In her Averaged American, Sarah Igo takes a novel look at the landmark social surveys that helped establish and legitimize social science during the first half of the twentieth century: the 1929 and 1937 Middletown studies by Robert and Helen Lynd; surveys carried out by George Gallup and Elmer Roper, who earned their bona fides as scientific pollsters by not incorrectly predicting the outcome of the 1936 election; and the reports on the sexual behavior of the American male (1948) and female (1953) conducted by Alfred Kinsey and his associates. Igo argues that social surveys define the standards against which ordinary citizens measure themselves, and she focuses on the works of these individuals because they “were the most successful purveyors of quantitative facts about ‘average’ Americans, and the best known and most talked about scientific productions of their day” (13). The notoriety of the “objective” data unearthed by these researchers fueled a popular fascination with social science and triggered a demand for more “detailed accounts of the actual rather than idealized social behavior” (11). For the first time, according to Igo, an increasingly “self conscious” citizenry could find out what “science” says is “average” and use this information both to locate themselves along a spectrum of typicality and to construct identities from the social snapshots framed by the surveyors. Igo takes us on an intellectual odyssey. She concludes that social research has transformed the American identity from white, native born, Protestant, middle class and Midwestern into a multicultural one. She also informs us how surveys have changed the way businesses attempt to reach their target, the consumer—shifting, for example, from homogenous appeals to the “mass” man and woman to niche marketing and specialized media to appeal to the tastes of, say, “women between the ages of 18 to 49” or “young and old, Latinos and Asians” or “gay and lesbian” (287, 297).

Igo devotes two chapters each to the Lynds, the pollsters, and Kinsey: the first, examining their theoretical interests, study design, and major findings; the second, reporting on the effects these surveys had on public opinion as well as the elite, business, and popular reactions to the key findings. (She tells us, for example, that manufacturers of women's sleepwear commissioned their own survey to counter Kinsey's claim that half of married women sleep naked.) Igo is at her best probing the motives that guided these researchers' choices of subject matter, ploys used to trick funders, reactions to critics, and how the Lynds and Kinsey cooked their data to reach their desired results. Igo is harshest in her assessment of the Middletown studies, not just because the Lynds, for ideological reasons, picked an “atypical” city to represent the typical American town, but also because they downplayed class divisions and racial and ethnic diversity in Muncie, Indiana, to magnify Middletown's cultural conformity and emergent consumerism, which they deplored. Igo faults the pollsters for their emphasis on “average” or “majority” opinion.

Despite the notoriously flawed methodology utilized by Kinsey and the fraudulent results produced by his techniques, Igo is kindest in her judgment of his taxonomic inquiries into the sexual behavior of men and women. Igo does not appear too troubled that Kinsey over sampled sororities, homosexuals, mental institutions, bars, hitch-hikers, and inmates (all males without high school education were drawn from prisons); or that he under sampled Catholics and excluded southerners, westerners and blacks. Indeed, she praises Kinsey's social consciousness for knowing that a prejudiced public would dismiss his explosive findings if they found out that “promiscuous blacks” were included. She accepts Kinsey's rationale for basing his study entirely on sexual histories given by volunteers. His unit of analysis—the orgasm, which Kinsey called the “sexual outlet”—though criticized by feminists like Margaret Mead, causes her no concern. She applauds Kinsey's goal to obliterate the distinction between “normal” and “deviant” sexual behavior. What she likes best about Kinsey's approach are the imponderable potentialities spawned by the variety of “imaginary” (and actual) sexual identity communities emerging from his data (277). Hypothetically, the college-educated Midwestern homosexual could take solace in discovering that the prospects of finding additional “outlets” from his stratum were not as bleak as he once imagined, or that the cheating housewife could find moral comfort from quantitative evidence in one of the 312 tables, charts, and “Accumulative Incidence Curves” that there were other “moderately religious” adulteresses in her area of the country. From her vantage point, the Reports, which she admits have been totally discredited by later research (294), were the most “representative” of the studies she examined, and, therefore, the most socially beneficial. Igo, for example, credits Kinsey's findings as instrumental in fueling the gay rights movement. Her chief criticism of Kinsey concerns the “peculiar assumptions” that regulated his research protocol: swingers and persons seeking “outlets” through S&M were discounted, for example, because he believed such activities to be “too marginal” (219).

Although Igo's book is extensively researched, crisply written, and a good read, the central thesis advanced in this otherwise very interesting study runs up against a disturbing reality unveiled by a half century of survey research.

In Igo's America, citizens follow public affairs closely, are informed, and are intellectually curious about survey findings. Yet scholarship dating back to Hyman and Sheatsley (e.g., 1947, 1954) and amplified today by the research of S. E. Bennett, Converse, Zaller, Delli Carpini, and Keeter contains results that demonstrate astonishingly high levels of public ignorance regarding current events, social facts, government institutions, economic statistics, or even where the respondent's own congressman stands on hotly debated policy issues.

The preponderance of evidence suggests that most Americans are not fascinated with social science surveys, at least not enough to motivate them to read social science books or Gallup polls to ferret out information to compare themselves with national norms. This little fact undermines Igo's contention that the identities of typical Americans are shaped by survey research data. I checked a Gallup poll conducted during the heyday (1944) of the early pollsters covered in her study and found that only 19 percent of respondents said they “regularly” or “occasionally” followed public opinion polls. Despite five years of chatter hyping Kinsey's 1948 sexual report on men and after the release of the even more controversial study on women, a 1953 poll accessed from Gallup.com reveals that 57 percent of the respondents indicated that they “never read or heard anything about Kinsey's sex studies.” The ubiquitous “we” that repeatedly turns up in Igo's book is not what she intends it to mean—we, the people. But, according to the citations listed in the 79 pages of footnotes appended to her book, it is we the social researchers, journalists, politicians, commentators, people who write letters to the editors, and surveyors—and perhaps another 10 percent—who opinion researchers believe encompass the “attentive public.” The flaw in Igo's work is her unrealistic view of a mass public composed of individuals equally motivated to follow the news closely and buy into its slant and who possess similar cognitive skills to enable them to absorb, integrate, retain, and otherwise make sense of the endless streams of social facts beamed into their homes everyday—in other words, her tendency to conflate attentive citizens with the mass public.

This is not to say effects of surveys on mass opinion are inconsequential. There is a trickledown effect. Igo could have argued that—despite the fact that few ordinary Americans read the Middletown studies, that the majority featured in her book were unaware of the Kinsey Reports, and that most people do not analyze poll data or pay attention to the news closely—these surveyors' works are significant because peculiarly interested publics absorbed distilled, stereotyped, or distorted versions of their findings carried in the discourse of opinion-makers of that era. Or she could have argued that these works are significant because they convinced elites to redefine normal and average. But this type of argument is missing in the Averaged American. Had it been a dominant theme, Igo would have produced a different book with a different title.