Charles Osgood

Charles Osgood was a psychologist whose work on how people in different societies express the same feelings using different words and concepts became directly useful to the CIA. In 1959, Osgood, who four years later became president of the American Psychological Association, wanted to push forward his cross-cultural research. He wrote in "an abstract conceptual framework," but Agency officials saw his research as "directly relevant" to covert activities. They believed they could transfer his knowledge of "hidden values and cues" into more effective overseas propaganda. Osgood's work gave them a tool called the "semantic differential" to choose the right words in a foreign language to convey a particular meaning.¹

Human Ecology Funding

Like Carl Rogers, Osgood got his first outside funding for what became the most important work of his career from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Osgood had written directly to the CIA for support, and the Society contacted him and furnished $192,975 for research over five years. The money allowed him to travel widely and expand his work into 30 different cultures. Osgood eventually received NIMH money to finish his research, but he acknowledged that the Society grants played an important part.¹

Osgood stressed that "there was none of the feeling then about the CIA that there is now, in terms of subversive activities," and stated the Society had no influence on anything he produced. Yet Society men could and did talk to him about his findings. They asked questions reflecting their own covert interests, not his academic pursuits, and they drew him out, according to one of them, "at great length." The Society's support ensured that he would continue on a scale that suited the Agency's purposes as well as his own.¹