The Promise of Psychology: Experts, the Psychological Strategy Board and America’s Campaign to Win the Cold War, 1951-1953

Abstract

This thesis examines a transition moment in the US government’s foreign policymaking from 1951-1953, when the Executive turned to psychology to improve its Cold War campaign against the USSR. Using the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) as a case study, which only operated from July 1951 to September 1953, the thesis examines the variety of ways the Board’s staff applied psychology to coordinate and systematise the US government’s foreign policymaking and psychological operations. I pay particular attention to the way PSB staff engaged with experts, and used the expertise given to them by behavioural specialists. By looking at the practice of policymaking in the PSB, I uncover the ways in which psychology was brought into US government thinking in the early days of the Cold War. Psychology became central to US strategic thinking in the Cold War. It had an incredible allure for policymakers. Yet PSB staff struggled to define a psychological strategy and used it as a catch-all term to describe many facets of US foreign policy and diplomacy. The Board’s elastic conception of psychology led to its staff being unable to improve America’s psychological warfare campaign. It failed to quantify and coordinate America’s psychological operations. Psychology was thus presumed rather than proven to be of assistance to foreign-policymakers. At the same time, the Board’s flexible use of the term psychology gave superficial coherence to the US government’s haphazard Cold War campaign and justified its use of interventionist policies as beneficial to the mental wellbeing of foreign peoples. This, rather than evidence psychology worked, drove policymakers’ faith in it. Looking at the history of the PSB, then, complicates historians’ understanding of the ways in which psychology and psychological experts assumed cultural and political authority in Cold War America.