Michael Pettit

A lot of interesting observations about the development of psychology as a science and the concept of deception as it mediated psychology’s interactions with the world of commerce, but I’m not sure I got a coherent through-line in the end. His story begins in the Gilded Age, where building a national transportation infrastructure (railroads) was inextricably intertwined with defrauding small investors; commerce and fraud were both expanding. “What people branded as innovation in certain realms (such as the manufacturing of guns or bicycles), they labeled fraudulent adulteration when it came to the production of food, drink, or medication”—innovation was truly happening, but so was deception. Worse, confidence men represented an aggressive form of masculinity, imposing their will on others and feminizing them, even as liberal ideology required individuals to exercise more choice and control. “Moreover, the success of nationally recognized brands soon lead to their counterfeit in the form of trademark infringement from rival companies.”

Scientists responded by trying to find new ways of truth-telling: “the visible production of the boundaries between the credulous and the trustworthy.” This was also a means for psychologists to assert professional expertise about the mind as against spiritualists, religious folks, etc. They tried to intervene in trademark infringement cases, but judges initially rejected their expertise while still adopting the model of the easily deceivable consumer that the psychologists endorsed. Pettit also makes the point that the courts initially adopted the view that consumers were easily fooled about trademarks—which caveat emptor in other areas of the law generally did not accept—in order to protect the interests of established businesses, not to protect the consumers themselves. Although gendered understandings of the consumer played a role, Pettit argues that they weren’t key; indeed, “[l]awmakers invoked the unwary purchaser in order to cut off empirical investigations involving differences in perception and psychological ability among consumers.” Consumers had subjectivity, but not agency. Eventually this understanding among judges legitimated more general consumer protection laws such as those enforced by the FTC.

Psychologists also tried to debunk spiritualists, but at the same time adopted the method of deceiving subjects about what an investigation was about, in the name of finding a greater truth—a method that persists today in controlled experiments as well as in some reporting, though no longer with sociology. “These demonstrations led to a gendered understanding of deception as male psychologists demanded full transparency from their female subjects while priding themselves on their masculine guile in besting their opponents.” And from the 1920s onward, “psychologists increasingly understood deception as an unavoidable, perhaps even a necessary and beneficial element of everyday life.” Rather than identifying untrustworthy types, they turned to searching for individual reactions—“the changing physiology of individuals as they momentarily deceived,” as with the lie detector. There was continuity with older attempts to use the body to tell the truth that the speaking person didn’t, but also change in the idea of deceit—from fixed characteristic to specific activity. One comparison I found interesting was that, in terms of “pathological” liars, Europeans were more worried about class passing—poor folks pretending to have high-class backgrounds—than Americans, who were more concerned with juvenile delinquency, gender, and sexuality. Of course, a study of “pathological liars falsifying cases of sexual abuse,” which the authors emphasized was relatively rare, was treated by the leading legal authority on evidence as being about how all women’s testimony was inherently unreliable in rape cases.

Pettit also discusses Catherine Lutz’s concept of “the epistemology of the bunker,” a concept I like quite a lot: “the ways in which the suspiciousness endemic to the political culture of the Cold War informed how people understood the self.” The “deceivable” self was a threat to democracy, which depended on “an individualism that was not wholly trusted.” Psychologists were employed in creating personality tests—working to expose potentially deceitful employees but also policing the boundaries of the profession, sometimes through deception. The acceptance of deception, Pettit says, played a big role in therapeutic practice, such as adoptions where the children were selected to look plausible as biological children of their adoptive parents “in the hopes of making the human intervention in the family invisible.” Likewise with the medical management of intersexuality, where children were not told the truth because knowing that truth “would impede the intended socialization.”… (plus d'informations)