Gordon Tullock meets Phineas Gage: The political economy of lobotomies in the United States

• Published in: Research policy 2020-02, Vol.49 (1), p.103872, Article 103872
• Main Authors: March, Raymond J., Geloso, Vincent
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Health economics; Lobotomies, Science; Mental health; Political economy
• ISSN: 0048-7333; 1873-7625
• DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2019.103872

•Gaps between scientific discoveries and applying scientific findings to social problems can emerge (and persist) in ways that are detrimental to the general public.•The extent of the detriment to the general public can be observed with the case of the lobotomy boom in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.•We use the framework developed in Gordon Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry to explain the incentive structures that made the lobotomy popular among medical practitioners in spite of reservations within the academic community.•We find that the incentives stemming from state funding prolonged the use of the lobotomy in public institutions while private institutions were more reluctant to practice lobotomies.•Our findings have critical implications for medical and research policy and the role of government-based funding in creating gaps between scientific discoveries and their applications. Incentives affect the ways in which scientific research is disseminated and translated into practice. From 1936 to 1972, approximately fifty thousand lobotomies were performed in the US, with the majority occurring during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, the lobotomy's popularity coincided with a consensus within the medical community that the procedure was ineffective. To explain this paradox, we follow the framework developed by Tullock (2005) to examine how financial incentives within the scientific community affected how scientific research is used in practice. We argue that government funding for public mental hospitals and asylums expanded and prolonged the use of the lobotomy, despite mounting scientific evidence. We demonstrate that the lobotomy was used less in private mental hospitals and asylums. This paper provides an explanation for the use of scientifically discredited procedures due to the lack of responsiveness of government funding agencies. The results have implications for the dissemination and translation of scientific knowledge in practice.