Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [438]
Today we shake our heads about the Romans, who spent vast sums to build their great cities, roads, and aqueducts but made no effort to study and arrest the declining fertility and work productivity of the native Roman stock. One wonders whether future creatures, poring over the ruins of our world, will shake their heads in wonder at our having spent immense sums for so many things but so little for the research on human nature that might have been the key to our survival.
The government is not only niggardly in its support of psychological research; it interferes with or even forbids certain kinds of research, sometimes for admirable reasons, often for ignoble or partisan ones.
As we saw earlier, during the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s the Public Health Service adopted regulations governing biomedical research that protected human rights, and in 1971 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare extended them to all research in human behavior; the regulations, though not laws, assumed the force of law by denying federal funds to those who did not conform. The crucial regulation required researchers to obtain the informed consent of patients and subjects to any experimental procedure. But this laudable extension of the rights of the individual, when rigidly applied, made deceptive psychological research or concealment of the experimenter’s goal impermissible; even relatively innocuous experiments requiring deception were ruled out.
After years of anguished protests over the strangling of social psychological research, the regulations were eased somewhat in 1981, and deceptive research again became fundable. Still, the constraints have remained so tight that much potentially valuable research is neither attempted nor considered. As one eminent social psychologist put it after the easing of the requirements, “The regulations and IRBs [Institutional Review Boards] exert a profound influence on researchers’ thinking. You don’t even consider tackling a problem that would require deception of a kind that will create trouble with the IRB. Whole lines of research have been nipped in the bud.”29
More deplorable forms of political interference with psychological research are the politically motivated attacks on specific projects and on behavioral research in general by officials of the administration and by members of Congress.
In a classic instance, Representative William Dannemeyer, a California Republican, raised a storm of conservative objections in 1991 to an approved teenage sex survey and managed to kill it off. Emboldened, he broadened his attack and introduced an amendment to a 1991 NIH reauthorization bill that would have prohibited HHS from conducting or supporting any national survey of human sexual behavior. Even in a time of intellectual conservatism this was too much for the House of Representatives, which voted 283 to 137 to defeat the amendment.30 Still, 137 members of the House voted for it, an alarming show of extremism.
More recently, there have been a number of attempts by various members of Congress to cut back or altogether prohibit federal funding of specific areas of psychological and sociological research—or, more ambitiously, all of it. A few instances:
—In 2003, during consideration of the 2004 NIH budget (as part of the Labor, HHS, Education appropriations bill), Representative Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced an amendment to defund five approved NIH grants because he felt that research on sexual behavior and health was not a proper area for NIH to fund studies in. The House defeated the Toomey amendment by a razor-thin margin