MACY CONFERENCES 1948-1953

Macy Conferences 1948-1953

Annotation: Margaret Mead, speaking in 1976, about the first Macy Conference formally dealing with the subject of ‘feedback’ stated:

“[in 1945] there wasn’t even any usable terminology. At first we called the thing ‘feedback,’ and the models that we were presented with at that point were the guided missile, target-seeking…[principles]” […] “There were three groups of people, there were the mathematicians and physicists - people trained in the physical sciences, who were very, very precise in what they wanted to think about. There was a small group of us, anthropologists and psychiatrists, who were trained to know enough about psychology in groups so we knew what was happening and could use it, and disallow it. And then there were two or three gossips in the middle, who were very simple people who had a lot of loose intuition and no discipline to what they were doing. In a sense it was the most interesting conference I’ve ever been in, because nobody knew how to manage this thing yet…”