Paul Erickson

“Sarason to analyze. On neighboring atolls, Alice Joseph and Melford Spiro administered the tests to a full population sample of Chamorros and Ifalukans, respectively. (Spiro added to the battery the Bavelas Moral-Ideological test as well.) Speed was of the essence—since the goal was optimally efficient research conducted by means of near-automatic methods—and it often seems (to the onlooker today) as if researchers cared as much about start-to-finish time clocked as the richness of their results. In-depth local knowledge was not an aim, per se. It was typical to note, as Joseph did, that their report was not meant to be a complete, penetrating study, but that “the work was planned experimentally as a deliberate attempt to find out how much information concerning personality structure in a cultural group can be obtained by a relatively short, standardized method in cases where there is not enough time for detailed personal and individual studies or systematic research on social and cultural backgrounds.”5 In the coming decade, these researchers passed their”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality