole hand-canner in the industry, we're now in the midst of a revolution, with close to 200 craft breweries shipping cans in 2012. 

Dale's Pale Ale (Oskar Blues Brewing Company)

Why can? Well, there's a website devoted to the cause, and they've spelt out a laundry list of reasons, from flavor freshness to economic efficiency. The fact that cans are lighter and smaller makes them cheaper to ship and easier to store; the fact that they keep light out and don't break means you can take them more places and they stay fresh longer.

So what took so long? Taste. And not the taste of metal – while it's true that if you drink straight from the can the taste will be different than from a glass bottle, no metallic flavor leaches into the beer due to a water-resistant polymer that coats the can's interior. 

Instead, it was taste in the sense Shapin is interested in. As the craft industry rose from its homebrewing roots over the '90s, microbrewers were careful to distinguish their products not as "alternatives" to big names like Budweiser and Miller, but as a different product entirely. 

As they built a customer base, cans became the province of "domestic" behemoths (who bottled too, of course); craft brewers bottled because, well, bottling was higher-end (it's probably no accident that, at least until recently, most wine came in bottles too).

Even after Dale's plunged in, other brewers bided their time. One craft CEO is quoted as saying: “If consumers buy it and they want it and there is a market for it, we will do it." Makes sense, as does the lack of a market (if you buy my line about distinction). But what changed? 

"What was the hipster," asked Mark Greif

I think it's no coincidence that the 2000s also saw the apotheosis of a cultural union between a "rebel subculture with the dominant class." Flannel, trucker hats, and – most significantly – canned beer marked an aesthetic elite. It's no coincidence, I'd wager, that the peak of PBR's power coincided with Dale's ascendence – just take a look at those patriotic cans. On the shelf or in the koozie, Dale's met the aesthetic demands of hipster and connoisseur - the look was right and the beer was good. 

None of the sources I've cited point to shifting aesthetic norms (there are, however, the "Canny Awards" for best design); justification is economic and environmental, with no mention of convergence on Budweiser et al. In a market booming like craft brewing, technology, economy, and aesthetics – the sorts of things we've been discussing lately – are moving quickly, and together. A companion piece to Shapin's wine project might be in order.

Radiolab: Pop Science, Common-Sense

Like many people in the history of science and technology, I am deeply interested in the history and cultural work of popular science, including magazines, books, TV shows, and now webpages and podcasts. I hope to offer some reflections on pop science over the coming months and also to highlight some web-based works on science that historians and other critical thinkers have created.

I wanted to start with some thoughts on a truly great pop science program, the WNYC (National Public Radio) show, Radiolab. And I particularly want to think through its relationship to common-sense, something that all popular communications must consider.

Radiolab began production in 2004. It features co-hosts Jad Abumrad, who received a MacArthur "genius" grant for the work in 2011, and Robert Krulwich. From the beginning, the show experimentally pushed the bounds of radio sound design, which had already achieved new heights in programs like This American Life and Studio 360. Abumrad and Krulwich typically tackle *big* topics that have always haunted Western thought (and Eastern thought for that matter, though their focus is typically on the West). The nature of time, space, consciousness, emotion—all of the timeless puzzles provide the show's fodder.

It is here that the question of common-sense rises for me. As Lukas, Hank, and I recently discussed, every communication, but especially popular, mass communication, depends on some notion of what current common-sense is. I wonder how Radiolab does and does not invite us to challenge such notions.

I want to note upfront that I do not mean what I say below as a grouchy, STS-infused criticism of Radiolab, a program I adore. All following prodding is meant only with love.

In this video, Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life and NPR hipster nonpareil, says, "Radiolab is reinventing what you can do on the radio in a bunch of interesting ways and the most basic one is that it conceives of itself as an entertainment." This is important. We can question the degree to which previous science popularizers—Carl Sagan, James Burke, David Attenborough, etc.—viewed their work as entertainment, but what is clear is that Radiolab participates in what we now call "edutainment." As such, its audience is the middle-brow, the class of folks who like to be broadly educated, who enjoy learning, and who say things like "that's a good fact to bring up at a cocktail party." Here, I'm not using middle-brow as a slur. Or if I am, I'm aiming it directly at myself. We can wonder, however, how Abumrad and Krulwich imagine the middle-brow listener (reader, consumer, whatever). Perhaps, they simply think of themselves or their friends, but regardless, implicit or explicit, such imagining is at work.

Radiolab often takes part in a dominant middle-brow trope of the day: the appeal of the counter-intuitive. People describe Malcolm Gladwell as the master of this domain. (A moment of Google joy: "Malcolm Gladwell counterintuitive" came up in the search bar as I was typing it. His place in the literature of the counterintuitive has been long recognized. Thanks to Andy Russell for pointing out this trend to me a few years ago.) This form of story-telling has a broad reach. We can think, for instance, of Steven Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics, which argued, among other things, that the decrease in crime in the 1990s was caused not by prison reform or increases in policing but by Roe v. Wade because the court decision allowed people to abort unwanted children, some of whom would have eventually become criminals. Today, among some populations, there is a sense that, if a statement is counter-intuitive, it must be right. So, there is a business in trafficking in counter-intuition and supposedly shaking us up a bit. Radiolab participates in this business more than a little.

The counter-intuitionists, including the Radiolab-ers, love to play at the nexus of neuroscience, behavioral economics, and sociobiology. Man, that stuff is hip. (But why is it hip? Maybe a topic for the future.) Abumrad and Krulwich use these fields and theories—and work conducted in their name—to interrogate received beliefs about things we hold dear, such as sexuality and emotions. Now, when communications are pitched in this way, we should question whose "received beliefs" we are talking about. Do any of us really believe the things such communications catechize? My guess is that these stories of unveiling reward us, in a Nietzschean way, for already believing what the program is telling us is smart, cutting-edge, and quasi-heretical. In this way, "unveilings" simultaneously reinforce a certain status quo and congratulate us. But, whatever, I'll take those snobby kicks if I can get them.

What concerns me more is how Radiolab and other instances of pop science could help us to question the world even more but pass on the opportunity. They particularly eschew the opening to examine the uncertainties of science itself. Sure, Radiolab is pretty good at admitting at key moments "we don't know what's really going on here." But I think it typically uses science as a tool to question the world instead of questioning those very tools and how easy and reassuringly they lay at hand. Along these lines, I have this kind of arch-Radiolab scene that I can't get out of my head. In it, Robert says, "Hold on, I don't get it. How does that [human thing under question] work?" And Jad softly, compassionately replies, "Well, you see, thousands of years ago, when we all lived out on the veldt . . . " and then explains how we evolved to be this way or that way. Indeed, the show uses an "imagine you are running from a tiger" type evolutionary thought experiment in one of its earliest programs on stress. I'm into Darwinian evolution. It's a great explanatory theory, and I love its history. But I wonder if we are best served by such easy-going explanations that depend on ideas that are by no means scientifically "settled." (I know, I know. A problematic statement. But let's keep moving.) I'm even more puzzled and perturbed by Radiolab's casual evocation of neuroscience and behavioral economics. And here's why.

Consider the book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The authors use studies drawn from neuroscience and behavioral economics to argue that humans are inherently irrational but that their decision-making can be greatly improved through some minimally manipulative techniques. Great. We can see how such a view would appeal to many people, especially the well-intentioned elite. David Cameron's government in the UK is currently setting up a 'nudge' unit to improve public policy-making and make it more efficient. Now, here are a few possibilities and it's unclear which is most likely: a) the efforts of this unit will be hugely successful and will, by all accounts, greatly improve life, b) Nudge accurately captures some aspect of human nature and, thus, will provide governments with better tools for coercing the public in perhaps undesirable ways, and c) the Nudge-ian visions of human nature are wildly off-base but will provide foundation for misguided and destructive policy efforts for the next generation. I'll make no bets on which one of these extreme alternatives–or much more likely some combination of them—will win out. But to the degree that we must consider such ideas as citizens who may one day be affected by them, I'm not sure that Radiolab is helping us be better people by casually, uncritically deploying the neuro-behavioralecon-sociobio nexus.

To conclude, Abumrad and Krulwich take scientific findings and use them as tools to explore the great mysteries of existence. It would be so great if they would use those same tools, and their methods of story-telling, to complicate our understanding of science in society. I have every faith that they would do it in a way that was insightful, empathetic to scientists and audience members alike, and, yes, entertaining.

(Capitalist) Numbers to Narratives

Lee kicked of a lively discussion Friday as he wondered what the history of capitalism had to say to the history of technology, (medicine?), environment, and science (HoTeES, or HoTMeS?). Lee postulated that the interactions of capitalism/political economy and science might be expected within the realms of shared problems and jointly produced tools. I wrote a dissertation about "tools for discrimination" and the "science of difference," wherein life insurers are shown to be important sponsors of investigations into human difference---so I am on board. To help me judge Lee's hypothesis, I would like to offer a few posts over the next week that point to intersections between these two fields (HofCapitalism, HofScience/Tech/Med/Env). Let's get empirical, so to speak!

A different sort of account book, but an accounting nonetheless---from Samuel Blodget's Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (1806)

Evidence 1: Caitlin Rosenthal's exquisite essay in the most recent issue of Common-place, one of the hippest journals around. Rosenthal has one big argument, accented by a score of anecdotal gems. She argues that account books, whatever else they might be, are always narratives---they tell stories. This, she claims, was true for the early nineteenth century books that now populate her historical work and remains true for the accounting summaries published by firms like Countrywide Financial on the brink of its disastrous unraveling.

Rosenthal battles the false conception that keeping accounts implies a mechanical, objective system (or, really, that such a system precludes narratives). Her case rests in part on evidence that nineteenth century systems were anything but mechanical: indexes were just being invented and were hardly standardized, accounting procedures varied from account keeper to account keeper (to much consternation). But she closes the piece noting that today's accounting system, although constrained by hosts of rules and standards, still produces narrative documents, which are trusted with peril.

Yet Rosenthal's point does not appear to me to be destructive or skeptical---she has not come to bury objectivity, accounting, what-have-you. In fact, much of the essay revels in the details of early nineteenth century bookkeeping practices, asking, not judging. The question arises over and over: why did all these individuals keep books?

One answer Rosenthal provides is this:

Keeping accounts was a daily quest for useful information. Sometimes quantitative information was punctuated by a bit of prose, verbalizing the intentions of a book's keeper. In 1870, Thaddeus Fish of Kingston, Massachusetts, contemplated the buying and selling of eggs in his account book. He described how a woman had "bought 150 eggs of a country man." She sold all of the eggs, but at an array of different prices, some yielding a profit, but others a loss. Fish, puzzling over her business, supplemented his muddled calculations with text: "I Demand to know whether she Lost or gained by her eggs." The urgency of his demand reflected neither profit seeking nor an opposition to it. Rather it revealed the daily necessity of understanding whether time was well spent and which risks were worth taking.

She also points to accounts kept to facilitate long distance management, to discipline laborers, to judge workers' alcohol consumption (and morals, implicitly), to facilitate inheritance, and more generally to provide some antidote to the complexity of modern life.

So, how can we use Rosenthal's piece as evidence in our general investigation? First, we might decide to conclude something not-that-surprising: that historical or sociological approaches to knowledge (like Ted Porter, who looms here, next to Michel Foucault, among others) have provided useful tools for historians of capitalism like Rosenthal (although I'm not sure if that's a label she would embrace).

Second, we might say something more significant: that nineteenth century Americans (and lots of other people too) were interested in making sense of an increasingly complex, interconnected world. They encountered overlapping and interrelated problems of trust (how do I decide who to invest in, or who to believe?), problems of risk (how do I decide whether its worthwhile to invest or believe?), and problems of knowledge (what is true? what will work?). To solve these problems, they (whether businessmen, farmers, or scientists) turned to new tools and techniques, and especially to quantification.

Finally, we might learn a lesson from the attention to materiality in Rosenthal's essay and apply that to our investigations of new shared knowledge practices. Rosenthal shows us account keepers writing over every corner of a book, desperate to save expensive paper, for instance. How did those account books compare to the ledgers and notebooks that scientists increasingly relied upon? Did astronomers and actuaries go to the same shops in New York (the Mutual of New York, I happen to know, bought all its accounting materials from a printer on Nassau Street in the 1850s)? My guess is: yes. In so far as the actuaries were often also astronomers, the answer was surely yes. So I will add a category to Lee's speculations: shared problems, shared tools, and shared materials.

[Three different people sent me a link to Caitlin Rosenthal's piece in the space of two days---it might have taken me a while longer to find it otherwise. Thanks to GH, HR, and MK.]

The History of Capitalism and HOTeES

When talking about the history of science and technology here on American Science, I've referred to it as HOST. This is nice. HOST has overtones of hospitality, gift-giving, amiability, and helpfulness, but maybe it's a bit too cozy. On the other hand, it could also be read as a parasitic host, which is more thrilling. Yet, it might be better for marketing purposes to call it HOTS, as in "I have the HOTS for research on paleontology and capitalism." Perhaps, it is even more advisable to talk about the history of technology, environment, and science, or HOTeES. Because, let's face it, who doesn't want to be one of the HOTeES? The things we think about on planes.

I returned a few weeks ago from the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians. This year's theme was "Frontiers of Capitalism and Democracy." I'd like to share some various and scattered thoughts on the conference's theme, with an eye as always towards (implications for) the HOTeES. 


On Friday, April 20, Sven Beckert, Jefferson Cowie, and Kim Phillips-Fein took part in a panel titled "The Return of the Political Economy?" The panel was clearly a cornerstone of the conference's focus on capitalism. As a sub-field, the History of Capitalism (HOC) has been gaining a great deal of traction in recent years, with centers dedicated to the topic opening at Harvard and Georgia. Many practitioners apply the sensibilities and approaches of cultural history to their object, examining how the economy, class, and "markets" are (socially) constructed. Beckert, Cowie, and Phillips-Fein all agreed that a focus on political economy in history is returning—or, indeed, has already come. Beckert outlined his vision of HOC, including his belief that it draws together various disparate trends in historiography.  Cowie expressed his discomfort with the HOC label, preferring the older term, political economy. I've heard several reasons why people prefer this older word, but at least one person told me that he is also interested in non-capitalist economies and, thus, finds political economy more broadly applicable.

HOC has tended to focus on labor (Jefferson Cowie, Shane Hamilton, Bethany Moreton), finance (Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Louis Hyman), and elite politics (Sven Beckert, Kim Philips-Fein, Ben Waterhouse). Many of these historians 'slip the surly bonds' of these artificial categories I've tossed up. Other works that fit the HOC bill don't fall neatly in these boxes at all. One example is Elizabeth Shermer's forthcoming book, which is based on her dissertation "Creating the Sunbelt: The Political and Economic Transformation of Phoenix, Arizona."

Still, questions remain: what place do HOTeES have in this mix of historiography? Inversely, what does the (ad) HOC have to teach HOTeES? And I know that the answer to both of these questions is "a lot," but I'm interested in hearing what people see as productive places of tension and overlap. I should also say that these questions remain unanswered for me and perhaps only me. Some people already play at this boundary between HOTeES and HOCs, like Courtney Fullilove & Emily Pawley (both of whom were on an great panel together at OAH) and American Science's very own Lukas.

Beckert explicitly casts HOC as providing a grand synthesis for a profession that was earlier riven by division, especially by a heavy focus on identity—what, in That Noble Dream, Peter Novick hauntingly called "Every group its own historian." Many HOTeES are probably sympathetic to Beckert's drift here. We might consider how this synthesis relates to the another potential synthesis we've seen amongst HOTEeS (as previously discussed on American Science, in the comments).

Of course, protests of "old wine, new bottles" can be heard near and far, particularly among established business historians. (I've heard several people say that their HOC courses were once business history classes.) Along this line, an interesting game might be to consider older works by HOTeES (or their paramours) and judge whether we could now re-describe them as HOC. What about studies of corporate R&D labs and other examples where money shaped science? We could also consider older works that address Frederick Winslow Taylor and Scientific Management. Historians, like Daniel Nelson, Daniel Rodgers, Hugh Aitken, and David Hounshell have examined how Taylorism did (and did not) shape industrial practices in the United States. Would these works need some kind of extra, special sauce to become HOC?

Moreover, many historians of science still see the shadow of Boris Hessen's flat-footed Marxist interpretation of Newton and the scientific revolution. They may be hesitant to engage with this return to political economy. But is there some more subtle way to bring science, economics, and Hessen's concern with the rise of practical "problems" together? Probably yes. I thought, for instance, of Jeremy Blatter's doctoral work at Harvard on applied psychology, and how businesses of the day created "problems"that begged for work by scientists.

Another place of potential overlap, of which Taylorism is a part, is the development of abstract "tools" that affect our actions. HOCs have done great work examining how financial instruments have shaped politics, "markets," and people's choices. And we can also think of many places where scientific notions (e.g., efficiency, race) have come to influence behavior. This notional space between economics, finance, science, and engineering as fields might be the richest vein of future exploration.

Finally, when I listen to Beckert and others who discuss HOC, I often agree with a) their description of the problem (fragmentation), b) their hope for synthesis, and c) their instinct that the (socially constructed) economy is the place to turn to draw things together. And, yet, their words lack some theoretical—and perhaps more programmatic—je ne sais quoi that would make it all gel for me.

In what other ways should HOTeES participate in this trend called the history of capitalism?

Beyond Theory & Method: Sociology, Anyone?

In the wake of yesterday's guest-post, I've been thinking about our ontology discussion (here and here) through a new lens. It's a dual one, framed around the sorts of questions we historians (of science) ask and how we go about answering them – motivations and methods, if you will. 

A (somewhat relevant) snippet from the archive

Don't worry: I'm not diving (all the way) down the rabbit hole again. But I wanted to link this up with a post from long ago on "the science (studies) wars" and specifically to Daston's now-famous question ("Philosophy, anyone?"). Specifically, I wanted to see if I could ground the ontology/epistemology dyad in the issue of reflexivity.

In my dissertation, I examine the ill-defined "field" of American debates over scientific methods between philosophers, psychologists, and scientists at the turn of the twentieth century. And in pursuit of both theory and procrastination, I've also been sifting through subsequent developments in these conversations, principally in sociology and philosophy.

Sociology's Three Wise Men

Now, in terms of methods, the way we historians work isn't much like philosophy or sociology as they're practiced today. But at least anecdotally (my favorite flavor of empiricism!), historians do tend to justify their work in terms that strike me as sociological and, to a lesser extent, philosophical. 

While smoking guns and "the Faustian magic of high scholarship"are still thrilling (and caked in the rest dust of the archives), historians (of science) often frame their work with sociological or philosophical questions rather than what-happened-when. The cash value of the "elevator pitch" is attention; its currency is its interest to non-specialists, often expressed as evidence of general social processes.

So what's the point? Things I've been reading in sociology (e.g. here and here and, though a classic, here) suggest that the very divide with which I began – methods and motives, means and ends – is a problem. Why? For Bourdieu, cleaving "theory" from "method" just disguises a labor hierarchy; for Levi Martin, it fails to explain social action.

For historians, the division works in a particular way. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that what you should really do is head to the archive, see what you find, write it up, and then, near the end, and only if you want, turn to "theory" as you start to frame what it's really been about all along. 

There...and back again

But is that how it should be? How might it be different? What if we paid more attention to our theoretical framing from the start, and/or did so in innovative ways? 

The historical analogue to Bourdieu and Wacquant's "reflexive sociology" might be to recognize that past and present, like theory and method or dinosaur-feathers and ideas-of-dinosaur-feathers, are co-produced, and to recognize it in more than our introductions. Another might be to find ways to take theoretical cues from our actors themselves. Both are radically reflexive, and (to me) exciting. 

Think of it as ratcheting Lukas's conclusion up a notch, not from "practice" to "theory" but from actors's practices to our own. We all agreed that "what's in your mind when you prepare a fossil for study and display may well have a significant impact on the material constitution of dinosaur bones." But how does "what's in your  when you [visit an archive]" impact history's objects? 

Might the lesson be that if we recognize the interplay of past and present – of the historian and her objects – we can take steps to shape that relationship, much as scholars in other fields are already attempting. Sociology (again!), anyone?

Guest Post: Sculpting Science?

Fossil preparation using a sandblaster.

[A recent post on feathered dinosaurs has led to an interesting discussion on whether and how we might extend Ian Hacking's ideas about the historical ontology of human kinds  to think more carefully about the material construction of natural kinds. I asked Caitlin Wylie, who is working on a PhD about fossil preparation at Cambridge HPS, if she had any thoughts on the matter.  In addition to the photo above, she was kind enough to send the following along:]

I’m glad to find that we all share a conception of scientific objects as theory-laden, even for objects as different as “bones, blood, and brains”! But I wonder if ontology is the most interesting focus to have here. Does it really matter if a fossil preparator actuallyremoves – or creates, for that matter – what today’s paleontologists interpret as feather traces? That interpretation and the resulting knowledge claims (i.e., that dinosaurs had feathers) are more important, if you ask me.

As Lukas wrote, “There is a strong intuition that some such material interventions change the object's ontology whereas others leave it intact.” Based on my ethnographies of paleontology labs, some changes are considered okay to make to fossils while other changes are not, but these okay and not-okay designations are not universal. Some preparators use super glue to repair fossils, for example, while others are militantly opposed (usually because they only want to make “reversible” changes to specimens, and they deem super glue impossible to fully remove). Fossil preparation, like making blood samples though maybe not like diagnosing a psychiatric patient, is inherently irreversible. You can’t put rock back on once it’s been chiseled off.  So this process of making a specimen visible involves quite a lot of decisions with permanent implications, from choosing tools and research goals to seemingly smaller-scale decisions about which scratches in the rock are scratches and which are feathers.

It makes sense then that we might want to explain changes in specimen preparation by changes in specimen interpretation. As Lukas wrote and Joanna agreed, “I could easily imagine someone preparing this specimen, trying to free the bones from the rock matrix, inadvertently destroying the fossilized traces of feathers.” I think today’s preparators would agree with you, based on their experience with the difficulty of spotting feather traces and even distinguishing fossil bone from its matrix, in many cases. I might object, however, to blaming the poor unappreciated “invisible technicians” for what was actually an epistemological belief at the time – i.e., that dinosaurs didn’t have feathers, so it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to look for them, scientist or technician. As Shapin and others point out, invisible technicians are made visible only when problems happen, and then these workers become convenient places to lay the blame.

Regardless of who gets the “blame” for the effects of now-rejected past beliefs, I think today’s science technicians are generally very aware of their responsibility for producing reliable specimens (and experiments too). For example, preparators have a community-wide joke about “making foramina”. Foramina are natural holes in bones, such as where blood vessels pass through bone, so this joke centers on the irony of preparators creating holes in fossils with their tools, either by mistake or to please a researcher who may say things like “I want to see foramina in this part of this bone, so that this bone can be identified as belonging to this species…” This joke is common and popular among preparators, but the one time I witnessed researchers hearing the joke, they didn’t laugh.

I think it’s the weight of responsibility that makes preparators laugh at the idea that, firstly, they might create holes in fossils, and, secondly, that these artificial holes might be interpreted as natural features. Preparators know that they control how a prepared fossil looks (even though scientists imply that preparators’ work is not important by omitting descriptions of it from publications). Thus preparators are wary of the necessity and the difficulty of navigating the gray boundary between good fossil preparation and forgery. For example, one preparator I interviewed was working on skin impressions around a hadrosaur skeleton, and he agreed with many preparators that preparation work can sometimes seem like sculpture:

CW: I’ve had two preparators now tell me about Michelangelo’s quote about “The piece is already in the stone”.
Preparator:  Yeah [laughs]
CW: Have you heard that before?
Preparator: Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. And that’s kind of what I thought in exposing the skin that I’ve done over the last few days, that like the skin was in there, it was under several inches of sandstone, and you could imagine if you didn’t see it when you came across it you would go through that until you got to the bone that’s on the other side of the skin. And luckily if you find it then you can follow it and not break that skin barrier, and then you’re kind of exposing it, and you could almost imagine just kind of making it up as you went along and using the tool to make a skin pattern on sandstone and just kind of sculpt the skin, you know, which I guess in fossil forgeries that’s done quite a bit, you know, where the things that are for sale on the black market and parts that are missing are just kind of carved out of matrix to look like the fossil. So it definitely is done, I would say, by unscrupulous people for the wrong reasons. But that’s not what I’m doing. [laughs]

Based on quotes like these and jokes about making foramina, it's clear that today’s preparators are very aware of the problem Lukas suggests for preparators in the past – of missing information that they may not be looking for and also, crucially, of MAKING information that may not be original to the specimen, either inadvertently or on purpose. So whether these kinds of changes actually occur as a result of the work of data preparators, in any field, is less interesting, in my opinion, than what we believe to be “real” and “natural”, and thus informative about the world. Data – from specimens, patients, experiments, etc. – are only relevant in that they function as foundations for our knowledge claims. Then these objects’ “real”-ness or artifice doesn’t matter unless that status influences how they are used to support knowledge claims. I find how we interpret the world to be more interesting than how the world actually “is”, since that’s impossible to know. What do you think? Should we be studying ontology, or epistemology, or maybe their intersections?

Thanks for reading, and keep up the good blogging!