ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Behavioral Science Beyond the Laboratory: Social Environments, Animal Models, and the Politics of Experimentation

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session examines how behavioral scientists in the mid-to-late twentieth century
treated diverse environments - from Caribbean islands to urban housing projects
to animal facilities - as if they were controlled laboratory spaces. By imposing the
laboratory fiction onto these sites, researchers erased the complex social, political,
and environmental factors that fundamentally shaped their experimental subjects and
results. The papers in this session reveal how attention to social history and material
context disrupts this fiction, exposing how power relations, institutional arrangements,
and local conditions were not noise to be controlled away but constitutive elements
of the knowledge produced. What researchers interpreted as experimental findings
about behavior, psychology, or pathology were shaped by colonialism, economic precarity, institutional racism, and environmental stress. By insisting on the social embeddedness of experimental settings - whether islands, housing projects, or animal facilities - we argue for a more critical historiography that recognizes how behavioral science functioned to justify the status quo, while at the same time enabling particular forms of intervention and control. Understanding these experiments requires understanding their social history.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jill Morawski

Commentator

• Erika Lorraine Milam, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Fish and Family: Struggles with Congested Aggression In and Beyond the Laboratory - Cécile Hauser, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich

• Automatic Animals: Behaviourist Psychology, Commercial Animal Training, and the Problem of “Misbehaviour” - Edmund Ramsden, Queen Mary University of London

Session Organizer

• Cécile Hauser, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich