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

Floyd Allport's most important World War II research resulted from the headline research he conducted along with his students. Allport's interests lay in determining what types of headlines increased morale. A preliminary study examining 60 newspaper headlines asked people to indicate the degree to which the headlines made them "feel like taking a more active part in the war" (F. H. Allport & Rhine, 1942, p. 5), as well as listing the emotions aroused by the headlines. Their results suggested that headlines evoking anger were the most likely to increase morale, whereas those arousing fear were the least motivating.

To determine whether news headlines were helping or hurting the war effort, Allport and Lepkin (1943) selected 126 headlines from approximately 4,000 relating to the war, asking participants to indicate the degree to which headlines made them feel like participating more actively in the war effort. They also had independent judges rate the goodness or badness of the headline in relation to the United States' goals. Overall, Allport and Lepkin found that bad headlines, those indicating American or Allied losses or advances by the enemy, were more likely to make people want to participate in the war effort. In his survey, however, he found that the majority of newspapers used optimistic headlines. Parallel research by Floyd's brother Gordon and one of his students (Winship & Allport, 1943), in a separate survey of 3,226 newspaper headlines, also found that the majority used optimistic headlines. Moreover, Gordon's survey indicated daily circulation varied little whether good or bad headlines were used, thus eliminating one of the editors' arguments for using positive headlines.

Based on their conclusion that message framing had a large impact on reader morale, Floyd Allport then felt compelled to inform the people in power - editors of periodicals - of their findings. Together with two of his graduate students (F. H. Allport, Lepkin, & Cahen, 1943), Allport published an article in Editor & Publisher urging editors to revise their policies concerning war-related headlines to generate the highest morale value. "Words are weapons," wrote Allport and his colleagues, asserting that "you can use the phraseology of the headline, and the legitimate emotions it arouses in the reader, to cure the evil of complacency and help us on toward victory" (p. 11). The article briefly summarized the F. H. Allport and Lepkin (1943) and Winship and Allport (1943) research and depicted graphically the morale value resulting from different headlines. While urging editors to be truthful in content, Allport and colleagues asked them to frame the news negatively to produce the greatest possible morale value.

To make sure that no influential editor overlooked his study, Allport also wrote letters to the editors of the 200-plus U.S. newspapers with circulations greater than 50,000, summarizing the findings from his research and personally asking them to revise their headline policy; to bolster his claim that altering headline policy would help morale (F. H. Allport, 1943b), Allport also included reprints of the Editor & Publisher article. News of this research appeared in such periodicals as Tide, Printers' Ink, The Christian Science Monitor, and Science Services (F. H. Allport, 1943a). The capstone of the publicity drawn to the headline research was a profile in Time magazine, complete with a photograph of the Brothers Allport ("Headlines and heartbeats," 1943). Although newspaper editors were said to "disagree with this academic handling of a practical problem" (p. 54), at the urging of Hadley Cantril and Jerome Bruner, the brothers sent a more formal report of their findings to the OWI (F. H. Allport, 1943c), and achieved at least a modicum of success: Peter Odegaard, who prior to the war was a board member of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and who during the war served as an assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, cited the Allport and Lepkin (1943) study as a direct cause in "revising the Navy's policy [about] publicity regarding casualties" (G. W. Allport, 1945; see also Cartwright, 1948). Nonetheless, it is unknown whether the research affected other military branches' news policies.