The Simulmatics Corporation was a private U.S. data science firm that used computation to conduct large scale behavior analysis. The corporation was founded in 1959 by Ed Greenfield, an advertising agent on Madison Avenue, and ceased operation in 1970, after a series of bad publicity and financial troubles led to its ultimate collapse. The Simulmatics Corporation provided large scale political data analysis to clients, most notably in the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam, and as part of the Kerner Commission, an investigation into the causes of nationwide racial unrest in the summer of 1967. Inspired by the growing use of computer simulation and prediction, particularly in the 1952 presidential election, the Simulmatics Corporation was founded on the premise of providing consulting services based on large scale social and behavioral data analysis using computer models. Their programs were run on IBM 704 computers and used the FORTRAN language. The word "simulmatics" is a combination of the words "simulation" and "automatic". Notable employees and affiliates of the corporation include Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Alex Bernstein, a computer chess pioneer and attendee of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop.
Notable projects
1960 Presidential Election The Simulmatics Corporation’s first significant contract was with the John F. Kennedy 1960 presidential campaign. The corporation conducted their analysis using “the People-Machine”, which was a program that modeled 480 different voter categories based on demographic information, such as “working class white protestant women in northern cities”. The program then predicted what these voter groups' responses would be to different stances taken by Kennedy. The corporation wanted to demonstrate to the campaign that making statements in support of civil rights would be beneficial to securing the presidency, which was reflected in their analysis. Jill Lepore, an American historian, argues that most results generated by the People-Machine were "common sense". After Kennedy’s election the Simulmatics Corporation’s involvement in the campaign was publicized in an article in Harper’s Magazine, written by a Simulmatics’ employee disguised as a “freelance writer”, and became a nationwide sensation. Concerns that Kennedy had manipulated the election by working with the Simulmatics Corporation were widespread as people worried about the integrity and future of politics. Simulmatics took advantage of this publicity and went public in 1961. They worked on contracts in a wide variety of domains, from simulating automobile traffic to the effectiveness of advertising campaigns for prominent companies.
DARPA and Vietnam In 1966, the Simulmatics Corporation was contracted by the Pentagon as part of DARPA. As part of pacification efforts, they were hired to win over the Southern Vietnamese to the American cause by first analyzing the population's sympathies and motivations. Simulmatics established an office in Saigon, and conducted research until 1968. As most of the Simulmatics employees did not speak Vietnamese, students from the University of Saigon were used to communicate with interview subjects to gather data. The Simulmatics Corporation conducted several studies while in Saigon. Their first and most successful project was a study of the Vietnamese Regional Forces and Popular Forces (RF/PF). Researchers used Thematic Apperception Tests and the Cantril Scale in an attempt to identify a standard psyche of Vietnamese villagers, hoping that they could then develop propaganda campaigns and policy to increase Vietnamese sympathies for America. In a later study, Simulmatics researchers recruited a wide network of villagers in the Dihn Tuong and Chau Doc provinces. Villagers would send detailed reports back to the Simulmatics office on the sentiments of their neighbors and acquaintances, building a massive database for the corporation which they could use to gage civilian reactions to different American pacification efforts. Reports from Simulmatics’ Saigon office frequently spoke of the organization's mismanagement. Because many of their original employees declined going to Vietnam, Simulmatics hired a new group of researchers, many of whom had fewer qualifications and were less well vetted than those initially working with the corporation. There were also significant challenges with cultural differences that researchers often seemed uninterested in addressing. As outsiders in rural Vietnamese communities, they struggled to build the trust to generate authentic and open responses from interviewees which compromised the integrity of their research. In late 1967 as complaints piled up and the Saigon branch came under scrutiny, all of Simulmatics' ARPA projects were terminated and the corporation’s Saigon office was closed.
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