In 1954, The Scientific Monthly —an American science magazine incorporated a couple of years later into the prestigious Science—published an article proposing a measurement instrument – a scale of fitness – designed to test the readiness of colonized people for self-government. Properly applied, this sociometric instrument would make sure that a democratic concern for the welfare of the governed rather than international power politics or imperial interests determined the schedule for independence. “If fitness can be defined and measured and degrees of it set as goals,” the article stated, “the trusteeship system is likely to work with less friction and probability of bloodshed in the future.” The man behind the proposal was Stuart C. Dodd, an American social scientist and pioneer of scientific polling techniques who had spent the 1930s and 1940s in the colonial Near East, conducting the first opinion and attitude field studies in the region as professor of sociology in the American University of Beirut. In the aftermath of the war, Dodd returned to the U.S. and became a vigorous exponent of the expansion of social scientific mechanisms and tools for international governance: from the use of public opinion polling as “barometer for international security” to the organization of an international association of pollsters that would launch “indigenous and self-supporting institutes of public opinion research in new territories” and tighten the affiliation of different national agencies toward a common project of “world surveying.” Joining other historians of science who have recently become interested in the specificity of late imperial epistemologies; this paper will examine Dodd’s initiatives (and opinion and attitude research more generally) in the context of colonial techno-politics. By inquiring into the role of social research in the governing and regulation of the mandate state, this paper also speaks to a broader historiography on social science as the new basis and standard of intelligibility for administrative practice in the second half of the twentieth century.