Social Science for Social Control?

Once the focus of hot political controversy, the Cambridge Project has disappeared from public view in the past two years. Most people, if they remember it at all, have no idea that the Project continues, supported by a million and a half Defense Department dollars a year.

Conceived in 1969 as a joint Harvard-MIT project to develop computer methodology for the social sciences, it became a political target because of its Department of Defense (DOD) funding. In the uneasy political atmosphere of that fall, the Faculty debated whether to join the Project on an institutional basis while radical pickets, petitions, and demonstrations attacked it as a tool of U.S. government hegemony at home and abroad. While radicals attacked it as counter-revolutionary in intent, liberals accepted it as "value-neutral" basic research but questioned the ethical implications of DOD funding.

After months of tortuous hearings, subcommittee reports, and committee meetings, the Faculty voted that Harvard as an institution would not participate in the Project but that individual faculty members could. Two years, $4 million, and several dozen research contracts later, Harvard is as deeply involved as if the Faculty hadn't rejected the proposal--except that the President cannot appoint Harvard representatives to the Project's two ineffectual advisory committees. The Project goes on, but by opting for a low profile and avoiding publicity, it has been all but forgotten.

The purpose of the Project is the development of "on-line" computer capabilities for social science. Under the old "batch processing" method, the user would have to wait several hours or days for results from a computer. But "on-line" (or "interactive" or "time-sharing") computing means that many users can almost simultaneously obtain immediate results. To the social scientist, on-line computing enables formulation of each question based on the computer's answer to the previous question. The advantages of such a method for military decision-makers especially in a crisis situation, are evident. Researchers working under the Project's auspices are developing further elaboration of computer techniques to deal with the special problems of the social scientist: complex correlation and causal chains; many variables, none of which can be held constant; and textual data to be analyzed for thematic content.

These methods can be developed by the computer expert working abstractly. But, the Project's originators argue, methods most closely suited to the needs of social scientists can best be developed by the social scientists themselves, as they work with real data on a problem they are actually trying to solve. Thus the line between basic and applied research blurs, when applied to the Cambridge Project. While Project's stated goals may be widely-applicable techniques of modeling, data reduction, and statistical analysis, it grants funds to Harvard and MIT professors for what is also substantive research. Critics of the Project disagree as to which aspect is more useful to the Defense Department.

Two years ago, radical attacks on the Project focused on the specific substantive research aspects. The original funding proposal submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Defense Department argued that the project would bolster projects (some already underway) such as work on "problems of the underdeveloped countries and on the conditions of stability in these areas so marked by turmoil" (emphasis theirs); analysis of texts rather than actual observation of movements and of countries (as in parts of the communist world where direct access is not possible; "the collection and processing of more than 750,000 pages of documents and analyses on contemporary communist and radical movements"; analysis of "several thousand detailed interviews with Viet Cong (which) will be released by Rand;" studies of "the problem of stability and disorder (by) cross-national comparisons of the performances of national governments;" "detailed analyses of the sociological and psychological bases of attitudinal change."

Under what conditions do peasants' protests become violent?"

Further, the funding proposal cited the kinds of data collections with which CAM would work: "world economic statistics," "U.S. economic statistics," "international armament expenditures and trends," "public opinion polls from all countries," "characteristics of local conflicts and limited was crises," "data on youth movements," "mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change," "peasant attitudes and behavior," and many more.

SDS, NAC (the November Action Coalition, SDS's now-defunct rival on the left), and Afro argued that the "abstract technology" aspect of the Cambridge Project was just a blind for counter-insurgency research. An SDS booklet read as follows:

"These kinds of data and much more will be processed for storage in the memory bank of a computer (one console of which will be located in the Pentagon.) Then operations will be developed to correlate and use them. To do what? To do things like estimate the number of riot police necessary to stop a ghetto rebellion in City X that might be triggered by event Y because of communications pattern K given Q number of political agitators of type Z; to plan a coup in country A where government B correctly assesses the needs of its people to be C and D and among whom the trend in public opinion is becoming more and more favorable according to indicators F-G..."

This radical critique proved overly simplistic, for almost none of the specific research projects cited in the original proposal have materialized under the Cambridge Project. Some had ended by the time the Project was underway; some sponsors objected to the Project's DOD funding; some had never intended to participate in the project. And in fact the funding proposal, on careful rereading, only mentions them as examples of the type of research that might benefit by the project. A common argument in defense of the proposal is that writing a grant proposal to the government is a game. The object is to make your particular academic interest sound as beneficial as possible to the potential source of funds; without necessarily intending to produce what the source wants.

Whether the specific data and research projects in the funding proposal reflected the intention of the Project's framers or an attempt to coax funds from the DOD is comparatively insignificant. The importance of the Cambridge Project lies in the "abstract technology" dismissed as a front by radicals. The Defense Department may never use specific programs produced by the Project, but it will use the technical expertise developed in the process of writing them. The funding proposal explicitly states the conceptual tools the DOD needs for its behavioral science problems:

Even an offhand list of behavioral science topics of interest to DOD rapidly becomes long, including, for example, leadership, organizational communications, personnel, training, policy analysis, public attitudes, morale, the psychology of deterrence, the psychology of bargaining, adjustment to foreign cultures, selection, allocation and assignment, man-machine communication, combat effectiveness, area knowledge, economic resources, and manpower utilization...Most of them are problems in which our understanding has been inhibited partly by the inadequacy of present modes of data management, analysis, and modeling.

Thus, when six professors at the Business School developed "a large simulation model of a competitive market" so that "750 M.B.A. candidates" could play a run-the-economy game, the validity of the particular model would be less important to the DOD than the understanding of information gathering and exchange for crisis-decision-making. This understanding would not be tied to the particular situation but would have a broad usage at the DOD and other government agencies as well. The analysis of Professor Griffith's collection of documents on comparative communism would be valuable in itself but even more valuable would be a technique for semantic analysis and thematic recognition by computers. The CIA, for example, collects enormous amounts of raw intelligence data from which meaningful patterns must be inferred. The sheer bulk of data makes the process too laborious to be done by hand. Programming a computer to recognize important themes and sift out relevant data would greatly reduce the human workload. The FBI could also use such a technique for tapped phones: instead of having an agent listen to all the conversations, a computer equipped to recognize spoken words could monitor the phone and print out conversations relating to themes it had been programmed to recognize as important.

The funding proposal documents further uses of computer techniques for DOD problems:

"Manpower estimates depend on longitudinal models of mass behavior. Area knowledge depends on efficient storage indexing, and retrieval of diverse data. Accelerating the processes of teaching and learning depends on achieving better models of cognitive processes. Improvement is organizational communications is likely to follow from better models of the network of information flows. Intelligent personnel assessment requires progress in our methods of multi-dimensional psychometric scaling. Achievement of deterrence can be helped by better bargaining models and by documentation of cultural values through symbolic analysis."

The Defense Department could hire its own computer experts or contract the problems out to private "think-tanks" like RAND. But for social science techniques the DOD needs what universities--Harvard and MIT in particular--have to offer: a first-rate community of behavioral scientist. The DOD's own such scientist don't know what they are doing, two of the Project's leading participants say; and the behavioral scientists of think-tank staffs number fewer than those at a single leading university. Cambridge offers an unusually large and diverse social science community.

At best the Cambridge Project can be seen as a serendipitous harmony of interests: the DOD needs the methods, the academics need funds for research they find intrinsically interesting. Probably many of the professors involved are not concerned with the DOD's use of their techniques. They would justify their work as pure research for the advancement of science with openly available results for anyone to use. The Cambridge Project as go-between helps them ignore the implications of the DOD funding. "Money is cleansed when it changes hands," a common rationalization goes. As a member of the Project's Policy Advisory Committee said:

"The Defense Department puts money in the Cambridge Project bucket and the professors take it out and it all seems very clean. The Cambridge Project makes people comfortable. The Harvard professors don't have to come in contact with anyone in uniform."

Although most academics receiving grants from the Project could disclaim any knowledge of its direct usefulness to the military, the Project's prime movers can not. MIT Professor J.C.R. Licklider, the Project's Principal Investigator (i.e., the nominal recipient of the government grant) returned to MIT from ARPA--the Defense Department agency funding the Project--several years ago in time to help plan the Project. (Whether the initiative for the Project came from the universities or from the Defense Department is thus a technical quibble.)

Ithiel de Sola Pool, professor of Political Science at MIT, and a major proponent of the Project, has been noted for his opinions on the proper public role of social scientists. In a 1967 essay entitled "The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments" he wrote:

"The Department of Defense is certainly the largest consumer of the skills of the geographer. It also needs linguistics. It also needs knowledge of the culture, values, social and political structures of every country that is a potential enemy, ally, or scene of turmoil--and this is virtually all the world...If you think that Washington could act better if it had a deeper comprehension of the social processes at work around the world, then you should be demanding that the CIA hire and write contracts with our best social scientists. The research now done by the CIA is sometimes well done and sometimes not very well done. I can think of no greater contribution a social scientist could make to the intelligence of the U.S. government than to help improve this effort at knowledge of the outside world."

Pool still stands by that opinion but insists that it applies only to policy decisions rather than to methodological research like the Cambridge Project. More refined techniques, however, will enable government decision-makers to create computer models of potential crisis situations and test out policy alternatives beforehand--as Pool himself should know.

No one denies the Project's relevance to the military. But its results are not specifically military-oriented, its proponents argue; they are equally applicable to groups of every political belief. "No matter what scientists discover it may be badly used, with this or with any other project," Pool maintains. "But the value counteracts the possible misuse. You can't stop the advancement of science."

As Pool put it, the Project's methodology is like the simple statistical tool of averaging: student protester, social scientist, and government official alike can use averaging to draw a conclusion or prove a point. But computer methodology, even if available to everyone, is helpful only to those with the computers, the funds, and the technical competence to use it. The unequal distribution of technical and financial resources narrows down the potential users to the government and government-funded university research. (Large corporations may find the techniques useful but so far they have done little work in this area.) Project participants can thus predict who will use their results, and for what ends.

"A neighborhood association should be able to assemble information to support its arguments about a new highway," the Project's first Annual Report argues in good liberal fashion. To lend credibility to its philosophy of pure research with results open to all users--regardless of political beliefs--the Project is investigating how to make it easier for the non-expert to use a computer. If the non-user could learn in a few minutes enough to use a computer for typical basic problems, the monopoly on technical know-how by a small minority of experts would given way to a broad base of potential computer users.

But the monopoly on financial resources would remain. The new "naive users" (as they say in the trade) would remain within a circumscribed sphere--chiefly academics and military men who know nothing about computers--and protest groups would still be left out. Certain "neighborhood groups" could gain access to government or university computers, but only if they were moderate enough to get financial assistance from the government, and not to threaten the computer-owner. Pool, for example, is conducting a seminar on computerizing land-use data for Cambridge Model Cities. But a more militant group--such as a tenant organization protesting university expansion into their community--would be less palatable to university officials. Thus the military users of the computer tools will be counterbalanced at the opposite end of the political spectrum by a few moderate community groups (who gain at the expense of more radical groups.)

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It is ironic that while the Project's methodological research is more useful to the DOD than specific counter-insurgency studies would have been, the "value-neutral" nature of this research protects the Project from becoming a political target again. There is not much danger of renewed political controversy arising around it, for it has quite effectively slipped from public view. But for those who remember the Project, "academic freedom" is a powerful justification for its existence. An increasing number of people here, it seems, find the abstract principle of academic freedom more important than the predictable misuse of "value-neutral" research