Governed by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology

Talk by Professor Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto (CA)

Abstract

In this talk, I will introduce my book, Governed by Affect, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. It offers a new history of psychology’s contradictory and contested public life in the United States and beyond since World War II, with a special emphasis on a series of transformations that have occurred since the 1970s. For both policymakers and ordinary people, the discipline of psychology has come to furnish a seemingly inexhaustible array of tools and concepts for making individuals healthier, wealthier, and happier. At the heart of this psychologized neo-liberalism is the notion that attention or the will exists as a scarce resource in a distracted and tempting world. Breaking with the austere and deliberative rationality of Cold War cognitive science, the new psychology depicts individuals as beholden to their unbridled passions and wants. At the same time of this unprecedented cultural influence, psychologists’ expertise came under greater scrutiny than ever before, with the discipline finding itself mired in a pair of moral and epistemological crises which threaten to overturn the field’s self-image as an objective science and a helping profession.

The book traces a series of key transformations: a switch from psychology identifying as a social science to a health science; the greater engagement of psychological scientists in the realms of self-help and public policy; and the overshadowing of cognitive science by theories of affect. These three transformations – in psychology’s political economy, in its public engagement, and in its theories of the self – constitute distinct but interconnected areas of analysis for constructing a new history of the psychological society. Such a perspective offers a critical genealogy of the stakes and public face of psychology at a time when the provision of mental health services and the use of behavioural interventions to improve both personal and social well-being are acute matters of concern.

Bio

Michael Pettit is a historian of the human sciences. He is a professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he is affiliated with the Historical, Theoretical, and