War on the Mind

Watson gives an account of the psychological research carried out for military authorities, much of it secret, in the United States, Britain, Israel, Australia and Russia during the Cold War and the Vietnam war. Drawing together published studies, unpublished reports and interviews, he sets out the range of tasks the services put to psychologists and the findings they produced. The fields he covers include interrogation and the psychology of breaking prisoners, torture, the selection and training of soldiers, riflemanship and the willingness of men to fire, sabotage and unconventional operations, propaganda and psychological operations, and tactics. The book assembles this material into a single picture of a discipline working inside the machinery of war, and argues that the applications extend from the defensible to the abusive, and that the distinction between the two has been drawn by military need rather than by the profession. Its case is that a substantial body of psychological knowledge has been developed and used out of public sight, that its practitioners and its subjects have often not known the purposes it served, and that the record should be set out plainly so that the uses of the science can be judged.

Written from the public record for the book.

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• Peter Watson