Psychology and Torture
Excerpts:
In late September, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to ban its members from participating in interrogations at United States detention centers, including Guantanamo Bay. Just a year earlier, the association had declined to take this action, but did pass a resolution listing a number of methods of interrogation - sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exploitation of phobias, loud music, harsh lights and mock executions were examples - with which psychologists should not be involved.
Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists. It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic - what makes someone do something - and it is an open question as to whether there are limits, aside from the limits of legality, to the uses to which these skills might be put.
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. 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.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/psychology-and-torture/?ei=5070&emc=eta1
(Link via email from Dilata)