Lapdocs

The Hoffman report on the APA’s collusion with the DoD and CIA to enable psychologists’ participation in torture has been released. I was particularly interested in the issue of motive:

The association’s ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board.

But there’s a broader issue than these individual payoffs (from page 14 of the report):

The very substantial benefits APA obtained from DoD help explain APA’s motive to please DoD, and show that APA likely had an organizational conflict of interest, which it needed to take steps to guard against. DoD is one of the largest employers of psychologists and provides many millions of dollars in grants or contracts for psychologists around the country. The history of DoD providing critical assistance to the advancement and growth of psychology as a profession is well documented, and includes DoD’s creation of a prescription-privileges “demonstration project” in which psychologists were certified to prescribe psychiatric drugs within DoD after going through a two-year training course. While APA took one significant step in 1991 that disappointed many military psychologists—refusing to allow DoD ads in APA’s publications because of DoD’s discriminatory position regarding gays and lesbians in the military—APA had lifted its advertising ban in 2004. And by the time of the PENS Task Force, contemporaneous internal discussions show that improving APA’s already strong relationship with DoD was a clear priority for those APA officials working on the PENS Task Force.

Especially with the decline in funding from NIH and NSF over the last few years, psychologists (and researchers across the sciences, including basic science that has no obvious military application) lap up DoD money when they can get it, and in my experience they see it as harmless. While I’m sympathetic to people trying to keep their labs running, this corruption is (yet another) example of how you may not be aware of the way the money you take is changing you.