In the first decades of the twentieth century, deaths from automobile accidents quickly mounted, and influential figures, like Herbert Hoover, sought ways to control this icon of industrial capitalism and its users. These early regulatory efforts opened up the new field of automotive safety, a crowded market for ideas full of both buyers and sellers of potential solutions. This essay examines the 1920s and 1930s, as one profession, psychology, entered and sought to influence this emerging field, which thoroughly entangled science and capitalism. It describes how psychologists used a committee in the National Research Council to find positions of power. It argues that the psychologists’ successes and failures were largely determined through a dialectical process between the psychologist’s skills, other powerful professions, like engineering, and available patronage and funding. The psychologists’ greatest success came through positing a novel entity—the accident-prone driver. Yet by the late 1930s, the most influential psychologists had turned against this idea, criticizing less prestigious colleagues who promoted it to industry and government. Established psychologists worried mostly that self-interested, junior colleagues were overselling their ideas and aligning too closely with corporate capitalism, thereby undermining the young profession’s already tenuous credibility.

中文翻译：

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“安全驾驶取决于驾驶者”：心理学家和汽车安全主题，1920-55

在 20 世纪的头几十年，车祸造成的死亡人数迅速增加，像赫伯特·胡佛这样的有影响力的人物想方设法控制这个工业资本主义的象征及其使用者。这些早期的监管努力开辟了汽车安全的新领域，这是一个充满潜在解决方案买卖双方想法的拥挤市场。本文考察了 1920 年代和 1930 年代，心理学这一职业进入并试图影响这一新兴领域，该领域彻底纠缠了科学和资本主义。它描述了心理学家如何利用国家研究委员会的一个委员会来寻找权力职位。它认为，心理学家的成功和失败在很大程度上是由心理学家的技能与其他强大的职业（如工程学、以及可用的赞助和资金。心理学家最大的成功来自于假设了一个新的实体——容易发生事故的司机。然而到了 1930 年代后期，最有影响力的心理学家已经反对这个想法，批评那些将其提升到行业和政府的不那么有声望的同事。成熟的心理学家主要担心自私自利的初级同事过度宣传他们的想法，并与企业资本主义过于紧密地结合在一起，从而破坏了这个年轻行业本已脆弱的信誉。