Creating a consensus: psychologists, the Supreme Court, and school desegregation, 1952-1955 - Experts in the Service of Social Reform: SPSSI, Psychology, and Society, 1936-1996

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998 by John P. Jackson, Jr.

A glance at the titles of established works in the history of the social sciences reveals a preoccupation with a fundamental paradox concerning the role of social science in American society, that of advocacy versus objectivity. Indeed, the quest for objectivity has been called the "crucible" of social science (Furner, 1975; Smith, 1994). The paradox can be read as follows: Presumably, social science draws its authority from the "objectivity" of science. That is, what social science has to say about society can be trusted as accurate because it is "scientific": disinterested, detached, and apolitical. Science is about "facts," not morality, politics, or emotion. And yet social science has flourished in this country precisely because it is used to solve moral, political, or emotional problems, so much so that historian Hamilton Cravens has suggested it be redubbed "social technology" (1986, p. 185).

If the corollary to technology is not "science" but "engineering," the corollary to "social technology" would be "social engineering." Social engineering has been embedded in the very professionalization of 20th-century American social science. Psychology is a useful example. For the first half of the 20th century, psychologists straggled to professionalize psychology by donning the mantle of natural science as objective knowledge. However, this move was made palatable to American society by claims that the study of psychology could produce knowledge that would be of great use in the efficient operation of society. In other words, the very professionalization of psychology in the United States was premised on the utility of psychology to cure various social ills, while psychology was simultaneously establishing itself as an autonomous discipline modeled after the natural sciences (Brown, 1992; Danzinger; 1990; O'Donnell, 1985).

The involvement of social scientists in the litigation over Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is a particularly appropriate vehicle to explore issues surrounding social engineering in the social sciences, because it is often seen as the ultimate expression of one side of the equation: Historian Walter Jackson argued that the involvement of social scientists in Brown meant that "the days in which social scientists vied with each other to establish their objectivity by distancing themselves from public controversy were clearly over" (1990, p. 292). The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) was the central organization in the Brown litigation, and that role has been a particular source of pride for the organization and those members who were involved. Otto Klineberg claimed that SPSSI's influence in the litigation was "crucial" (1986, p. 55). David Krech, one of the moving forces behind SPSSI's founding, claimed that working with the NAACP during Brown "was precisely the sort of thing I had always hoped that SPSSI could do" (1973).

The citation of social science in a Supreme Court opinion was the result of a decade-long effort by social scientists to become, in their own words, "social engineers." Because it is often seen as such a pure expression of activist social science, the Brown case uniquely showcases the mechanisms by which social scientists took their science and used it to reshape society into what they saw as a more democratic and egalitarian one.

The work in Brown is far from unproblematic when considered as social engineering. Social scientists' public pronouncements about the arrival of social engineering masked an ongoing project to define the proper use of social scientific knowledge. The social scientists were aware that their credibility as experts was predicated on their presenting "objective, scientific" evidence. Yet their objectivity could be called into question because of their close involvement with the partisan issue of school desegregation. The social scientists were aware of this tension in their dual role of social scientist versus social advocates, and they sought ways to reduce or eliminate that tension. In particular, by tracing the activities of this particular group of social scientists between 1951 and 1955, we can see how they translated their political and ethical beliefs into social science, and their social science into social action.

The tension between objectivity and advocacy was not an abstract problem; it was a very real problem that arose out of the experiences of social scientists in the litigation. Questions about objectivity were raised not only by the opposing side in the litigation, but also by the social scientists themselves. The social scientists constantly struggled to define how they could be objective scientists in the context of their work with the legal team. Different views of the proper role of scientific knowledge can be seen at certain points of the litigation - during the drafting of legal briefs submitted for the appeals process, during the campaign to gain signatures for those appellate briefs, and during the work done for the second Brown decision in 1955. The community of social scientists involved in the litigation debated the proper role of social science in public controversy at each of these points. To justify their actions as appropriate for scientists qua scientists, they drew the mantle of objectivity around themselves and embraced the rhetoric of value-free and neutral social science.