Social psychologists' expertise in the public interest: civilian morale research during World War II - Experts in the Service of Social Reform: SPSSI, Psychology, and Society, 1936-1996

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998 by Blair T. Johnson, Diana R. Nichols

In the coming war we shall fight not only on land, on the sea, and in the air. There will be a fourth theater of operations, the Inner Front. That front will decide the continued existence or the irrevocable death of the German nation.

- Heinrich Himmler

Words, no less than guns, are materials of war.

- Floyd H. Allport

In 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression and on the eve of a second world war, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) was established with the formal goal of analyzing "contemporary psychological problems" stemming from the "present economic, political and cultural crisis" (Krechevsky, 1936). The Depression led many people inside and outside academia to question established institutions and structures. Thus, SPSSI resulted from a deep concern over unemployment and other social inequalities. SPSSI became an organized means for behavioral scientists to express their frustration about social conditions through scientific study and action programs concerned with issues of the day. A secondary goal was to help legitimize studies involving solutions for social problems. These two intellectual goals aside, a third motive for the creation of SPSSI was practical: to help its members to find significant employment within the field of psychology (Krech, 1973). SPSSI promised to provide its members with greater knowledge of job opportunities, something that the American Psychological Association (APA) had failed to do. Instead, knowledge of job opportunities spread by word of mouth among people who knew each other. With academic job opportunities in psychology so limited at the time, most graduating with doctorates in psychology in the 1930s and early 1940s began careers in the private sector, government, or outside of psychology altogether.

Reflecting the Society's formal goals, SPSSI members strove to find useful ways of applying the psychological principles they had learned so well. Even before warfare first erupted in Europe, SPSSI members analyzed social issues of import to the strained world situation. These efforts were extremely diverse, ranging from motivational explanations for nationalism (e.g., F. H. Allport, 1927) to analyses of opinions about fascism and communism (e.g., Katz & Cantril, 1940; Stagner, 1936) to treatises on the nature of civilian morale (e.g., F. H. Allport, 1941; F. H. Allport & Hanchett, 1940). Similarly, SPSSI produced yearbooks on significant topics of the day, such as industrial conflict (Hartmann & Newcomb, 1939). To continue this goal of providing psychological insight into significant topics, SPSSI inaugurated the Journal of Social Issues in 1945. Though diverse topically and conceptually, these efforts shared a single goal: If the principles underlying war behaviors could be understood, interventions could help stop or prevent warfare. To the membership of SPSSI, psychological research was the main way to the truth (Nicholson, 1997). Finally, by organizing knowledge in so systematic a fashion using books and journals, SPSSI was able to demonstrate its growing expertise to the scholarly world, and using press releases, to display this knowledge to the public, not just to scholars.

Given that SPSSI members took proactive intellectual stances toward world social issues, it is no surprise, therefore, that SPSSI leaders had already mobilized their resources against Adolf Hitler and his forces even before the United States formally entered the war (Cartwright, 1948). In the early to late 1930s, these efforts took the form of assisting psychologists, such as Kurt Lewin, who fled from anti-Semitic policies in Germany and immigrated to the United States. As war began to escalate in Europe, SPSSI members concentrated their efforts to a greater extent on generating knowledge that would assist the Allies in the war effort. Thus, when the United States entered World War II, with no lag its psychologists began producing knowledge of import to the war effort. By the middle of World War II, "most of the social psychological energies in the US" (Newcomb, 1945) were directed toward the war effort. Many psychologists volunteered for posts within the government; others pursued research of even greater import, conducting studies that could efficiently inform the actions of the U.S. government or its citizens and thereby help win the war against the Axis Forces.

Civilian morale was one crucial aspect of the war effort, as it frequently has been in other wars throughout recorded history (e.g., Braverman, 1996; Bruntz, 1938). By publically stating that the tides of war depended on the German public's mental toughness, Heinrich Himmler recognized that the success of warfare hinges on the participants' mental processes, and that, therefore, psychology would play a prominent role. Thus, it was crucial for Germany to keep its citizens' morale high. However, the morale issue cut deeper still: If one could demoralize one's opponents, resistance would drop, and the war would end more quickly. With Germany's public officials offering such highly visible statements regarding the importance of morale, it is little wonder that morale figured prominently in the research of U.S. psychologists and that they, too, were concerned about the morale of the public of which they were part. It also explains why U.S. social psychologists would have started analyzing civilian morale even before the United States entered the war.