Exporting American Values

There is no doubt that the majority of psychology research worldwide happens in the USA. If psychology was a science this would be of minor concern.

The minor concern is that those funding research, the state, large corperations, and in some medical areas, large charities, fund the research first that is important to them. So some areas get more attention than others. With science, however, the findings add to human knowledge, and over time, as theories and hypotheses are tested, theories made better, it makes little difference the impetus to do research.

So, for example, Germany in the period between the world wars, became interested in rocket science as that technology was not covered under the Versailles treaty. Both the USA and USSR recognised the potential of missiles as weapons of war after world war two, this becoming even more important as a weapons delivery system for nuclear war heads. Famously the USA recruited Wernher von Braun the designer of the V2 missile, SS officer and user of slaver labour, for their development of ICBMs, which as a side effect led to the moon landings. This grisly history has no effect though on the actual rocket science, it is not Nazi science, or American science (or Soviet science) it is science.

As a side note I have little patience with those who apologise for psychology and its lack of progress in almost 200 years by bleating that it is a young science. Rocket science is a young science and rocket scientists have put a person on the moon.

These concerns may become of more pressing importance if a major country, like the USA, were to start defunding science that the President disagrees with, and banned federal agencies from even referring to the issue. How that plays out with regard to the climate emergency we will have to wait and see.

So of course across science, development is uneven as societies have particular cocerns, however for natural sciences, most of the time, these peturbations become less important across time.

Psychology is different, because the academic discipline of psychology changes it subject matter, the psychology of individuals. Psychology is not unique in this, it is probably true of the social sciences more broadly.

As a phenomenon I first became aware of it not in psychology, but in sociology, from the work of Stanley Cohen, specifically Moral Panics. Like many people who played D&D in the 1970s and 80s I became aware of the accusations made that D&D led to all sort of bad things, including  satanism.  Given I have almost always been in an academic environment I read up on Moral Panics, I remember writing a fanzine  piece on it. I also gave a guest lecture on the topic in an introductory sociology class, which ironically led to a complaint about me because I did not believe that certain activities, like role playing games, listening to certain music, reading certain fiction opened the door to satanism. The complaint was not upheld. When a student of mine, Yvonne Adiar, did her dissertation on rave culture, the reaction of the media was referred to by those supportive of rave as a 'moral panic'. The notion was also used by some of the ravers we interviewed for a follow up study to contest the idea that drug use within the rave scene was dangerous. This is a looping effect, what Jones & Elcock, and Tyson, Jones & Elcock call reflexivity (a term with too many other meanings to remain useful) and what Giddens called the ‘double hermeneutic’ ( a term misued in IPA).

Now it is likely that there are some aspects of psychology not open to these looping effects, but it is difficult to know which bits may not be. Kurt Danziger in 2008 wrote a history of memory, noting that particular analogies for memory have gained in popularity with the rise of experiemental and later neuropsychology. That our understanding of memory has changed, but that this has had applied consequences. Edwards and Potter (1992) studied, amongst other topics, how people create memory in their interactions. I argue that one of the resources for this is how the academic discipline describes memory. However memory is also a good example of how other institutions within society, for example the judicial system, resists changes in how reliant we should be on the memories of eye witnesses.

In areas like personality tests, where some aspect of human action, and the reasons for human actions are simplified into a notion that there are different personality types or traits the holders of which act differently the looping effects become more obvious. It may be that certain types or traits are given a higher value than others, or it may be that once a person is told that they have certain traits or types that these become self fulfilling prophecies, in a similar way that some people interact with asrology. This also has the broader effect of individualising human activity, rather than seeing human action within the social environment that influences it.

In aspects of social psychology too these looping effects can be seen, prejudice becomes primarily a problem of individuals rather than issue about social structures. Also when one examines the psychological literature around inequality there appears to be a blind spot when it comes to prejudice directed to working class people.

In Jones & Elcock (2001) we write about how, in an American context, psychology became a prestigious profession because of the work of psychologists for the government of the USA during World War Two. The reconstruction work done by the USA in post war Germany and Japan had an influence on how universities in those countries were organised. Of course since then the economic preeminence of the USA has continued this influence.

I would argue the dicipline of psychology has become a cultural apologist for the USA.