USARIBSS

The US Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (USARIBSS, commonly ARI) was the Army's principal in-house behavioral science research organization during the Cold War. It operated under a succession of names that reflected bureaucratic reorganizations: the US Army Personnel Research Office (USAPRO) in the 1950s, the Behavioral Sciences Research Laboratory (BESRL) in the early 1960s, and finally ARI from 1974 onward. Throughout these changes the organization maintained a consistent function: sponsoring and conducting research on human performance, training, leadership, and psychological factors relevant to Army operations.¹

Structure

As of the mid-1970s, ARI was headquartered in Washington, D.C., with approximately 250 professional staff. It operated two established research laboratories and had two more in development, along with field units embedded with Army commands. A special laboratory operated in South Korea, serving the large US force presence there. The organization's Washington headquarters was located in a building shared with ARPA and US Air Force research laboratories, situating it within a physical cluster of military behavioral and advanced research organizations.¹

The organization was run for an extended period by Jay Uhlaner, who edited the volume Psychological Research in National Defense Today, a survey of the field that served both as a technical reference and as a statement of the organization's scope.¹

Research Areas

ARI's work spanned individual training and performance, group dynamics under combat conditions, cross-cultural factors in counterinsurgency settings, and psychological assessment. Its classified output covered sensitive areas including the psychological vulnerability of adversary military populations and the behavioral science underpinning of interrogation research. Classified documents in the USAPRO and BESRL lineage include a 1953 document on psychological assessment, a 1963 document on counterinsurgency training, and several documents from 1965 through 1971 on topics including psychological reactions to weapons, attitudes of Vietnamese villagers, and motivation in soldiers facing future conflicts.¹

Shared Work with HumRRO and SORO

ARI existed within an ecology of Army-funded behavioral science organizations that included HumRRO (the Human Resources Research Office) and CRESS (and its predecessor SORO). Where HumRRO was an independent nonprofit and SORO/CRESS was affiliated with American University, ARI was an internal Army body. The three organizations shared research interests, cited each other's work, and sometimes transferred personnel. Together they constituted the institutional infrastructure through which the Army funded, directed, and applied behavioral science research from the early Cold War through the Vietnam era.¹

Classified Document Trail

Classified documents in the ARI lineage span 1951 through 1971:

• 1951: American Institutes for Research (AIR) detection of malingering study (closely related to USAPRO)
• 1953: USAPRO psychological assessment document
• 1963: Army psychological strategy and counterinsurgency document (Foreign Service Institute / Department of State, related body)
• 1965-1967: BESRL documents on weapons reactions and related topics
• 1967-1971: ARI documents on Vietnamese attitudes, soldier motivation, and related subjects¹