Psychologists and the U.S. Military: Then and Now

As psychologists, we are professionally bound to protect and promote the psychological health and wellbeing of those we serve, to avoid knowingly doing harm, and to apply our knowledge base and scholarship toward promoting the greater good.

There is nothing especially amusing about this mission, so when Saturday Night Live (SNL) lampoons psychologists and their activities (see clip below), you can be pretty sure that something is seriously wrong.

At first blush, the SNL skit seems in bad taste: Bagging your own groceries may not be pleasurable, but it's hardly comparable to waterboarding or rectal feeding. But then that's the point: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen don't seem to see the difference, at least not enough difference to categorize the latter as "torture". Perhaps if they were told that the same activities were carried out by a foreign power against Americans, they'd feel differently. Research findings suggest it likely.

Regardless of what it might be formally called, the international community has reached a moral consensus, as reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and other international treaties to which the United States is a signatory, that torture is cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment and thus represents a violation of international law. Further, empirical research suggests that not only is torture psychologically brutalizing, but it is not even an effective technique for ascertaining truth (e.g., Alexander and Bruning 2008).

This is why the leadership of virtually every other related professional discipline, including psychiatry, social work, and medicine, has deemed it unethical for its members to participate or assist in the process of torture. In the United States, the discipline of psychology, through the leadership of the American Psychological Association (APA), has stood alone in its refusal to firmly acknowledge the ethical incompatibility of its mission to promote human mental health and healing and its members’ involvement in the military’s and the CIA’s abusive interrogation and detention practices.

While I am not privy to APA’s reasons for this choice, I believe that it is rooted, at least in part, in the troubling history of APA’s relationship with the military. More so than with other practice and research disciplines, the impressive growth of professional psychology in the United States can be directly tied to its relationship with the U.S. military and related agencies.

During World War I, psychologists, under the leadership of Robert Yerkes, sought to aid the war effort by creating and administering a test of intelligence to military recruits in order to both identify those who were intellectually inferior (who may then be recommended for discharge) and those whose intellect suggested that they would most benefit from specialized training and assignment. So enthusiastic was the military to make use of this new psychological tool, that more than 1.7 million men were tested using either the Army Alpha or the Army Beta, the alternative test developed for those who were deemed to not be sufficiently literate to take the Alpha (Gould 1982).

Notably, while the actual impact on military functioning appears to have been minimal, the social impact of these tests was devastating. Not only was the average overall mental age of the recruits a shocking 13, but the average ‘‘Negro’’ mental age was reported to be 10.41, a difference that Yerkes and his disciple Carl Brigham attributed to innate differences in intelligence, despite the fact that Black recruits had access to less education and were almost all illiterate (Gould 1982). These data and their racist interpretations were widely publicized and were used to promote various racist policies, including the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted the immigration of Jews and Slavs and prohibited the immigration of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians.

Thanks to Yerkes and his colleagues, psychologists became a fixture in the military, with the Department of Defense continually playing a critical role in providing jobs for psychologists as clinicians and funds for psychologists as researchers. While these strong bonds have been highly beneficial for building the profession’s reach and influence, they have also come to pose difficult, complex, and unresolved challenges to psychology’s core ‘‘do-no-harm’’ ethical foundation (Eidelson et al. 2011). The nature of these challenges are well illuminated by two examples: (1) psychologists’ involvement in the post-9/11 interrogation and detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, CIA ‘‘black sites,’’ and elsewhere, and (2) American psychology’s embrace of military programs designed to create more effective and less psychologically vulnerable soldiers.

There is now irrefutable evidence that U.S. psychologists were actively involved in the design, implementation, research on, and oversight of abusive and torturous ‘‘war on terror’’ interrogation practices and confinement conditions (ACLU 2008; Olson et al. 2008, Senate Committee's Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program 2014). One of these practices included the misguided reverse engineering of the military’s torturous Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program. In many other cases, psychologists’ involvement in interrogation methods—which included deception, fear escalation, ego harm, extended isolation, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, snarling dogs, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding (Flaherty 2008; Olson et al. 2008)—conflicted with a range of professional ethics standards.

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Yet the leadership of the APA, the largest professional organization of psychologists in the world, repeatedly emphasized that psychologists played a crucial role in keeping prisoner interrogations safe, legal, ethical, and effective. This stance conformed precisely to the position already adopted by the Department of Defense—and it stood in direct opposition to all other major healthcare professions, as well as to psychologists’ own professional ethos.

To take such a stand, the APA had to change some of its own existing policies. After 9/11, when it became clear that the U.S. military was going to engage in a ‘‘war on terror,’’ the APA created a task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), to determine the ethical implications of psychologists’ role in national security operations. This task force has been criticized on a number of grounds, including the secrecy of the process, the ‘‘emergency’’ bypassing of the APA’s standard approval process, and the fact that the majority of the task force members were in some significant capacity tied to the department of defense and the intelligence community (Olson et al. 2008).

The PENS report also relied upon the 2002 revision of Ethics Standard 1.02 (APA 2002). In its revised form, this standard made it permissible, when an irreconcilable conflict arose, for psychologists to ‘‘to adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority’’ rather than to the APA Ethics Code itself (Pope and Gutheil 2008). More specifically, it encouraged psychologists involved in national security settings to adopt the broadly discredited Nuremberg defense—‘‘I was just following orders’’—when their involvement in detention or interrogation operations violated their professional ethics (Olson et al. 2008). The PENS report argued that such activities were necessary because psychologists were essential in making interrogations safe, legal, and effective (Pope 2011).

In reality, however, psychologists are often unable to determine if detainees are reluctant to give information or if they simply do not have any information to give. Research reveals high rates of error in trained interviewers detecting deception (Olson et al. 2008). Overall, the ‘‘do no harm’’ professional ethos combined with the lack of evidence of actual benefit to national security both point to the need for APA to adopt clear, firm ethical guidelines for psychologist involvement in military activities.

With respect to the interrogation of war prisoners, psychologists with appropriate expertise could ethically play a role in teaching intelligence personnel how to build rapport and noncoercive relationships—as long as the prisoners’ capture and ongoing confinement are deemed legitimate, humane, and legal under international law. Such honest relationship building has been found to be the most effective means for ascertaining accurate information that can help to keep other people safe (Alexander and Bruning 2008).

More generally, psychologists can much more effectively contribute to our collective security by studying the roots of nonviolence, as well as violence, and by developing and advocating for policies that best care for and protect the needs of our planet and all its human beings.

References

Alexander, M., & Bruning, J. (2008). How to break a terrorist: The US interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq. Free Press

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (2008). Newly unredacted report confirms psychologists supported illegal interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Press Release. Retrieved April 30, from http://bit.ly/97hxR4

American Psychological Association. (2002). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychologist, 57, 1060–1073.

Eidelson, R., Pilisuk, M., & Soldz, S. (2011). The dark side of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. Retrieved from http://www.zcommunications.org/the-dark-side-of-comprehensive-soldierfi…

Flaherty, A., (2008). Probe: Officials warn about harsh interrogations. USA Today. Retrieved February, 24, 2013 from http://bit.ly/9N63Rc

Gould, S. J. (1982). A nation of morons. New Scientist, 6, 349–352.

Olson, B., Soldz, S., & Davis, M. (2008). The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A critique of policy and process. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 3, 2–8.

Pope, K. S. (2011). Psychologists and detainee interrogations: Key decisions, opportunities lost, and lessons learned. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7, 459–481.

Pope, K. S., & Gutheil, T. G. (2008). The American Psychological Association and detainee interrogations: Unanswered questions. Psychiatric Times, 25, 16–17.

Note: Parts of this post were previously published in a chapter titled Toward a Psychology of Nonviolence in Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era, written by Harry Murray, Mikhail Lyubansky, Kit Miller, and Lilyana Ortega, published by Springer Press.

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