ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Science of Sincerity: Psychology and the Problem of Dissent During WWI

• In Event: World War Histories of Science

English Abstract

In March 1918, the United States Secretary of War ordered the army’s bevy of psychologists to study conscientious objectors — the Mennonites, Quakers, socialists, and others who opposed the draft. Psychologists stationed at army cantonments across the country — who were responsible for administering intelligence tests to new recruits — were quickly commissioned to assess conscientious objectors for mental abnormalities, probe personal histories, and conduct intelligence tests. The preliminary results were troubling. Conscientious objectors, particularly those who objected to the war on political grounds, scored higher on intelligence tests than other would-be recruits. The comparative psychologist Robert Yerkes, who ran the army’s psychological division, found that, given their intelligence and proclivity for spreading pacifist propaganda, objectors required further scrutiny, and recommended establishing a special Board of Inquiry. The army obliged, wanting to get a firm answer on which objectors’ claims to conscience should be respected, and which denied. Psychologists testified their scientific expertise on conscientious objectors before the Board as well as in courts-martial cases, the sentences of which ranged from dishonorable discharge to a lifetime of hard labor or death. Despite notable works on psychologists’ contributions to (and benefits derived from) the war effort, their work managing and measuring conscientious objectors has gone almost entirely unnoticed by historians of science. This presentation attends to the construction of these “conscientious personalities,” shedding new light on the psychologization of political dissent, the early development of psychometric testing, and psychologists’ role in interpreting and reinscribing the legitimate exercise of state power.

Author

• Juliana Broad, Yale University