“Project Camelot”

The U.S. Military has long been a major source of funds for scientific research at
universities and elsewhere. These research funds have been used to support the research projects
of natural scientists, often for the purpose of refining military technology and weaponry. In
1964, however, the Army made a major attempt to recruit social scientists for research on
“Project Camelot”.

The objective of this project was “to devise procedures for accessing the potential for
internal war within national societies” and “to identify… those actions which a government
might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for internal war.”
Moreover, it was intended that “the geographical orientation of the research will be toward Latin
American countries.” In other words, the Army wanted to know how to predict and avoid
revolutions in Latin America.

The results of the research then, could clearly be used to interfere the domestic affairs of
other nations. Several million dollars were made available for the project, and many social
scientists agreed to participate in it.

The project was aborted within a year. News of the research and the source of its funds
as leaked in Chile, where it caused an immediate furor. The U.S. Ambassador complained to the
federal government, and both Congress and the State Department applied pressure to have the
project cancelled. The Military backed down, and “Project Camelot” was abandoned. But the
affair contributed to a persistent wariness in other countries about the motives of American social
scientists. American sociologists conducting research abroad still encountered the suspicion that
they are working for the CIA or other branch of U.S. government.

Why did social scientists allow themselves to become involved in the project? Irving
Louis Horowitz (1967) found that they did not regard themselves as “spies”, nor were they
interested in maintaining anti-democratic regimes in Latin America. They saw themselves as
“reformers” whose insights into the real causes of revolutions – poverty and oppression- might
“educate” the army. None of them actually believed however, that the military would take their
recommendations seriously. They had been presented with an opportunity to do major research
with almost unlimited funds, and they simply overlooked some of the ethical issues involved.

Sociological research is not self-supporting. It depends on the grants of public and

private institutions, and the line between accepting a grant from them and working for them is a
thin one. Sociologists have to be aware that their research may be put to questionable uses,
including uses they could not have foreseen.

“Tearoom Trade”

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published Tearoom Trade, an observational study of

homosexual acts that took place between strangers in certain men’s rest rooms that were used
almost exclusively for that purpose (“tearooms”). The participants on the scene wanted to avoid
any involvement with the police, and for that reason one person always served as a lookout. By
taking the role of lookout Humphreys was able to observe hundreds of sexual encounters without
his identity as an outsider becoming known. Only a tiny majority of people with homosexual
inclinations participate in this highly impersonal form of sexual activity, and Humphreys was
interested in finding out more about the special characteristics of these subjects.

To get further information, Humphreys noted the automobile registration numbers of the
participants and traced their addresses. After waiting a year to ensure that he would not be
recognized, he visited their homes under the guise of a survey researcher looking for information
on a quite different topic. He was able to obtain a great deal of information about them,
including for example, the surprising fact that the majority of them were married and living with
their wives. Humphreys’ ingenious study won the C. Wright Mills award for the Society for the
Study of Social Problems for outstanding research, but it was strongly criticized by some
sociologists and in the press.

One criticism was that Humphreys was a “snooper”, delving into a subject unworthy of
professional study. This is a criticism few sociologists would accept – all sociologist are in some
sense “snoopers”, and a research topic cannot be excluded simply because some peop0le find its
subject matter distasteful. A second criticism was that Humphreys had endangered his subjects
by recording details of their illegal acts and keeping lists of their names and addresses. If the
material had fallen into the wrong hands, blackmail, extortion or arrest could have followed.
Humphreys replied that he had kept only one master list of names in a bank deposit box, that
once he allowed himself to be arrested rather than disclose his identity to the police, that he
eventually destroyed his data, and that he took every precaution to conceal the identities of the
participants in his report. Humphreys’ attitude seems to have been a responsible one, but one
fact remains that other researchers would not necessarily have been as careful. The third and
most serious criticism was that Humphreys had used systematic deception, both to observe the
sexual encounters and later to gain entry to the subjects’ homes. In the second edition of his
book (1975), Humphreys acknowledges the force of this criticism and agrees that he should have
identified himself as a researcher, even at the cost of sacrificing some sources of information.
His dilemma highlights a problem that keeps recurring in sociological research: the distinction
between legitimate investigation and unjustified intrusion is often difficult to judge.

Source: Robertson, Ian. 1980. Sociology. New York: Worth Publishers, Inc.