Dr Katherine Lebow: List of publications

<p>In a 1933 article in The Nation, entitled “When Men Eat Dogs,” the social psychologist and market researcher Robert Noleman McMurry reported to American readers on a pioneering study of unemployment in the Austrian community of Marienthal. Conducted by the Austrian Research Unit for Economic Psychology and a team including Lotte Danziger, Marie Jahoda, and Paul Lazarsfeld, the study is now considered a landmark of social research. At the time, however, interest in the Marienthal study was far from being merely academic: for many commentators, the phenomenon of 10.2 million unemployed in Europe by March 1931 raised the specter of social and political breakdown. Certainly for McMurry—viewing the problem from Austria in 1933—the prognosis was dark:</p> <p>When people abandon nearly all the restraints which have marked their lives from childhood, when the social mores are no longer observed, their behavior can hardly be other than capricious. They are hungry. Their clothes are in rags. Their children are suffering. They themselves are half sick. A demagogue promises them food, shelter, work. Will they stop to analyze the validity of his program or the merits of his claim? Dr. Lazarsfeld doubts it. Rather, they will follow him, no matter how impossible his pretensions or how great a sacrifice on their part it entails.</p> <p>As the author put it, the unemployed resembled “decerebrate animals who respond only to immediate stimuli and in the intervals between stimuli lapse into a sort of stupor.” </p>