Abstract
When contemporary psychologists devise experiments or studies, it is part of their everyday work to think about plausible cover stories that might disguise their hypotheses and research interests. By leaving their subjects unaware of what the studies are really about, or by intentionally distracting them from a study’s purpose, psychologists intend to catch their participants in a ‘neutral’ state. Such an artificial condition of naivety is meant as a safeguard against motivational tactics and strategies of impression management, possibly displayed by a subject. If the subject knows too much about the study, so goes the general rationale, this would implicitly or explicitly affect the responses under investigation, and, ultimately, render impossible a precise investigation of certain psychological processes. Hence, the notion of a subject engaging in deceitful self-presentations poses a direct threat to psychology’s aim of uncovering the general laws of human behavior.
This generic conception, which is also revealing in terms of the underlying power relations between the experimenter and the subject, is, however, not a natural one: deceit as an intentional practice in psychological research, as well as the notion of a subject prone to deception, has a (hi)story. In his carefully researched monograph, Michael Pettit sheds light on these two aspects which are, in fact, intricately entangled: psychology’s changing stance towards the instrumentalization of deception as a research tool, and psychology’s reframing of the human subject as a motivated tactician who cannot be trusted. Spanning a period from the last third of the 19th century to the 1930s, Pettit traces the growing preoccupation of the psychological sciences with the problem of deception, and their various strategies to tackle it via scientific means. In order to grasp the changing conceptions of personhood that become apparent in these efforts, Pettit differentiates between two forms of ‘selves’, which run like a common thread through the book’s narrative. Pettit understands these two forms of selves, serving as the basic analytical categories of the book, as abstract formations that refer to ‘widely ascribed and normative characteristics of personhood found in a given historical epoch’ (8). Whereas the ‘deceitful self’ denotes a self characterized by ‘lying, cheating, stealing, and the manipulation of others’ (ibid.), the ‘deceivable self’ conveys a notion of personhood that stresses ‘the unavoidability of humanity’s error-prone, suggestible, and fallible nature’ (ibid.).
Deception, Pettit makes clear in the introduction, is a complex phenomenon that evades simple fixation and definition. Consequently, his historical account is not about the transformation of a certain predefined ‘essence’ of deception within the history of the human sciences. Rather, it is the monograph’s aim to investigate ‘how shifting assemblages of peoples, things, and practices lead to differing perceptions of what exactly constitutes deception’ (3).
Throughout the book, Pettit consistently follows this multi-centered perspective, as he brings together a whole array of different agents (e.g. psychologists, stage magicians, judges, spiritistic mediums, businessmen), locales (e.g. the psychological laboratory, state and county fairs, the police station) and practices (e.g. psychological experiments, judicial interrogations, advertising campaigns). What unites this diverse assemblage of people, sites and operations is their fascination with elusive appearances and deceptive behaviors.
Pettit argues that it is exactly these assemblages that have been crucial for the institutionalization of academic psychology in the United States, as well as its growing grasp on central sectors of society like the workplace, court and clinic. Pettit unfolds his argument during the course of six densely packed chapters, introducing the reader to confidence men and muckraking journalists (ch. 1), analysing the cooperations between experimental psychologists and stage magicians (ch. 2), reviewing the efforts of psychologists to expose wonder-workers and spiritistic mediums (ch. 3), recounting the dissemination of the notion of the ‘unwary purchaser’ in legal discourse (ch. 4), illuminating the historical relationship between the technology of the lie detector and the psychological case study (ch. 5), and, finally, depicting the discipline’s multiple strategies to measure deceit with personality tests and carefully staged experimental situations (ch. 6).
As this brief overview already suggests, Pettit argues for a careful consideration of the larger cultural context of the emerging ‘science of deception’. In particular, it is psychology's multiple ties with the commercial culture of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries that the monograph allows to take center stage. Chapter 2 – an especially strong and convincing chapter of the book – provides a vivid example: Pettit shows that the commercial culture of the Gilded Age and its leisure-time amusements directly affected experimental psychologists’ interest in the study of deception, while also shaping their research practices. Psychologists were avid visitors of state and world fairs, vaudeville theaters and the magic shows of stage conjurors, although these were known as attractions of mass culture. They did not frequent these sites just for diversion, but also for professional reasons, and took the spectacles as a source of inspiration. Joseph Jastrow, for instance, built cooperative relationships with well-known magicians to investigate their mental abilities, but also to learn from their stagecraft, which could serve as a model for psychological experiments. Another example of psychologists’ active reception of Gilded Age popular culture is evident in their fascination with ambiguous figures. These images originated in popular illustrated magazines, but then travelled to scientific journals and became graphic objects of psychological theorizing, as well as research. Being easy to produce, drawings like the ‘duck-rabbit’ served as compact tools for studying perception and, thus, linked the putatively secluded space of the psychological laboratory to the popular visual and material culture of the Gilded Age.
Throughout the course of the book, Pettit thoroughly argues that it was, in fact, the discipline of academic psychology that acted as the central agent in normalizing deception: from the 1920s, psychologists came to argue that deception was a normal and unavoidable aspect of human nature. At the same time, this blossoming discipline began to offer its own diagnostic tools, instruments and therapeutic techniques, promising to manage this newly discovered ‘truth’ about human nature. Regarding their own practice, psychologists successively normalized deceptive strategies in their investigative enterprise, arguing that the scientific benefit would finally outweigh the moral obligation to approach their subjects in a sincere manner. As Pettit shows, this ‘untruthfully acquired truth’ (15) was not applauded by every psychologist and, furthermore, also affected psychology’s public image in multiple ways. By assembling different contexts and objects, and people and practices, as well as diverse types of publications and materials, The Science of Deception provides a thick description of an entire culture fascinated by deceit in its myriad appearances, but at the same time being deeply unsettled by it.
In conclusion, Pettit’s book is an important contribution to the recent scholarship in the history of psychology, as it compellingly illustrates that the emergence of topics within the history of the human sciences can only be understood by situating them in their larger cultural and social contexts. Thus, Pettit succeeds in showing that the production of psychological knowledge takes place in multiple forms and cannot be limited to the confined space of the laboratory: just as psychological knowledge is traveling through different types of media, settings and social spheres, the actors that brought the study of deception to the laboratory, the child guidance clinic, or the mental hospital, were also traveling through different professional, social and recreational contexts, getting inspiration from rather mundane settings.
Methodologically, this approach requires us to delve into a variety of textual and pictorial sources, but also provides the challenge of assembling these materials into a cogent narrative. Pettit’s prose is elegant and his constellation of vivid case studies makes for an inspiring read. However, the chosen perspective and his way of triangulating case materials also entail a rather general view. Thus, for readers awaiting a minute reconstruction of the emergence of deception as an epistemic problem in the discipline of psychology, or expecting a close analysis of the experimental practices that shaped knowledge-building in terms of a deceitful and deceivable personhood, some chapters and their conclusions might leave questions unanswered.
Pettit’s historical account ends in the 1930s, with a brief excursion into the early 1960s and Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies. However, as Pettit adumbrates on the last page of his book, the quest for exposing the ‘deceitful self’ and the ‘deceivable self’ via scientific means is currently witnessing a renewed interest: the flourishing branch of neuroscience with its latest imaging technologies aims to expose the biological underpinnings and networks of complex mental phenomena such as consciousness, personality, or mental disorders. Yet, the findings gained from neuroscientific investigations do not only add to basic research, but open up new potential applications in the fields of marketing, law and the security apparatus of the state. The Science of Deception can thus also serve as an important basis for discussing these contemporary developments and their ethical implications from a historically informed perspective.
The book provides a rewarding read for scholars specializing in the history of the human sciences. With its rich material, it will also be illuminating for readers with backgrounds in history, cultural studies, or American studies.