Predicting, Controlling, and Engineering Humans: Eugenic Sciences in American Psychology

Abstract

Since its inception as a distinct academic and professional discipline in the USA, American psychology has drawn on sciences that were mired in ideologies of social Darwinism and eugenics. Eugenics, itself defined as a “science of human betterment” or “science of racial betterment,” is primarily remembered for its centrality to Nazi policies of racial purification (e.g., violent anti-Semitism) as well as similarly inhumane treatments of people with disabilities and sexual minorities. However, eugenics and its application were also integrated with scientific practices central to the emerging field of psychology, especially fields’ focus on intelligence, emotional self-control, or gender conformity as evidence of evolutionary fitness (i.e., evolutionary superiority and inferiority). In turn the public and social leaders used American psychology eugenic-based works to uphold problematic and socially unjust (e.g., racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, classist) policies and practices. Thus, leading American psychologists utilized eugenics as a framework for promoting psychology as a scientific tool for supposedly predicting, controlling, and socially engineering not just human individual behavior but American society at large with significant negative social impact. This chapter documents past and present-day uses of eugenic-based psychological approaches in U.S.-based psychology as a discipline.