Cohen-Cole approaches some of the broadest themes in the modern history of the human sciences. This dissertation explains the sudden emergence of strikingly different notions of human nature and mentation during the Cold War, breaking with extant understandings of the rise of cognitive psychology. His study shows cybernetics and computer technologies to be less important to this development than some historians have claimed; instead, he demonstrates how the on-the-ground psychology of postwar America dynamically and substantively informed the development of cognitive models of the person. By keeping the focus on very particular intellectual communities, including the Harvard Department of Social Relations and the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, he traces in detail the institutional dimensions of thinking about thinking and uncovers how the ideals of scientific reflexivity and interdisciplinarity introduced novel perspectives on a field that is generally held to have evolved through mechanistic theory and experimental findings. The resulting study illuminates how conceptions of mind were attached to diverse public and intellectual projects at a time of national mobilization and international ideological struggle.
--2006 Prize Committee: Ellen Herman (chair), Jill Morawski, David Robinson