Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

60 N. Grube
precise and rational forecast of future developments. In addition to these claims,
pollsters have ambitions to educate the people. Therefore, as I shall show in the last
section, they construe respondents as incomplete beings.
5.1 The Creation of National Community: Dewey’s and Gallup’s
Ethical Legitimation of Social Sciences and Polls
Around about 1900, in the period that saw the emergence of empirical social
research, expectations of the social sciences rose out of a desire for social coherence.
In ‘The Public and its Problems’ (1927) the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey
(1859–1952) worried about the eclipse of ‘the public’. Dewey compared public participation
and communication in American mass society with rural 18th century
communities. Writing in the spirit of historical Romanticism, Dewey is saddened by
the gradual disappearance of traditional face-to-face communities and local neighbourhoods.
He feels that public participation in problem solving is beginning to
fade into the ether. At the beginning of the 20th century, many people were being
excluded from the benefits of technological inventions, economic progress and the
self-regulation of public affairs. The increasing social anonymity and impersonal
voting system weakened the will of average Americans to engage in public affairs
(Dewey, 1927/1984, pp. 305, 309–311, 319–320). Instead of local self-regulation
powerful special interest groups, who exerted a great influence on politicians, businessmen
and bureaucratic experts (Dewey, 1927/1984, p. 321; Lippmann, 1915),
governed urban affairs. Like Dewey the American journalist and political spindoctor
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), registered the alienation of the ‘outsiders’.
The ‘outsiders’ were the ‘great mass of wage-earners and farmers, of clerks and
small managers’. For Lippmann, these groups were alienated from the sphere of
political decision-making. This sphere was dominated by well-informed ‘insiders’
and experts (Lippmann, 1915, p. 35). As a consequence the ‘necessarily ignorant’
outsiders used their power as voters only irrationally, sometimes even destructively.
Lippmann (1925, p. 150) complained that such groups were ‘often meddlesome’.
This fatalistic behaviour endangered the necessary mobilisation of human resources
necessary for both the development of international and economic competition and
the drive to make the world safe for democracy. Lippmann and Dewey accused
the mass media of seducing the masses (Dewey, 1927/1984, pp. 321–322). Media
coverage presented solely selective information, stimulated a prevalent desire for
amusement, entertainment and distraction, helped to maintain ignorance all of which
led to the inability to overview and judge complex public affairs (Dewey, 1927/1984,
p. 306; Lippmann, 1925, pp. 43–44).
Both Lippmann and Dewey hoped that the social sciences could create knowledge
about thoughts and attitudes of people, their perceptions of diverse society
and their experiences with complex interdependent aspects of modernity. Lippmann
wanted to put social sciences, or at least polls, into the service of the government
for an efficient and improving government of the masses. In post-war Germany,