The Happiness Industry Read Online Free PDF Page B

sounds’ frustrates the behaviourist as much as the utilitarian. Today, the facial-coders, neuromarketers and eye-trackers are living Watson’s dream of ‘breaking away’ from subjective reports of experience, and finding supposedly more objective routes to our internal states.
    Before behavioural psychology or market research achieved this ‘break-away’ feat, they found themselves in some quite unusual alliances. In the process, business came to understand people not only as passive recipients of corporate ‘education’ or ‘stimuli’, but as active, tentatively political actors with judgements about the world around them. If the task was to find out what people felt, wanted or thought, going out and asking them risked revealing some far more radical responses than JWT or Watson would have been prepared to countenance. What if they were sick of mass-produced goods? What if they didn’t want lots more advertising? What if, above all, they wanted a say?
    As the craze for psychological analysis swept American business over the course of the 1920s, large foundations such as Rockefeller and Carnegie looked to fund cutting-edge forms of market research. Statisticians had just invented randomized sampling methods, which greatly improved the authority of surveys as representations of large populations. 23 Before sampling methods became available, surveys were very much skewed interms of who happened to respond to them. They gave a flavour of opinion, but this couldn’t claim to be typical. The foundations offered to fund researchers who would put the new sampling techniques to work in the service of better market intelligence on the part of US corporations. But they were frustrated to discover that most of the individuals or organizations capable of delivering this type of knowledge were political activists, socialists and sociologists. 24
    Since social surveys had first been conducted in Europe in the 1880s, they had tended to be carried out in pursuit of progressive political agendas. Charles Booth in East London, or W. E. B. Du Bois in Philadelphia, set the stage for quantitative sociological research, which would go out and find how ordinary people lived, by seeing them in their domestic environments and asking them questions. The techniques for doing this work became increasingly professionalized with the establishment of progressive institutions such as the London School of Economics and the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC.
    As the statistical techniques of social research developed, they became a matter of public fascination in their own right. One of the studies funded by Rockefeller became a national obsession, debated across the mainstream media. Conducted by a socialist husband and wife, Robert and Helen Lynd, from 1924 onwards, the ‘Middletown Studies’ produced a series of best-selling publications. The research purported to hold up a mirror to American society, revealing banal yet fascinating details of the minutiae of how people went about their day-to-day lives. The researchers were hopeful that people would read these studies and challenge the culture of consumerism that was engulfing them.
    The Rockefeller Foundation believed that they were helping to identify new ways of connecting social values to corporateagendas. The Lynds believed they were helping to raise class-consciousness. At the intersection of the market and democratic socialism, the new survey techniques could serve either and both goals at the same time. Following a sequel 1937 study, ‘Middletown in Transition’, one sales journal announced that ‘the only two books that are absolutely necessary for an advertising man are the Bible and Middletown!’ 25 A new form of shared national self-consciousness had occurred, and its political implications were entirely open-ended.
    These sorts of unlikely ideological alliances became a feature of how psychological surveys would