Jonathan MacDonald

My dissertation “Expert Advice: Mediating Social Science’s Public Aspirations, 1930-1965,” investigates how American social scientists used mass media to popularize their ideas. I tell two stories together: the rise of the social scientific expert or public intellectual at midcentury and the emergence of mass communications technologies. I look to items that I group under the term “prescriptive media objects”: mass media texts that bear the mark of prescriptivity informed by the social sciences in their writing, aesthetics, and especially their intended function. I uses objects like educational films and television, public service announcements, self-help writing, mass surveys, and evidence of the quotidian and ephemeral presence of the social sciences in American life. Chapters examine pop-psych “personality tests” in the popular press, “social guidance films” in the classroom, a university course taught over broadcast television, the public safety risks/rewards of billboard advertising, and the Walt Disney attraction “The Carousel of Progress.”