Are psychologists experts for hire, or is it understood, as a matter of
professional self-definition, that their expertise is to be deployed
only for benign purposes?
As a matter of fact, psychological skills are purchased and deployed as
commodities all the time. Law firms employ jury consultants to assess
the psychological make-up of prospective jurists and give advice about
the appeals and emotional triggers that might sway (i.e., manipulate)
them. Every viewer of “Law and Order” knows the good-cop-bad-cop
routine, a strategy of interrogation designed to put suspects off
balance and gain their confidence by creating a false sense of
comradeship. Cable TV’s most popular heroine, Brenda Lee Johnson of “The
Closer,” plays both roles herself. Large corporations employ
psychological profilers to help make them make personnel decisions.
Sports teams hire “coaches” whose job it is to motivate players and make
them more aggressive. Hospitals use the results of psychological
examinations to decide whether or not a patient should be released. And
of course the military employs psychologists in an effort to identify
techniques that lead prisoners to spill what they know.
The American Psychological Association flirts with the same reasoning
when it regards the transformation of psychological insights into
devices of torture as an instance of crossing a line. But that line is
crossed whenever the knowledge psychology yields as a science of the
mind is made into the technology of persuasion. Applied psychology can
never be clean.
full: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/psychology-and-torture/
---
And later when Summers speculated (at a conference) on the possibility
that the under-representation of women in the sciences might have a
genetic basis, the speculation itself (perfectly respectable as an
academic topic) was not the problem.
The problem was that it was offered by the president of Harvard and
therefore seemed to bear Harvard’s imprimatur. Had a faculty member said
the same thing (to be sure, Summers himself was a faculty member, but
that identity was overridden by his administrative identity as long as
he was in office), it might have rubbed some in the audience the wrong
way, but it wouldn’t have been news, and it certainly would not have
been the kind of news that caused many women scientists to say (before
they were asked) that they would never set foot in Harvard Square.
full:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/administrative-virtues-the-case-of-larry-summers/
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