The APA’s ethics change required deliberate, not accidental, collusion

Evidence

Regarding another part of the linguistically nebulous statement, it is not that the APA failed to “provide meaningful field guidance.” The policy change explicitly permitted psychologists to participate in military interrogations. The original APA code of ethics would have prohibited psychologists from being in the military interrogation field to begin with. The policy change involved more than simply an oversight lapse in APA governance. The board of directors, that included a president and vice-president, played an active role in selecting the task force stacked with DoD personnel. Some APA officers also sat in on the deliberations. The phony claim of collective organizational blindness has no basis in fact. The biased task force was created designedly not unintentionally and unknowingly. Freed from having to speak for the APA, Nadine Kaslow led the fight for a stringent code of ethics (Risen, 2015b). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2386

Categorization

• XREF: The contrast between Nadine Kaslow’s compliant official role and her firm ethics stance once freed from the APA presidency is a striking instance of role-bound moral behavior — connects to the social psychology of roles (Zimbardo’s Stanford experiment) already implied in this book.