The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940-1977

The story of a unique and controversial wartime study of pilot fatigue. During World War II, members of the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory were commissioned to study pilot fatigue.They set up a Spitfire cockpit in the laboratory, turned it into a piece of laboratory apparatus, and carried out a series of important experiments that appeared to dramatically confirm the dangers of fatigue.Historians of psychology are aware of this episode, but the experiments, the events surrounding them, and the scientific reasoning involved have never been studied in detail.By going into the episode in depth, and by looking behind the scenes at archival material, David Bloor offers an analysis that is both original and more penetrating than anything that has been said before on the topic. Bloor describes the Cockpit experiments themselves before turning to the theoretical interpretation of the results and the intellectual resources that informed how they were viewed.Bloor then explains a major empirica