Cold War Inventions in Social Research Methodology and their Trajectories

The proposed project is concerned with the history of social sciences at the RAND Corporation during Cold War. The RAND Corporation is a think tank with headquarters in Santa Monica, California, that has since its inception held strong ties to the U.S. Air Force. During the 1950s and 06s, RAND offered a home to many talented young researchers in the mathematical, natural and social sciences and, by providing decision makers in the government and the armed forces with scientific advice, it played a decisive role in American foreign policy. Nonetheless, the history of RAND`s approach to social science has received only scarce attention by historians of science. The project will reach its objective by an in-depth analysis of three social scientific methods that were developed, if not invented at RAND: (1) political gaming, (2) the Delphi method, and (3) systems analysis. In a conceptual framework that combines historical research mainly with concepts from the sociology of scientific knowledge, it investigates both the initial formation of these methods and the re-shaping and reformulation they experienced during their diffusion.

In the years after the end of World War II, experiences from the war effort and the emerging global geopolitical situation made foreknowledge, especially in the realm of foreign policy, invaluable. Especially the increasing feeling of insecurity after the launch of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to an increased call for stable assessments of future development to rationalize todays political and military decision-making. Anticipating this demand, researchers at the RAND Corporation had already begun to develop techniques of prospection. Sometimes called the prototype of a think tank, RAND was initially installed as a collaborative project between the US Air Force and Douglas Aircraft Company in 1947. Soon after, it was reorganized into a non-profit organization. Autonomous by law, RAND was, in fact, almost wholly funded by the US armed forces. Our project explored the history of three techniques of prospection developed at RAND during the first decades of the Cold War: the Delphi method, political gaming, and systems analysis. All of these aimed at providing predictions of some sort. Despite the similarities in origin and objectives, the three techniques differ considerably, both with regard to scientific ideas informing them and the careers they saw after their invention at RAND. Our in-depth analysis of the development process and the further fate of the techniques provides an inside glimpse at how the United States endeavored to use social scientific knowledge to avertor at least winwars.