The Story of Psychology (129 page)

What, then, would be a reasonable sum for the federal government to invest in psychological research?

Twenty billion dollars a year?

Ten?

Five?

The actual figure: for fiscal year 2005, $574.4 million, a little over half a billion.
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Basic research in psychology currently receives one seventh as much federal support as does research in the physical sciences, one twenty-seventh as much as the life sciences, and only 2 percent of all federal support of scientific research.

The APA and the APS regularly send representatives to Capitol Hill to plead for greater support, but there they encounter serious obstacles. Most of the federal funding of psychological research comes from various agencies within the National Institutes of Health, modest amounts from branches of the Department of Defense, less than $4 million from the National Science Foundation, and minor sums from other agencies.
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The associations’ representatives must therefore make their case before a number of committees and subcommittees; that spreads the risk but means fighting on many fronts without any overall high-level support.

In earlier decades, when psychological research was as simple as Thorndike’s building a few puzzle cages out of scrap wood and buying a few cats and dogs, funding was a minor problem. But modern surveys, magnetic resonance scanning equipment, mainframe computers, and longitudinal studies by teams of specialists cost substantial amounts of money. Even so, psychological research is nickel-and-dime stuff compared with research on new weapons or space travel. Yet we, a nation more enamored of psychology than any other and eager for its knowledge and the benefits it confers, invest in psychological research a little more than .2 percent (two tenths of 1 percent) of the 2005 federal budget.

Today we shake our heads about the Romans, who spent vast sums to build their great cities, roads, and aqueducts but made no effort to study and arrest the declining fertility and work productivity of the native Roman stock. One wonders whether future creatures, poring over the ruins of our world, will shake their heads in wonder at our having spent immense sums for so many things but so little for the research on human nature that might have been the key to our survival.

The government is not only niggardly in its support of psychological research; it interferes with or even forbids certain kinds of research, sometimes for admirable reasons, often for ignoble or partisan ones.

As we saw earlier, during the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s the Public Health Service adopted regulations governing biomedical research that protected human rights, and in 1971 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare extended them to all research in human behavior; the regulations, though not laws, assumed the force of law by denying federal funds to those who did not conform. The crucial regulation required researchers to obtain the informed consent of patients and subjects to any experimental procedure. But this laudable extension of the rights of the individual, when rigidly applied, made deceptive psychological research or concealment of the experimenter’s goal impermissible; even relatively innocuous experiments requiring deception were ruled out.

After years of anguished protests over the strangling of social psychological research, the regulations were eased somewhat in 1981, and deceptive research again became fundable. Still, the constraints have remained so tight that much potentially valuable research is neither attempted nor considered. As one eminent social psychologist put it after the easing of the requirements, “The regulations and IRBs [Institutional Review Boards] exert a profound influence on researchers’ thinking. You don’t even consider tackling a problem that would require deception of a kind that will create trouble with the IRB. Whole lines of research have been nipped in the bud.”
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More deplorable forms of political interference with psychological research are the politically motivated attacks on specific projects and on behavioral research in general by officials of the administration and by members of Congress.

In a classic instance, Representative William Dannemeyer, a California Republican, raised a storm of conservative objections in 1991 to an approved teenage sex survey and managed to kill it off. Emboldened, he broadened his attack and introduced an amendment to a 1991 NIH reauthorization bill that would have prohibited HHS from conducting or supporting any national survey of human sexual behavior. Even in a time of intellectual conservatism this was too much for the House of Representatives, which voted 283 to 137 to defeat the amendment.
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Still, 137 members of the House voted for it, an alarming show of extremism.

More recently, there have been a number of attempts by various members of Congress to cut back or altogether prohibit federal funding of specific areas of psychological and sociological research—or, more ambitiously, all of it. A few instances:

What motivates these members of Congress to oppose social and behavioral research? It is possible that they really feel some of the targeted studies are “improper” or wasteful or potentially refutative of their political and social beliefs. But it is also possible that they are primarily playing to the audience of their constituents—those elements of American society that are fearful of science or hostile to scientific research that threatens their belief systems. Whatever the answer, it is clear that government funding of research in the social and behavioral sciences, relatively minor though it is, will probably continue to be attacked by congresspersons whenever it suits their purposes.

In addition to administration officials and legislators, many special-interest and advocacy groups outside the government have attacked particular kinds of research, sometimes succeeding in hampering work, sometimes actually aborting projects. Ironically, this has been happening during the several recent decades in which psychology has been making its most striking advances. More ironically, these efforts to block research have been made not only by conservative groups but by liberal, radical, antiestablishment, and politically middle-of-the-road groups.

One such essentially middle-ground force is the “animal rights” movement, whose followers have often resorted to violence, breaking into medical and psychology laboratories, destroying equipment and records, and sometimes making off with the animals. Leaders of the animal rights movement argue that animal and human lives are morally equivalent and that performing experiments on animals that would be unacceptable on human babies is “speciesism.” Animal research, in their view, is immoral regardless of the benefits. Their ethical stance was epitomized some years ago by Chris DeRose, founder and director of Last Chance for Animals, who said, “If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
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Many other areas of psychological research have been regularly, fiercely, and often successfully opposed by other special-interest and advocacy groups, some of the politically correct kind, others politically conservative, and yet others of a traditionalist middle ground. To evince interest or pursue research in any of the topics blacklisted by these groups can result in anything from hate mail, public demonstrations, threats of violence, and physical assaults to, in academe, failure to be promoted, ostracism by one’s colleagues, lack of tenure, and rejection of research papers by journals—in sum, academic oblivion. Here are a few such areas of research:

“repressed memory” experts because the findings are a threat to court cases of sexual abuse in childhood).

The record is far longer,
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but this handful of items is enough to illustrate that many of psychology’s findings are as unpopular, repellent, and detestable to various segments of our population as Galileo’s argument that the earth circled the sun was to the Catholic Church in 1633.

But popularity is not the test of truth, the legitimacy of research is not determined by its social appeal, and academic freedom does not mean freedom to inquire only into subjects that are politically safe. Research considered offensive, dangerous, or politically incorrect may prove to be valueless or even harmful—or may increase our understanding of humankind and lead to an improvement of the human condition. We saw that in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, Weir Mitchell, a distinguished physician and a pioneer in the application of
psychology to medicine, called him a “dirty, filthy man,” and a dean of one Canadian university said that Freud seemed to advocate “a relapse into savagery.”
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Those worthies were too close to his work to see its future value; we are too close to much of the work under recent or current attack to know exactly how much, if anything, it will add to knowledge and benefit society. But unless we seek new knowledge, we are certain not to gain it. That being so, efforts to block psychological and behavioral research for political, religious, or other nonscientific reasons are no better than the Catholic Church’s forcing Galileo, on pain of imprisonment, to swear that the truth was other than he knew it to be and to abstain from teaching, writing, or discussing heretical heliocentric theory.

How far into the terra incognita of the mind has our journey taken us?

An explorer making his way across an unmapped landmass knows, when he sees the ocean in the distance, that he has reached the far shore, the end of his trek. But for us there is no far shore; in science there is never a finite amount to be known about the nature of reality. We cannot know how far we have gone toward the end of the journey, since there is no end. As with all other sciences, psychology, in answering questions, also discovers the more detailed and profound ones it can ask.

We have, though, come far enough to answer many of the classic questions asked by Greek philosophers so long ago and by other thinkers ever since. The answers to their questions about the nature of the soul, the dual substances of mind and body, and the ways in which mind and body interact are implicit in what is now known about the real-world chemical and electrical events taking place at many levels and in organized forms that yield the complex thoughts and feelings that we call mind. Here is a paradigm of the levels of those events and forms of organization: