The Psychology and Cold War [Psihologia si Razboiul Rece]

In the East-West confrontation, during the Cold War, the psychology had both military and non-military applications, which were at least as important in the functioning of the two camps: in the fields of work, group and leadership relations, mass-media, assessment of intellectual skills and functioning, professional recruitment, space-travel preparation, etc. All these uses seemed to secure for psychology a privileged scientific, social and political positions, both in the Western and the Eastern world. One of the most important stakes in the psychological warfare of the Cold War was to control the mechanisms through which social representations were formed. The construction of the perceptions about the enemies in one’s own camp followed the same logic: in the 1950s and the 1960s, a real frenzy accompanied the circulation of such images as that of the rich kulak, the small bourgeois, the “social parasite” or the “saboteur” within the communist society just as in the West (especially in the USA) there was much talk about infiltrated communist traitors. Besides being used at the societal level to form social representations, the methods of psychology were frequently used in individual cases in order to “normalize” those who proved to be reluctant or even hostile to the established social order. Political prisoners were thus subjected to so-called behavioural change (“therapy”) experiments (see the “Piteşti Experiment”).