Surveying the Economic Mind: George Katona and the Institutionalization of Psychological Economics at Michigan,...

Standard histories of behavioral economics locate the field's origins in the heuristics-and-biases program of the 1970s, treating earlier attempts to join psychology and economics as a prehistory that failed to take root. This article reconstructs the most sustained of those earlier attempts: the psychological economics that George Katona (1901-1981) built at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center between 1946 and 1981. Drawing on Katona's published writings, the institutional record of the Michigan surveys, and the contemporary debates they provoked, the article argues that Katona's program, although theory-driven and abductive in method, building theory inductively from survey observation and testing its predictions deductively, was institutionalized by its hosts and received by economics not as a body of theory but as a measurement apparatus: the Surveys of Consumers and the Index of Consumer Sentiment. This mode of institutionalization explains both the program's durability and its disciplinary marginality. Because psychological economics lived in an interdisciplinary survey organization rather than in economics departments, it survived the theoretical hostility of postwar economics; because that discipline admitted only theory deduced from the postulates of rational choice, it could evaluate the program's predictions but never its theory; and because the program's survival never depended on winning that evaluation, it failed to reproduce itself as an economic specialty, and its data outlived its ideas. The Michigan case, the article concludes, shows that the disciplinary fortunes of psychology within economics have turned as much on instruments, institutions, and rival logics of inquiry as on arguments.