The science of ethics: Deception, the resilient self, and the APA code of ethics, 1966-1973

The ethics review and the humanities and social sciences: disciplinary distinctions in ethics review processes

Ethics review processes are frequently perceived as extending from codes and protocols rooted in biomedical disciplines. As a result, many researchers in the humanities and social sciences (HASS) find these processes to be misaligned, if not outrightly obstructive to their research. This leads some scholars to advocate against HASS participation in institutional review processes as they currently stand, or in their entirety. While ethics review processes can present a challenge to HASS researchers, these are not insurmountable and, in fact, present opportunities for ethics review boards (ERBs) to mediate their practices to better attend to the concerns of the HASS disciplines. By highlighting the potential value of the ethics review process in recognising the nuances and specificity across different forms of research, this article explores the generative possibilities of greater collaboration between HASS researchers and ERBs. Remaining cognisant of the epistemic and methodological differences that mark different disciplinary formations in turn will benefit the ethical conduct of all researchers.

Teaching the History of Applied Behavior Analysis

Incorporating historical readings and discussion into applied behavior-analytic coursework may be an important strategy for developing well-rounded behavior analysts. However, little guidance is available to instructors interested in teaching the history of applied behavior analysis. This article describes how the history of behavior analysis can be incorporated into a course on applied behavior analysis to achieve this goal. The history of punishment/aversives in behavior analysis will be provided as an example of how the history of behavior analysis can be embedded into applied coursework. The historical interaction between the culture at large (i.e., the culture beyond behavior analysis) and behavior-analytic literature and events related to punishment will be described because both affect the field and have led to the current state of practice. History related to early ethical standards, early experimental analysis of behavior literature, the backlash against early applied behavior analysis, and the field of behavior analysis' response to the backlash is discussed.

Voices off: Stanley Milgram's cyranoids in historical context

This article revisits a forgotten, late project by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram: the 'cyranoid' studies he conducted from 1977 to 1984. These investigations, inspired by the play Cyrano de Bergerac, explored how individuals often fail to notice when others do not speak their own thoughts, but instead relay messages from a hidden source. We situate these experiments amidst the intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of late Cold War America, and show how Milgram's studies pulled together a variety of ideas, anxieties, and interests that were prevalent at that time and have returned in new guises since. In discussing the cyranoid project's background and afterlife, we argue that its strikingly equivocal quality has lent itself to multiple reinterpretations by historians, psychologists, performers, artists, and others. Our purpose is neither to champion Milgram's work nor to amplify the critiques already made of his methods. Rather, it is to consider the uncertain, allusive, and elusive aspects of the cyranoid project, and to seek to place that project in context, whilst asking where 'context' might end. We show how the experiments' range of meanings, in different temporal registers, far exceeded the explanatory rubric that Milgram and his intellectual critics provided at that time, and ponder the risk for the historian of making anachronistic or teleological assumptions. In short, we argue, cyranoids invite our open-ended exploration of 'voices offstage' in social and psychological relations, and offer a useful tool for thinking about historical context and the nature of historical interpretations.

Reasonable men: Sexual harassment and norms of conduct in social psychology

Sexual harassment has received unprecedented attention in recent years. Within academia, it has a particularly reflexive relationship with the human sciences in which sexual harassment can be both an object of research and a problematic behavior amongst those engaged in that research. This paper offers a partial history in which these two are brought together as a common object of social psychology’s culture of sexual harassment. Here we follow Haraway in using culture to capture the sense-making that psychologists do through and to the side of their formal knowledge production practices. Our history is multi-sited and draws together (1) the use of sexual harassment as an experimental technique, (2) feminist activism and research which made sexual harassment an object of knowledge in social psychology, and (3) oral history accounts of sexual harassment amongst social psychologists. By reading these contexts against each other, we provide a thick description of how sexual harassment initiates women and men into cultures of control in experimental social psychology and highlight the ethical-epistemological dilemma inherent in disciplinary practices.

Best practices in nutrition science to earn and keep the public's trust

Public trust in nutrition science is the foundation on which nutrition and health progress is based, including sound public health. An ASN-commissioned, independent Advisory Committee comprehensively reviewed the literature and available public surveys about the public's trust in nutrition science and the factors that influence it and conducted stakeholder outreach regarding publicly available information. The Committee selected 7 overlapping domains projected to significantly influence public trust: 1) conflict of interest and objectivity; 2) public benefit; 3) standards of scientific rigor and reproducibility; 4) transparency; 5) equity; 6) information dissemination (education, communication, and marketing); and 7) accountability. The literature review comprehensively explored current practices and threats to public trust in nutrition science, including gaps that erode trust. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of peer-reviewed material specifically focused on nutrition science. Available material was examined, and its analysis informed the development of priority best practices. The Committee proposed best practices to support public trust, appropriate to ASN and other food and nutrition organizations motivated by the conviction that public trust remains key to the realization of the benefits of past, present, and future scientific advances. The adoption of the best practices by food and nutrition organizations, such as ASN, other stakeholder organizations, researchers, food and nutrition professionals, companies, government officials, and individuals working in the food and nutrition space would strengthen and help ensure earning and keeping the public's continued trust in nutrition science.

The normalization of torment: Producing and managing anguish in Milgram’s “Obedience” laboratory

Milgram framed his “Obedience” experiments as an inquiry into the Holocaust, posing state directed mass murder as a “conflict between conscience and authority.” However, recent research into atrocities suggests that “moral conflict” is often absent; murder is frequently undertaken willingly in a spirit of idealism and “normalcy.” The question is not why do people obey orders they find morally objectionable as Milgram suggested, but rather how does it become “normal” and “ok” to torture or kill defenseless people? I examine this question through a reinterpretation of the Obedience study. Instead of focusing on the confused and entrapped participants, people who were tricked into “immoral” action, I study the scientists themselves—individuals who applied enhanced stress techniques on innocent people repeatedly and enthusiastically, fully aware of what they were doing. Inverting Milgram’s Holocaust analogy, I suggest that recent scholarship on Nazi doctors can provide insights into the various ways that torment became “normalized” for Milgram and his assistants.

Livelihoods of theory: The case of Goffman’s early theory of the self

Although theory rich, contemporary psychologists have no consensual understanding of what constitutes a theory or how theory should be used, revised, and appraised. Likewise neglected are ways that a theory is taken up in specific research domains and how a theory can change over time. In response to calls for renewing psychology’s appreciation of theory, this article introduces an understanding of theory as vivacious and biographically complex. A dynamic perspective affords means to explore how a theory travels, is taken up in different times and places, and changes. So appreciating theory’s liveliness reveals not only what premises of humans are valued at a given time or within a given research domain, but uncovers vestigial features that were abandoned but might be valuable to contemporary theory work. Theory’s livelihood and travel is illustrated here by Erving Goffman’s early work on the self and its uses by Henry Riecken, Robert Rosenthal, and E. E. Jones.

Alone again: John Zubek and the troubled history of sensory deprivation research

In the 1950s, sensory deprivation research emerged as an influential new field for behavioral science researchers, supported by the intelligence community. Within a few years, deprivation research had become ubiquitous; images of sensory deprivation were invoked to explain a wide range of phenomena, from religious revelations to the very structure of psychoanalysis. Yet within a decade and a half, this field of research became implicated in cases of torture and abuse. This article examines the history of University of Manitoba psychologist John Zubek, who remained one of the final researchers still conducting sensory deprivation research in the 1970s. It raises questions on how might it be possible to successfully and cautiously perform controversial research.

Introduction: the human sciences and Cold War America

Studies of the history of the human sciences during the Cold War era have proliferated over the past decade--in JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the Cold War in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the Cold War human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the systems sciences, on the other. The essays in the special issue both extend understanding of each of these interpretive frameworks and help us to grasp their interconnection.