Overview

Americans today know that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data - now woven into our social fabric - became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, community studies, and consumer research transformed the United States public. Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as the average American and as intimate as the sexual self. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society - and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

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9780674023215

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Reviews

Cultural historians of the modern era and social scientists of many stripes will find much to admire in this insightful volume. Igo reminds us how deeply steeped social scientific inquiries are in contemporary social conventions and attitudes. She also outlines the overlooked role social scientists have played in shaping today s imagined communities, picking up where the census takers, map makers and newspaper publishers had left off during the century previous.--John F. Reynolds Journal of Social History (03/22/2008)

The 20th century, marked by the ascendance of the social sciences in academia, brought to the US the movement to socially engineer society by surveying, measuring, statistically analyzing, polling, and categorizing Americans. Standardized IQ and behavior tests produced quantified measurements of what was average and what was normal. Polls replaced literary traditions in defining the American mind. .. Normality increasingly lined up with quantified averages. Mass public and average American became synonymous with the search for a coherent US culture. The character of the aggregated Americans emerges in Igo's chapters on Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown (1929), George Gallup and Elmo Roper's public polling, and Alfred Kinsey's revelations of the behavior of statistically normal Americans. The movement magnified the issues involved in weighing the significance of statistical minorities. Igo's well-written study is an excellent introduction to the problems involved in aggregating and disaggregating the US...[H]er book provocatively proposes the seeming inevitability that Americans need to understand that they will live in a world shaped and perceived through survey data. -- J.H. Smith Choice (09/01/2007)

The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public presents a fascinating history of the coevolution of scientific techniques and public consciousness through the use of polls, interviews, and surveys of the opinions and behavior of U.S. citizens...Historian Sarah Igo has delved deeply into various documentary sources, ranging from newspapers and popular magazines to specialized social scientific treatises, to provide the analytic backbone to this history. Finding fresh ways to deploy her copious source materials, the author loses no time before plunging immediately into her compelling narrative about the maelstrom of mass opinion, dissecting the who, what, when, where, how, and why of this broad sociocultural movement. Focused on the middle third of the 20th century, the story has an inherent dynamism that Igo enhances with remarkable literary verve.--James H. Capshew PsycCritiques (06/18/2008)

Author Information

Sarah E. Igo is Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.

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