Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0003
M. Faragher
Reflecting on British public response to Italy’s incursion into Abyssinia in 1935, journalist F.W. Deedes argued that the 1934 Peace Ballot, a widespread national referendum evincing public support for the League of Nations, had successfully turned public opinion against interventionism. Completed by over eleven million people, the Peace Ballot was the most influential public opinion survey of the 1930s. It was also a press sensation, drawing praise by League advocates and disdain from conservative papers, which referred to it as a “Ballot of Blood.” This chapter traces both optimism and skepticism over polling when it first entered public discourse via the newspapers. While Waugh’s Scoop (1938) details the hapless efforts of the aesthete and nature-writer William Boot to provide honest reporting of the Abyssinian Crisis, the overwhelming powers of press magnates and their financial interests undermine his work by manipulating and capitalizing on public opinion. Waugh’s skeptical vision of public opinion in Scoop mirrored his public critiques of the research organization Mass-Observation, whose practices of public observation he likened to the actions of “keyhole-observers and envelope-steamers,” and whose methods, he argued, would empower authoritarians seeking to control public opinion. Mirroring similar themes of Storm Jameson’s novel None Turn Back (1936), Scoop not only critiques the newspaper trade, but also denounces institutionalized public opinion and its imbrication in the newspaper industry in the 1930s. Like other skeptics, Waugh challenges the utopian notion that polling fosters unmediated exposure to public thought; the mediation of polling through the political morass of newspapers elicited fears that polling would become just one more media cudgel with which to shape and manipulate public sentiment.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0004
M. Faragher
In 1942, Val Gielgud and John Dickson Carr wrote and produced a pair of plays: Inspector Silence Takes the Air and Thirteen to the Gallows. Both are set in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) studios during wartime, and both dramatized dead air and dead bodies. Gielgud, as a high-level radio-producer, feared that the BBC was broadcasting into a void. The emergence of the Listener Research Department, a unit designed to assess listener sentiment about BBC programming, promised to usher in an institution with a more responsive relationship to its audience. But these plays, featuring BBC technicians as villains, criticize the BBC’s Reithian self-conception as an unliteral force to produce and manufacture public taste, a tendency in constant tension with the burgeoning science of listener research. This chapter traces the ambivalent responses to the wireless as both a method of controlling public opinion and a medium with the potential to facilitate psychographic congruity across populations. Those outside the BBC expressed equal parts concern and optimism about the ability of wireless technology to shape its audiences. Recognizing the BBC’s power to move listeners, Olaf Stapledon’s short story “A World of Sound” is the first of his works to theorize the sonic sphere as a means of transcending individual consciousness; radio-centric telepathy would later become a crux to his aesthetic project, with novels like Star Marker imagining radio waves as a means of decentralizing authority and enabling individuals to access the public consciousness directly and make collective decisions.
1942年，瓦尔·吉尔古德和约翰·迪克森·卡尔创作并制作了两部戏剧:《沉默探长升空》和《十三人上绞刑架》。这两部剧都以英国广播公司(BBC)的工作室为背景，讲述了战争时期的空气和尸体。作为一名高级广播制作人，吉尔古德担心英国广播公司正在向一个空白的地方广播。听众研究部(Listener Research Department)的出现，是一个旨在评估听众对BBC节目的看法的部门，它有望引领一个与听众建立更积极关系的机构。但这些以BBC技术人员为反派角色的戏剧批评BBC的雷希斯式自我概念是一种制造和制造公众品味的非文本力量，这种趋势与新兴的听众研究科学一直存在紧张关系。本章追溯了人们对无线的矛盾反应，无线既是一种控制公众舆论的方法，也是一种有可能促进人群心理一致性的媒介。BBC以外的人对无线技术塑造其受众的能力表示了担忧和乐观。奥拉夫·斯台普顿(Olaf Stapledon)认识到BBC打动听众的力量，他的短篇小说《声音的世界》(A World of Sound)是他第一部将声音领域理论化为超越个人意识的手段的作品;以无线电为中心的心灵感应后来成为他的美学项目的关键，他的小说《星星标记》(Star Marker)将无线电波想象成一种分散权力的手段，使个人能够直接接触公共意识，做出集体决定。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0007
M. Faragher
This short afterword looks to the work done by Theodor Adorno and others in the production of The Authoritarian Personality, a quantitative study of psychological traits that might suggest preternatural fascist tendencies in interviewees. This text symbolizes the onslaught of postwar psychographic consumer research, which was only heightened with the use of computer algorithms to more clearly map groups psychology. The book traces the postwar use of “psychography” in marketing, and contends that the book’s tracing of the psychographic turn can help us better understand the contemporary psychographic age, wherein algorithmic sociological profiling has become a dominant force in modern democracy.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0002
M. Faragher
H.G. Wells’s life extends the radical evolution of psychographics outlined in the Introduction, but his oeuvre also proves the inherent difficulty in aestheticizing the emergent age of social psychology—a point evinced when producer Alexander Korda demanded Wells revise the script version of his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come three times to make it “filmable.” While Wells’s novel imagines a peaceable future wherein social psychology becomes the “whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world,” the film adaptation instead symbolizes this philosophical transformation by starring a sole philosopher-king who, against the people’s will, seeks to control and colonize the universe. This chapter argues that the conflict between these two Wellsian visions is prefigured by his intimate and conflicted relationship to sociology and group psychology. As early as 1906, Wells sought out the position as the first British chair of sociology at the University of London. But Wells was immediately to become a gadfly in academia: he engaged in scathing critiques of sociology for denying its utopian impulses and refuted theories of group dynamics put forward by Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter. Incorporating readings across Wells’s literary career—including Anticipations, An Englishman Looks at the World, and In the Days of the Comet—this chapter contends that Wells’s writing captures a life-long effort to reprise the scope of sociology from outside academia, and captures the writer’s foundering efforts to aestheticize the institutional promise of social psychology—efforts that inevitably succumb to Wells’s fetishization of pseudo-authoritarian technocracy.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0006
M. Faragher
The Ministry of Information (MoI) had a robust morale-research apparatus which, more often than not, failed to successfully appeal to the public in high-profile information campaigns. Cecil Day-Lewis, who worked in the Publications division of the MoI during the war, allegorized such failures through his detective fiction; in both Malice in Wonderland and Minute for Murder, he alludes to Ministry campaigns like the “Silent Column Campaign,” which failed to appropriately respond to public criticism elicited from Home Intelligence morale reports. Day-Lewis’s subtle critiques of MoI morale assessment are also mirrored in the wartime work of Elizabeth Bowen, who used her information work in Ireland to encourage the MoI to take on more sympathetic public stances towards the neutral nation during the war. While Bowen attempted to read and translate the desires of the Irish public to English officials, The Heat of the Day likewise emphasizes characters’ struggles in interpreting and mastering the desires of others. In both The Heat of the Day and in her wartime short stories, Bowen returns to early psychographic symbols of ghosts and apparitions to elucidate the precarious position of the public opinion worker during wartime. In this chapter, both Bowen and Day-Lewis remind readers that the desire to manifest interiority as material produces fear and anxiety amongst citizens who feel themselves spied upon and who see psychographics as just another means of control for governments and institutions against its citizens.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898975.003.0005
M. Faragher
As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.
作为《Mass-Observation》的撰稿人，Naomi Mitchison和Celia Fremlin在他们的小说中强调了定性分析在评估公众舆论中的重要作用，而定性分析的作用往往被低估。虽然英国公众舆论研究所经常将女性排除在研究人员和研究对象之外，但Mass-Observation的结构对女性作为观察者和观察对象的投入更为开放。在她以希腊为灵感的短篇小言集《微妙的火焰》(the Delicate Fire)中吹捧数学的政治价值之后，她在自己的小说《我们受到警告》(We Have Been warning)中灌输了更多对统计分析的平等主义价值的怀疑;主人公迪奥娜·高尔顿(Dione Galton)太晚才意识到，她通过幽灵格林·琼(Green Jean)口口说出的自己对英国法西斯主义兴起的直觉，远比她用来预测丈夫最终在选举中失败的投票卡准确得多。同样，西莉亚·弗雷姆林(Celia Fremlin)的战后小说《黎明前的几个小时》(The Hours Before Dawn)证实了主人公路易丝·亨德森(Louise Henderson)所谓的非理性恐惧，她必须与傲慢的专家抗衡，努力阻止新房客维拉·布兰登(Vera Brandon)的暴力冲动。这两部小说都受到了作者在M-O工作经历的影响，它们认为单靠定量分析不足以捕捉女性战时经历的复杂性。本章认为，M-O研究人员和像弗雷姆林和米奇森这样的小说家的贡献，为社会心理学研究史上一条未曾涉足的道路提供了可能性，因为对数据的迷恋最终淹没了更全面、更定性的方法的可能性。
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