17 Unethical treatment in studies and practice
Leila Jones; Sophie Stephens; and Bita Askarihazaveh
Throughout history, marginalized groups have been negatively impacted by belief systems that perpetuate poor treatment of them (Guthrie, 1998). Ethical guidelines were not standardized and enforced until 1953, when the APA put out its Code of Ethics (Stricker, 2010). This meant that in the early 20th century, psychology was not held to any standard or ethics or morality. It seems that even after this code was put into place, it was still seen as okay to treat marginalized groups as less than. This extended from individual treatment to public policy (Guthrie, 1998). There were many influences in this, including intelligence testing and the Eugenics movement (Guthrie, 1998). These two methods sought to find hereditary sources for disability and lack of intelligence, and used that to declare an ideal human race (Scherz, 2022). The impact of the Eugenics movement and intelligence testing on psychology in the early 20th century had negative effects on marginalized groups (Guthrie, 1998), such as people of colour, women, and people with disabilities, and some of those effects are still being felt to this day.
Scientific racism has been around essentially as long as psychology as a field has been around. The rise of intelligence testing, and the interest in the Eugenics movement gave this racism new backing (Winston, 2020). The end of World War II quelled some of this overt racism, because people had seen how extreme it could get, but it did not go away completely. Even prior to the 20th century, R. Meade Bache pushed the idea that faster reaction times characterized lower races, and James McKeen Cattell’s mental tests were used to judge the intelligence of entire races (Winston, 2020). Racially biased intelligence testing continued into the 20th century, with many tests being given to immigrants and people of colour. Henry Goddard studied “feeble-mindedness” among immigrants on Ellis Island. He believed that this “feeble-mindedness” was linked to criminality and immorality (Winston, 2020). Even today, there are a small number of researchers who are working on finding connections between race and criminality, intelligence, sexuality, and more (Winston, 2020). This proves that it is incredibly important that the risks of this type of racism and bias in scientific fields are known.
People of colour were especially affected by the impact of the Eugenics movement and intelligence testing on the field of psychology in the early 20th century. Mexican American children were thought to be mentally confused because they were bilingual, and were generally thought of as inferior. When intelligence tests were given to these children, they had a significant cultural bias toward White, American culture, which made it difficult for children from other cultural backgrounds to succeed (Guthrie, 1998). This meant that their scores appeared lower, and they were treated as inferior because of that. This type of outcome occurred with Black Americans and Asian Americans as well (Guthrie, 1998). It was very difficult for people of colour to move towards being seen as equal when these supposedly scientific tests were backing ideas that these people were unintelligent.
Beyond intelligence testing, personality testing was also used to evaluate people of colour and reinforce already present biases (Guthrie, 1998). It was thought that different personality traits could be attributed to different racial groups as a whole. These tests were often administered by individuals who held racial biases, and issues of validity and reliability arose, as no two tests seemed to measure the same things (Guthrie, 1998). This drove a push for standardization of personality tests, and the removal of culture from these tests (Guthrie, 1998). Of course, the complete removal of culture is near impossible, so Black psychologist Robert Williams created the Themes Concerning Blacks test, which was more in line with Black culture and would be more accurate in measuring Black people (Guthrie, 1998).
Black Americans were treated poorly in many ways, one of those being in the availability of education. Black Americans were not allowed to attend many of the colleges and universities that white Americans were allowed to attend, and there were specific institutions that were for black Americans to study at, separate from white Americans (Henley, 2019). This significantly limited their options for education, and that perpetuated the notion of Black Americans being less educated than White Americans. Qualified black scholars, such as Francis Cecil Sumner, were turned down from doctorate programs based on the fact that they were Black (Henley, 2019). This led Sumner to greatly expand the psychology program at Howard University, the largest Black university at the time (Guthrie, 1998). Even as more Black scholars emerged, they were often less recognized than the White scholars of the time (Guthrie, 1998). To this day, we see access to education presenting as a problem to people of colour. Local public policy limits the education opportunities that people of colour have access to, which limits career opportunities for these people as well (Faber et al., 2023).
Advancing in the field of Psychology as a science evolved through many perspectives and theories. As the majority of psychological ideas originated from individuals who were representative of their cultural and political environment, their views were extremely subjective and prejudiced in their nature. These biases led to major direct and indirect discriminatory abuse and societal disadvantages towards minorities. In the last century, the concept of having ethical guidelines to protect individual rights slowly progressed. Eugenics ideology and practices emerged from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and continued perpetuating genetic and racial supremacy. The American Psychological Association denounced and apologized for some of their previous actions that affected racial minorities. However, there is not much acknowledgement of the harmful treatment towards the other marginalized groups at the hands of the Eugenics movement.
Supporting point 1
- – John Locke Tabula rasa concept, influenced how people with mental retardation viewed, not able to learn
- – People kept in poorhouses, rise of asylums and “training schools”, make the deviant undeviant, “deviant” children reflected negative morals on parents
- – 1923 80 private institutions for persons with disabilities
- – Social Darwinism on the rise, promoting xenophobia and diagnosing “feeblemindedness” through IQ tests
- – Term “eugenics” introduced by Francis Galton as influenced by Darwin
- – William McDougall, experimental psychology can serve the goals of eugenics, focusing on the study of the hereditary basis of mental qualities
- – Sterilization laws and intelligence tests used to discriminate against people deemed to have intellectual disabilities
Supporting point 2
-“In particular, negative eugenics sought to limit procreation by people with disabilities and others deemed “socially inadequate.”26 Negative eugenics, including compulsory sterilization and institutionalization, targeted those deemed subordinate, such as people with disabilities, people with substance use disorders or criminal histories, people of color, and those living in poverty (Powell, 2021).”
-laws prohibiting disabled people to marry and create families
– sterilization policies of criminals adjusted but not sterilization of disabled people 1942 USA
-psychologist Henry Goddard, Committee to Study and Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. Recommended segregation and sterilization to preserve American blood, psychology testing used to deem those mentally unfit (immigrants, black people, native americans, poor white people and disabled people)
-charter of rights late 20th century
*to be put in paragraph form for major point 2
Major Point 3
-Women are mostly considered inferior to male psychologists despite studies revealing contradicting information about the differences between men and women.
-Darwinism brought legitimacy to studying the nature of women to compare to human/men’s nature and allowed women to be studied on their own rather than secondary or accompanying men.
Although Darwin himself displayed beliefs aligned with the scientists of his time in essentially seeing women and intellectually inferior and childlife. Perhaps unintanually he invoked support for scientists to research women and therefore learn about their biological differences independently as oppose to an extension of men which was the eseblished norm in scientific research at the time.
-Biased beliefs by psychologists looked for differences between female and male brains to prove that women are inferior (brain size etc.)
-Our understaning of the brain has evolved over the last century of psychology. We do some some differences in the anatomy of womans brains. Woman’s prefrontal context,prefrontal context, lateral partitel cortex and insula are all arger than their male counterparts which in part is the misunderstanding psychologists had regarding the psychology of woman due to limited involvement of woman in the field of psychology and the understanding that womans brains were inferior to mens. We now understand certain portions of womans brains are bigger and certain portions of mens brains are bigger which is why the way information is processed may vary.
References
Faber, S. C., Williams, M. T., Metzger, I. W., MacIntyre, M. M., Strauss, D., Duniya, C. G., Sawyer, K., Cénat, J. M., & Goghari, V. M. (2023). Lions at the gate: How weaponization of policy prevents people of colour from becoming professional psychologists in Canada. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cap0000352.
Guthrie, R. V. (1998). Psychometric Scientism. In Even the Rat was White: A Historical View of Psychology (2nd ed., pp. 55-87). Allyn & Bacon.
Henley, T. B. (2019). American Psychology and Functionalism. In Hergenhahn’s An Introduction to the History of Psychology (8th ed., pp. 313-360). Wadsworth Publishing.
Scherz, P. (2022). Life as an Intelligence Test: Intelligence, Education, and Behavioral Genetics. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 46(1), 59–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09747-0.
Stricker, G. (2010). American Psychological Association Code of Ethics. In The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology (eds I.B. Weiner and W.E. Craighead). https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470479216.corpsy0047.
Winston, A. (2020). Scientific Racism and North American Psychology. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.516.
Pierre, J. (2014, April 28). Disability rights. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/535eeb377095aa000000021b
Robyn M. Powell, Confronting Eugenics Means Finally Confronting Its Ableist Roots, 27 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 607 (2021), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol27/iss3/2
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica . (2023, March 9). Phrenology. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/phrenology
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, February 1). Skinner v. Oklahoma. Wikipedia. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_v._Oklahoma
Disability in the 19th century. Historic England. (n.d.). Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1832-1914/
American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Historical chronology. American Psychological Association. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://www.apa.org/about/apa/addressing-racism/historical-chronology
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
https://cla.umn.edu/psychology/story/psychology-must-reckon-its-racist-past-and-present
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/historically-marginalized-communities
https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470479216.corpsy0047
https://www.apa.org/about/apa/addressing-racism/historical-chronology
https://connect.springerpub.com/content/book/978-0-8261-8063-6/part/part01/chapter/ch01
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076948
https://www.english.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/articles/Brilmyer_2017_Darwinian%20Feminisms.PDF