Blog – Page 3 – Roy Eidelson

The “Operational Psychology Professional Practice Guidelines” Are Deeply Flawed — the American Psychological Association Needs Your Comments

Through February 15th, the American Psychological Association (APA) is soliciting online comments from psychologists, the public, and interested organizations in response to a new draft proposal for Professional Practice Guidelines for Operational Psychology. Here I would like to briefly share some thoughts about why this is important and deserving of readers’ attention.

The drafters of the Guidelines define operational psychology as the “application of psychological science to the operational activities conducted in support of national security, national defense, and public safety.” To be sure, this is a challenging arena of professional work, so developing practice guidelines would certainly seem to be a worthwhile endeavor. But after closer inspection, I believe that the APA’s approval of these particular Guidelines would risk lending unwarranted legitimacy to highly problematic areas within the larger domain of operational psychology — areas that still require extensive discussion and evaluation by a range of stakeholders much broader than the task force members who have produced these Guidelines.

Context for the new Guidelines is crucial. For years there has been incontrovertible evidence linking psychologists working for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies to “war on terror” abuses at CIA black sites, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere. Tragically, psychologists were directly involved in designing and implementing cruel, inhuman, degrading, and torturous detention and interrogation practices. Among the abuses suffered by prisoners were prolonged solitary confinement, disorienting sleep and sensory deprivation, painful stress positions, physical beatings, cultural and sexual humiliation, waterboarding, and indefinite detention.

The American Psychological Association’s “Psychology PAC” Must Do Better

Contributions to the campaign war chests of Republican Party politicians who hold contemptuous views of democracy are unsurprising from mega-corporations and right-wing billionaires. The top priority for these donors is to have their self-aggrandizing agenda front-and-center in the halls of Congress. So even when democracy itself is under attack, they’re going to place profits over people and bestow gifts on any candidate willing to do their bidding.

The American Psychological Association’s (APA) affiliated “Psychology PAC” certainly isn’t in the same boat when it comes to political giving. That’s some measure of good news. But a little research reveals that this PAC does have a history of making some highly questionable choices when it comes to deciding where to direct its financial resources.

According to Psychology PAC, it solicits voluntary contributions from APA members and staff as a way for these donors to “participate in the democratic process.” More importantly, the PAC states that the donations it makes are “consistent with APA’s values and mission to benefit society” and that it fights for the APA’s priorities, including “for ending violence; for criminal justice; for promotion of social justice issues, and for the fight against bigotry and racism.”

These virtuous aspirations would seemingly eliminate donations to a broad swath of today’s politicians in Washington, D.C. Yet, as I wrote earlier this year, among the recipients of Psychology PAC dollars during Donald Trump’s presidency were eight GOP members of Congress who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory: Michael Burgess (Texas), Tom Cole (Oklahoma), Chuck Fleischmann (Tennessee), Morgan Griffith (Virginia), Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma), Devin Nunes (California), Adrian Smith (Nebraska), and Jason Smith (Missouri). Along with colleagues, these lawmakers promoted baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud despite repeated court rulings that concluded otherwise. Such false accusations were the impetus behind the violent January 6th insurrection in which a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building, endangering lives, destroying property, and threatening the democratic process that Psychology PAC extols.

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The American Psychological Association Still Owes Guantanamo’s Victims an Apology

Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the years since January 11, 2002, nearly 800 “detainees”—few with any meaningful connections to international terrorism—have been imprisoned there, where they have been subjected to abuse and, in some cases, torture. From the outset, members of my own profession—psychologists—played key roles in operations at Guantanamo, CIA “black sites,” and other overseas detention facilities. Their involvement included designing and implementing inhumane conditions of confinement and brutal techniques of interrogation.

Among the most pervasive of the methods used were solitary confinement, where prolonged isolation could extend for weeks or months, sometimes in empty cells and total darkness; sleep deprivation, in which prisoners were kept awake for days at a time by bright lights, loud music, intermittent slaps, or other noxious means; sexual and cultural humiliation, including forced nudity and sexually provocative and insulting behavior by interrogators; and the use of threats to generate fears of injury and death, ranging from snarling military dogs to confinement in coffin-like boxes to mock executions.

This, then, was the context six years ago when an extensive independent investigation uncovered compelling evidence that leaders of the American Psychological Association (APA)—the world’s largest organization of psychologists—had failed to adequately defend the profession’s fundamental do-no-harm ethical principles. Instead, they had opted to support and preserve the continuing involvement of psychologists in these operations, despite mounting reports of their complicity in “war on terror” excesses. In response to the investigation’s disturbing findings, the APA instituted a series of valuable ethics reforms and apologized to its membership and to psychologists worldwide for having abandoned the profession’s core values.

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U.S. Psychology’s Unfinished Journey from 9/11

As the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 nears, there will be many valuable reflections about that horrific day and about the subsequent “global war on terror” that devastated countless lives around the world. My own focus here is narrower: to briefly consider this disturbing two-decade period in relation to the American Psychological Association (APA) and professional psychology in the United States.

In the days following the terrorist attacks that targeted New York City and Washington, D.C., it quickly became apparent that the White House, the Department of Defense, and the CIA were prepared to ignore well-established international laws and human rights standards in pursuit of our adversaries. But at that time, it was less immediately obvious that some members of my own profession—fellow psychologists—would choose to embrace and participate in the merciless “dark side” operations that took place at secret overseas “black sites,” at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, and beyond. And then, as events unfolded further, it became even more surprising that—through acts of commission and omission—these abusive and sometimes torturous operations would also find support within the leadership of the APA.

At any point, the APA could have joined with concerned human rights groups in seeking to constrain a U.S. military-intelligence establishment set on unbridled retribution that brutalized prisoners and diminished the country’s moral standing around the world. But for the world’s largest organization of psychologists, that tragically proved to be the proverbial road not taken.

Rumsfeld Then, DeSantis Now: The Lies That Bind

Given the horrific toll of the Iraq War, that disastrous misadventure hardly seems like a good template for combating COVID-19. Yet in key ways, recent pronouncements from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—whose state is experiencing an overwhelming surge in cases and hospitalizations amid his prohibition on mask requirements—should remind us of the propaganda we once heard from Donald Rumsfeld, the late former Secretary of Defense. The deadly consequences are reminiscent too.

In particular, three “political mind games” stand out. Each takes advantage of a core psychological concern that influences how we make sense of the world. First, “It’s a False Alarm”: when others raise doubts about your plan, offer overconfident assurances of success. Second, “Don’t Blame Us”: when your rosy predictions are proven wrong, deny that anything could have been done to prevent the setbacks. And third, “They’re Misguided and Misinformed”: when you’re questioned about falling short, attack the media for purportedly misrepresenting events. Tragically, this trio of manipulative appeals has spanned time and space, from Iraq almost twenty years ago to the Sunshine State today. Let’s briefly examine each component in turn.

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Psychologists Should Now Lead the Call to Close Guantánamo

Last week, Mansoor Adayfi, Moazzam Begg, Lakhdar Boumediane, Sami Al Hajj, Ahmed Errachidi, Mohammed Ould Slahi, and Moussa Zemmouri published an open letter in the New York Review of Books. Noting that many Guantánamo detainees had been abducted from their homes, sold to the United States for bounties, and subjected to physical and psychological torture, these seven former prisoners–all held without charge or trial before their eventual release–called upon President Biden to close the detention facility. Their letter, which merits reading in its entirety, includes this plea:

Considering the violence that has happened at Guantánamo, we are sure that after more than nineteen years, you agree that imprisoning people indefinitely without trial while subjecting them to torture, cruelty and degrading treatment, with no meaningful access to families or proper legal systems, is the height of injustice. That is why imprisonment at Guantánamo must end.

These accusations are neither isolated nor unsubstantiated. Indeed, the week before Biden’s inauguration, a group of United Nations experts–including Nils Melzer, the Special Rapporteur on torture–described Guantánamo as a “disgrace” and as “a place of arbitrariness and abuse, a site where torture and ill-treatment was rampant and remains institutionalised, where the rule of law is effectively suspended, and where justice is denied.” They too called for its closure and reaffirmed that “The prolonged and indefinite detention of individuals, who have not been convicted of any crime by a competent and independent judicial authority operating under due process of law, is arbitrary and constitutes a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or even torture.”

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With the Win-Win Machine, Most of Us Actually Lose

Somewhere, deep in the bowels of our nation’s capital, today’s Democratic Party establishment keeps close guard over a hulking, fearsome, and often temperamental machine. With hundreds of moving parts, it’s surprising that the elaborate contraption has only one purpose: to take bold and popular policy proposals that could improve millions of lives, chew them up, and then spit out much feebler versions that don’t materially threaten the status quo. Servicing this apparatus isn’t cheap. But that’s not a problem because so many corporate behemoths–Wall Street, Big Oil, health insurers, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and beyond–are more than happy to foot the bill. They’re also very generous when it comes to tipping the machine’s operators, which apparently is how the Win-Win Machine got its name.

Given how well this arrangement works for its beneficiaries, the Democratic leadership understandably finds it unsettling whenever progressive candidates–having won office despite the considerable obstacles routinely erected by the Democratic National Committee and its offshoots–enter Congress but refuse to get their hands dirty by helping out with the Win-Win Machine. Indeed, worries about the machine’s future–and the buckets of money it reliably brings–are undoubtedly part of the impetus behind a post-election narrative being promoted by establishment Democrats. They claim that support for “socialism” among progressive candidates–in the form of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other efforts to counter injustice and inequality–is the reason the party failed to expand its control of the House or win back the Senate.

But the evidence doesn’t fit this self-serving account. Around the country, progressive candidates–and policies–flourished. Noteworthy winners in their races include Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Pramila Jayapal in Washington, Cori Bush in Missouri, Marie Newman in Illinois, Katie Porter and Ro Khanna in California, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones in New York. As Bernie Sanders wrote a week after Election Day, “It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy. It also is good politics.”

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Black Lives Matter: Resisting the Propaganda of Status Quo Defenders

First came the new names—Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and others—all added one by one to the long list of tragic, unjustifiable police killings of Black Americans. Then came the batons, the pepper spray, the tear gas, the flash-grenades, the helicopters, the armored vehicles, and the rubber bullets wielded against nonviolent Black Lives Matter protesters across the United States, from Minneapolis to New York City to Portland. And then came the chorus of privileged beneficiaries of our country’s discriminatory status quo, denying and defending the reality of brutal, racist, militarized, and unaccountable over-policing.

This sequence—grievous harm and public outrage followed by false reassurances from self-serving voices—is a familiar pattern. It’s one that I’ve studied as a psychologist, focusing primarily on the manipulative “political mind games” that the rich and powerful use to preserve an oppressive and inequitable system, one that rewards the few at the expense of the many. I’ve found that these propaganda ploys often target five specific concerns in our daily lives—namely, issues of vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. Each of these concerns is linked to a key question we regularly ask ourselves: Are we safe? Are we being treated fairly? Who should we trust? Are we good enough? Can we control what happens to us?

Because these questions are so central to how we make sense of the world, it’s not surprising that the so-called one-percent aren’t the only ones for whom disingenuous answers become rhetorical weapons. The same appeals are used by other status-quo defending authorities when their apparent wrongdoing and corruption are too obvious to ignore. This is clearly the case in the current national crisis over police brutality and institutional racism, where these mind games are promoted to create the doubt and division that undermine the solidarity necessary for achieving long overdue progress.

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Asylum, Now an American Horror Story

It’s hard to know exactly where the Trump Administration found the inspiration for its newest set of draconian asylum rules. Might it have been a National Geographic special where a giant anaconda encircles its prey, squeezes it to death, and then swallows it whole? Or perhaps a late-night, B-grade horror film in which some evil mastermind drowns his victims by slowly filling a sealed room with water? Regardless, these proposed changes cannot camouflage the racism, xenophobia, and nativist politics behind them. We’ve seen the Muslim travel ban, the attempted rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the terrorizing of communities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Now we’re witnessing an assault designed to suffocate the hopes and life prospects of asylum seekers.

The changes under consideration would upend the decades-old and internationally embraced standards of the Refugee Act of 1980, created to protect refugees who have a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Despite the frequent misleading and malicious characterizations from the White House, with rare exceptions asylum seekers leave their homes with few resources other than the keen determination to endure the risks, hurdles, and hardships they inevitably face in reaching and living in the United States. But their motivation is simple: failing to do so is quite possibly the prelude to grievous harm and even death in their country of origin.

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Status Quo Bias and the “Change Is Dangerous” Mind Game

The following brief excerpt is from Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible by Roy Eidelson. A free PDF version of the book is available here.

With the Change-Is-Dangerous vulnerability mind game, today’s plutocrats defend their agenda in a different way: by insisting that their opponents’ proposals for change will endanger us all. Regardless of the benefits these alternatives could bring, the 1% argue that initiatives inconsistent with their own policy recommendations will have potentially catastrophic consequences for the country. This is true whether we’re talking about tax increases for the wealthy (new investments stifled!), minimum wage hikes (forced layoffs!), curtailment of spying operations (terrorists everywhere!), new regulations to address climate change (U.S. businesses unable to compete!), reductions in mass incarceration (crime waves!), gun control (defenseless citizens!), or lower-cost imported medications from Canada (tainted drugs!).

Such appeals from self-interested one-percenters benefit from what psychologists call “status quo bias.” We generally prefer to keep things the way they are rather than face the uncertainty of less familiar options. In part, this is because we usually experience losses more intensely than rewards. That’s why winning $100 doesn’t feel as good as losing $100 feels bad. In much the same way, we tend to focus on how a proposed change could make things worse rather than better. Familiar expressions like “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know” and “When in doubt, do nothing” capture the phenomenon well. This helps explain why patients are reluctant to change a medication they’ve been taking for years, even if their doctor tells them a newer one works better and has fewer side effects. Likewise, when it comes to elections, incumbents have an advantage over their challengers—even when they’ve disappointed their constituents. Preferences like these may be irrational, but that doesn’t make them any less stubborn or potent.

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