"Mapping the New Mental World Created by Radio": media messages, cultural politics, and Cantril and Allport's 'The Psychology of Radio.' - Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport - Experts in the Service of Social Reform: SPSSI, Psychology, and Society, 1936-1996

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998 by Katherine Pandora

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, radio suddenly emerged as a powerful new form of mass communication. According to the Columbia Broadcasting System, of the 29,904,663 homes counted by the 1930 U.S. census, 21,455,799, or approximately 70%, possessed radios in 1935; estimates placed the number of Americans who were habitual radio listeners at nearly 78,000,000 (Cantril & Allport, 1935, p. 85). By decade's end more families owned radio receiving sets than owned telephones or automobiles, had plumbing, or subscribed to newspapers or magazines (Cantril, 1940, p. xiii). Of even more significance, perhaps, radio broadcasting permitted a mass array of individuals across regional, class, ethnic, and racial lines to experience the same live event at the same time: During these years it was estimated that 20,000,000 people could be found tuned in simultaneously to the same program (Cantril & Allport, p. 3). As Americans experienced the rapidity with which radio broadcasting was becoming embedded within the patterns of everyday life, few doubted that its presence was effecting dramatic social, economic, and political changes. But what the specific nature of those changes might be remained a matter of great uncertainty.

In 1935 Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport and his former student Hadley Cantril challenged their colleagues to acknowledge that the "radio revolution had caught social psychologists unprepared" to answer the flood of questions that had arisen about a radio-saturated social world (p. 4). Asserting that "the really important problems of the radio are now psychological problems" (p. 4), they stated that the time had arrived for psychologists "to map out from their own point of view the new mental world created by radio" (p. vii). The vehicle for their argument was The Psychology of Radio, a work that was as much an attempt to exemplify the proper scope and moral economy of the still youthful field of social psychology as it was an exploration of the topic at hand. In Cantril and Allport's view, social psychology's progress could no longer be measured by the "number of textbooks annually produced, nor by the mere plausibility of its pronouncements." What was required instead was that the field be judged by "the incisiveness and the validity of its analysis of significant social problems" (p. vii). Given that radio was showing itself to be "preeminent as a means of social control, and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men," its salience as a significant social problem was clear (p. viii).

But the legitimacy of this assertion was by no means clear to Cantril and Allport's colleagues, for two reasons. First, to tie social psychological research so closely to current events appeared to encroach upon the autonomy of academic scientists to set their own research agendas, in which the pursuit of "pure" science --held to be truth's gold standard - presumably necessitated detachment from the social world, with its demands for immediately usable knowledge. But the authors of The Psychology of Radio went beyond arguing that social psychologists should speak to contemporary social problems: In asserting that psychologists should be judged not only by the subject matter they chose but also by "the incisiveness and the validity" of the analyses they produced, they raised the question of who would do the judging. That their work was published by a mainstream press and intended for a general audience - rather than directed solely to their peers, through authorized disciplinary venues - indicated that they believed the public should constitute the jury regarding the significance of scientific work. In The Psychology of Radio, Cantril and Allport offered a model of the social psychological expert as a partner with the public in seeking to make sense of matters of political import and social philosophy. In doing so, they challenged the norms of scientific inquiry shared by many of their orthodox peers. (For further elaboration of this point see Pandora, 1997.)

Social Psychology as Social Activism

Historians of psychology have drawn important insights about the dynamics of social psychology during the 1930s by using the founding of such organizations as the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) in 1936 as touchstones, but there is much more to learn about psychology's cultural politics by reaching further into the work of this period.(1) Historical examination of such neglected works as The Psychology of Radio - which in its genesis was a pre-SPSSI rather than a post-SPSSI phenomenon - offers scholars new insights into the hard-fought disciplinary battles that marked psychology during the 1930s, and of the wider intellectual, social, and political referents and ramifications of these disputes. Intended by its authors as an effort to locate social psychology squarely in the midst of the public arena, The Psychology of Radio was a contribution to an ongoing political debate about the corporate control of this newly influential communications medium. The Psychology of Radio offered itself as an example of what social psychology in the public interest might look like in a brave new world undergoing technological transformations. It was representative of a new vision of the relationship between scientific researchers and the larger polity, one that Allport a few years later would describe as a commitment to the pursuit of "psychology for society's sake" rather than to "psychology for science's sake" (Bruner & Allport, 1940, p. 775).