Renowned psychologist Ken Pope has written an excellent essay on the Hoffman Report and its conclusions that the American Psychological Association enabled torture. Pope is a former APA Ethics Chair who resigned from the APA in 2008, out of disagreement with the organization’s post-9/11 ethics stances.
The essay asks us to reflect on what the Hoffman Report has to do with each of us – what we chose to see (and not see) then, and what we choose to do now. Here is an excerpt in which he focuses scrutiny on the various other institutions charged with safeguarding ethics, including state licensing boards:
…the Hoffman Report documents a wide range of improper behaviors involving conflicts of interest, improper handling of ethics complaints to protect psychologists, issuing misleading statements that hid true motives, to name but a few, as well as activities related to torture and violations of human rights. Now that the Hoffman Report has awakened our profession, if none of the diverse improper behaviors violates any ethical standard in the APA Ethics Code, that may tell us something. If any of the diverse improper behaviors violates any standard in APA’s code, and neither the APA Ethics Committee, nor any state psychological association or state psychology licensing board that has adopted APA’s ethics code as enforceable, takes action sua sponte (on its own initiative) or in response to a formal complaint, that may tell us something. These and other measurable signs of meaningful change (e.g., whether APA and its elected officers representing the membership publish formal corrections or retractions of factually incorrect statements appearing in journals or press releases that denied, discounted, or dismissed reports of improper behavior, just as researchers fulfill their ethical responsibility to correct the formal record) can hold a mirror up to both our own individual and our psychological community’s ability and willingness to meet the challenge of change.