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By Root 1324 0

was the decisive event. At the APA’s 1988 convention in Atlanta, a group of former presidents of the association and eminent academics, among them Albert Bandura, Kenneth Clark, Jerome Kagan, George Miller, and Martin Seligman, caucused in a hotel room and, in a spirit of defiance and rebellion, announced the formation of a new organization, the American Psychological Society, for academic and science-oriented psychologists. In the ensuing weeks hundreds of scientists resigned from the APA to join the APS, and hundreds more joined but retained their APA memberships. Within a year, the APS had 6,500 members and now has nearly 12,000 full members and over 5,000 student members. It is and always will be far smaller than the APA, which currently has nearly eight times that many members, but it is thriving. To more sharply distinguish itself and its purpose from the APA, the APS, while preserving its acronym, recently changed its name from the American Psychological Society to the Association for Psychological Science.

Today, like divorced parents who have worked out a modus vivendi for the sake of the children, the APA and the APS no longer publicly attack each other. Representatives of the two groups have occasionally had discussions aimed at finding ways to cooperate when possible. The APA even offered, some years ago, to publish the new APS journal, Psychological Science (today the APS publishes four journals), and although the APS chose another publisher, it sent a letter of appreciation to the APA. The two organizations compete in trying to attract graduate students and new doctorate holders, but today many APS members think it wise to belong to both groups. Present indications are that the APS will continue to grow and to serve the scientific community. The APA, also growing every year, will have an ever-larger percentage of clinician-professionals but continue to have a sizable minority of academician-scientists, publish journals for them, and represent their interests in Washington and elsewhere.

If all this is confusing, how could it be otherwise? In psychology nothing is simple, nothing is clear; the field nicely mirrors the untidy, complex human mind that it studies.

Psychology and Politics

—Nearly one tenth of all doctoral scientists in the United States are psychologists.

—Psychological knowledge has become vital to the successful operation of our schools, industries, clinics and mental hospitals, and the military. All will function still better as research yields greater understanding of human nature.

—Basic research in psychology, unlike many other sciences, does not yield salable products and hence is not self-supporting. It must be funded largely by the federal government for the public good.

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.27

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.*28 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