A History of Psychological Ethics

As with so many other things which evolve over time, there was no one, clear-cut beginning to psychological ethics. Even if we consider the publication of the first American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics Code, its sources lie before that, and we have a pretty good idea of where we might find the first motivation for it. The main motivation goes back to World War II. During WWII, psychologists were becoming increasingly involved in the war effort.

They did testing of young men for the draft and soldiers to see the status of their mental abilities and mental health, which positions of the military they would be good for, etc. There was even this extensive system of color coding from gray to black, and lighter gray you were the weaker your mental health status, and the darker towards black meant you were rated as psychologically stronger. So they would put those latter types of people in serious warfare type situations and other, weaker types in less demanding roles.

But even more important than this was the fact that psychologists were having to deal with soldiers coming home from the war with, what you could imagine are serious psychological issues, various types of trauma, seriously difficulties adjusting back to civilian life, disrupted families, etc. Because of all this, the profession gained a kind of notoriety and degree of public attention that it hadn’t before. So psychologists were facing many serious ethical and moral dilemmas on a scale that they hadn’t really before, and there was a growing recognition that the profession needed a kind of set of standards to go by, to deal with these types of issues in a systematic way.

Next is Edward Tolman. He put together the APA Committee on Ethical Standards for Psychologists in 1947. You may have heard of Tolman before, he was a pretty big name in psychology, working mainly in the early to mid part of the 20th century. He was, as were most researchers at the time, mainly in the behaviorist school. And he was pretty active in the APA, and he came forward with the aim of creating this code of ethics for the profession. Keep in mind, the APA had existed since 1892, but it hadn’t had a standard code of ethics to be used for the profession until this period. So it was over 50 years after its inception that the APA finally began to formulate a standard code like this. But really the profession wasn’t nearly as big or important in the early days so it was simply wasn’t as necessary. But Tolman wanted to create a code of ethics, which would actually be effective in changing the behavior of psychologists.

The members of the committee drew from the knowledge of psychology at the time, what was known about human behavior and how to change it, and they essentially used this knowledge on themselves for the task they wanted. They didn’t just want to create a code, which would just be a formality, something, that no one really paid much attention to. So they used what they called the critical incident method to get an idea of where they should start. And the critical incident method basically involved the process of collecting reports from psychologists about morally and ethically difficult situations that they had been in, with clients, researcher assistants, students, colleagues, etc. This wasn’t just about psychologists working in a clinical relationship with patients, it was about psychologists in every professional role that they played, in every setting. So the committee got together again a second time, under a new chair, Nicholas Hobbs, and reviewed over a 1000 of such incidents turned in by members of the APA. And they identified what they saw as the major themes and issues that emerged from these reports. And finally the first version of the APA Ethics Code was published in 1953.

Now we jump straight into what lead to the current ethics code. This here is not exactly how the ethics code was formulated, but the aim was to create a similar set of rules. The ethics code, rather than just being handed down by God in a flash, went through 9 revisions over 50 years, involving thousands of members of the APA. They were continually reviewing each bit of the document and how relevant it was to practice, and what new things were needed, etc. The first 1953 version was more than 170 pages long and included examples and case studies of all of these different scenarios that I mentioned earlier, which psychologists reported to the committee. Over time the code changed in a lot of ways, and became much shorter and more concise.

A foundational issue has been aspirational principles versus enforceable standards. This is basically the dichotomy that split the two philosophies of what the ethics code should be like. On the one hand, aspirational principles are basically broadly worded ideals and principles that do not attempt to define with any precision really what one should do in a particular situation or what is right or wrong behaviors. Enforceable standards, on the other hand, include a set of standards that specifically describes behaviors required and proscribed by the profession and is designed to serve as a basis for adjudicating grievances. By the 1980s there were an increasing amount of legal cases that psychologists were involved in, where the old aspirational principles did not really help the situation. Their vagueness kept them from being for concretely useful.

So a debate arose over the type of language to be used. You had people arguing that the broader aspirational principles would still be better, because they would cover more ground. Yet the people defending enforceable standards said they a clearer, more concise, strict, law-like language would be better because of its concreteness and would hence be more useful. Long story short, the enforceable standards people won out, and the 1992 Ethics Code was a totally different kind than ones before it. It got rid all the old aspirational principles and case studies. It had clear distinctions and rational principles. And today we are left with that type of legalistic legacy in the world of psychological and mental health ethics. The complexity of the situations that arise in this domain don’t always fit easily into such frameworks. But, this is the case with most human social endeavors.