In response to their last blog post, David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway received the following email from Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist and Head of Science Communication at the BPS:
Hi both, saw your blog. In the interest of completeness, feel free to add this as my response:
In terms of ‘feelings’, you repeatedly used the phrase ‘high handed’ in our exchange, which is defined as ‘using authority forcefully without considering others’ feelings and opinions’.
Your article being critical of the BPS had absolutely zero bearing on the decision to reject. Everyone is welcome to explore our complete archive to find numerous pieces we have published over the years that are critical of the BPS, including from you on this very topic.
You have, yourselves, often talked of the importance of editorial freedom, and that is something that has been vigorously supported over decades by a representative body of members on the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee. It has also been, in my experience, supported by both Trustees and senior leadership as a vital part of a healthy organisation.
In reply to this, David Pilgrim posts:
The response above from Jon Sutton is very unusual. The collective stance of senior BPS employees like him has been to studiously avoid responding to any post on BPSWatch. For any Skinnerians left out there, we were placed on an extinction programme. I am not sure how to interpret this precedent but am glad that Jon Sutton has at last come out to defend his judgment and his purported independence. However, he cannot be independent because of his conflict of interest as an employee, now with a Director title.
Sutton’s personal style, which can be glib (one liners ending in ‘cheers’ are par for the course) and patronising (feigning worry that we might be ‘hurt’ by the rejection) is mildly irritating. However, it is not the central matter here. This is not about Jon’s personal style but the role of the editor and its funding, which I think places The Psychologist in a similar structural relationship to the BPS that Pravda had in relation to the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party. The editor is given discretion, but he or she must stay strictly in the lane set by their political masters.
In my previous post with Ashley Conway, there was much that we omitted which was relevant to the rejected piece and the precarious position for now held by the BPS about memory and the law. Here I say more on this.
Why was the piece rejected?
Why was it so important for the editor of magazine of the British Psychological Society to deny its readership a reasoned view on a topic that remains of serious public policy interest? It is not that Sutton is opposed to politics being foregrounded in The Psychologist. If he had an old-fashioned positivist stance of guarding ‘disinterested’ knowledge that would be consistent, but quite the opposite is the case. When it comes to one version of politics, identitarian special pleading, he frequently grandstands about championing this or that partisan group cause (Tosi and Warmke, 2020).
Transgenderism has been high on his agenda, even coaching activists who were neither psychologists nor BPS members to provide a prepared riposte to appear the day after a Judicial Review judgement was published https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/blow-rights-transgender-children. The decision to publish this planned provocative article was discussed in Pilgrim (2023). Sutton responded to criticism of him about the bias, confirming that he had indeed initiated the article and quickly amended his position to challenge the judgement of the Judicial Review by stating in The Psychologist “The ‘truth’ is not always so simple, and the ‘law’ can be questioned.’”
So, something is going on here in Sutton’s selective decision-making as a gatekeeper of knowledge when politics are concerned. In the previous post, Ashley Conway and I were of the view that this is about protectionism in relation to the current memory and law policy of the BPS. In his reply to us Sutton simply denies this charge, claiming that he has been even handed. In relation to the ‘memory wars’, I can only find the piece by Chris Brewin and Bernice Andrews that was a moderating view and challenged in part that of, for example, Chris French and Dan Wright (who were advisors to the BFMS).
It is noteworthy that a full-scale attack on the science and personal consequences of the false memory movement (barring our new book) has been missing from British psychology. This has left an open goal for the false memory experimentalists to keep churning out the same case for defending those accused of serious crimes, while patronisingly deeming ordinary people on juries, survivors of abuse and clinicians working with trauma to lack ‘scientific literacy’.
In the US psychologists have challenged that movement forcibly at times. One, Anna Salter was sued unsuccessfully by members of the advisory group of the FMSF and another developed important concepts, such as ‘betrayal trauma’ and ‘DARVO’ (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) (Salter, 1998; Freyd, 1997). By contrast, British psychology has tended to celebrate the false memory movement (look at its taken-for-granted appearance on the curriculum), with no public and sustained opposition from within, giving it a relatively easy ride this side of the Atlantic. This may have given Jon Sutton the confidence to bat away our piece, knowing quite correctly that a wider campaign to resist the false memory movement has been absent in British psychology. His decision could be made knowing that there would be little come back.
Despite the modish critical social justice posturing in The Psychologist, in my view the balance of articles and discussion permitted largely defends two deeply reactionary policies. Both undermine the rights of women and children, especially when they are the victims of patriarchal power. One is in relation to excluding gender critical views and the other in relation to memory and the law, which we explained in the previous post. Sutton may deny this claim, but it is for readers to judge his credibility and that of our critique. Our piece was an opportunity for Sutton to set out the case for discussion of the ‘memory wars’ in a new context dominated by the fall out of the Epstein scandal. Instead, this is what he said when delivering the news:
Dear David and Ashley,
I have now had views back on your submission; I’m afraid the consensus is that it’s not suitable for The Psychologist. Reviewer concerns centred on whether it’s a clear, persuasive and truly psychological argument (e.g. ’seemingly forget’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting, in an article ostensibly about false memory); and on the feeling that a lot of it sits at the borderline of what might be considered professionally or even legally acceptable. You may have more luck placing it with an outlet that has that wider scope, and is more set up to do the necessary checks.
Readers of this blog can go back and check this summary dismissal to see if it makes sense, given the content of the rejected piece. What does the phrase ‘truly psychological argument’ mean? Given that psychology is such a contested discipline, is there even a consensus on what constitutes a ‘truly psychological argument’? What exactly is wrong with the words ‘seemingly forget’ which referred to the post-Epstein reckoning of key elite actors like Mountbatten-Windsor and Mandelson? What does the recent vernacular metaphor ‘heavy lifting’ mean exactly in this context? We pressed Sutton for more clarification, but he simply refused, invoking his unilateral editorial right to do and say what suited him and threatening to seek managerial permission from the BPS to block our emails. The dismissive position he adopted would not matter if the piece was irrelevant to the public interest and it was not properly reasoned and referenced. None of that was true about our submission cuing the next claims about the piece from Sutton.
Was the rejected piece professionally or legally unacceptable?
A nuanced put down in Sutton’s vague rationale is worth a reflection, it is this phrase: ‘the feeling [sic] that a lot of it sits at the borderline of what might be considered professionally or even legally acceptable’. What was in our piece that was even remotely unprofessional? Was it that we recorded the facts of the four cases of discredited members of the BFMS or FMSF (three of whom were psychologists). Surely it is professionally valid, and even laudable, to draw attention to ethically dubious conduct in our disciplinary midst?
Was it recording the track record of a key leader of the false memory movement, Elizabeth Loftus, when she worked preferentially in defending accused perpetrators and not their accusers, a fact that she has never hidden (Abramsky, 2004; Loftus and Ketcham, 1991)? That punching down effect is obvious when her long career, note as a (very) public intellectual, is appraised fairly. Her celebrity swansong might now be in relation to Ghislaine Maxwell, jailed for good reason. This simple fact is in the public domain.
It is also a fact that Elizabeth Loftus was a member of the advisory board of the British False Memory Society. It is also a fact that since 1991, she has remained a lifetime member of the BPS and honorary fellow of the Society. Note she resigned from the American Psychological Association abruptly in 1996 in the wake of criticisms by survivors of abuse and some APA members, and note before the ethical claims against her were investigated and ruled upon (Dalenberg, 2014; Brand and McEwen, 2016). When Karl Sabbagh, the sex offender, who was still on the advisory board of the BFMS while in prison, ten years previously wrote his self-interested book in defence of the false memory movement, Loftus said this on its back cover:
A terrific book. Sabbagh’s journey into childhood memory shows keen insight into how it works and what it means. He offers a masterfully original and beautifully written perspective on one of the most fundamental aspects of the human mind.
That book was published by Sabbagh – that is a fact (Sabbagh, 2009). Loftus warmly commended it – that is a fact. The more we unpicked the false memory movement, as we do in our book, the more its shocking aspects kept appearing for us to report.
Given this fact-checked picture, did Sutton’s comment, a touch menacingly, imply that our writing on these serious matters was libellous? If so, then he must be aware that libel is only relevant when a claim might both affect the reputation of a person detrimentally and that claim is factually inaccurate. If not, then it is a matter of fair comment or legitimate viewpoint. We did our best to ensure that the rejected piece was all fair comment, and all evidentially based (as we have done throughout the book that we are about to launch). In this piece, who exactly might we have libelled?
A healthy decision to test our confidence in this overall claim, would have been for Sutton to publish our piece and then let the reviewer (or reviewers) say why we were wrong, in whole or part, and explaining why our claims were unprofessional or even illegal. That open debate would have been in the public interest (another key consideration when weighing up libel claims). The suppression of it by Sutton is, in my view, against the public interest. Again, the readers of this blog can come to their own conclusion.
There is more to come
Only around half of the Epstein files have been released. The wide ranging online and printed explorations we see about this partial picture are encountered by us all daily. One aspect of the emerging story is the association of key intellectual figures, some of whom were psychologists, including Steven Pinker, Michael Gazzaniga, David Buss, Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman. Elizabeth Loftus joined their esteemed ranks, when invited to speak at the intellectual salon of Edge.org. This project was driven by Epstein’s funding for the Edge Foundation, which had been organised since the 1990s by the literary agent John Brockman.
After Epstein’s arrest, confidence in the intellectual salon of Edge was undermined and its activity declined. Epstein did not merely enjoy, and manipulate, his wealth and sexually exploit minors. In addition, his political backers encouraged the cultivation of cultural, especially scientific, influence. This is an emerging matter for current commentators and future historians. Epstein was not a rogue and evil individual working alone – he was supported by political and financial actors, who were the beneficiaries of his maleficence. They certainly included superrich patriarchs, but probably also the security services of more than one country: Russia and Israel are the focus of investigators for now.
Finally, returning to Sutton’s advice that we might try an outlet other than The Psychologist with a wider scope, this does make a sort of sense given the above complexity, which is beyond the competence of psychology as a sole discipline to understand. But should psychologists now completely outsource their reflexivity and social responsibility to other fora? Is that a wise and ethically defensible stance?
In for a penny in for a pound. If Sutton wants psychologists to be politically engaged with the world, he cannot pick and choose where that might take us. It cannot only be about fronting the views of transgender activists in opposition to their political setbacks or favouring the false memory experimentalist position and its intellectual leadership (which he denies). However, from where I sit, that does seem to be where we are up to when it comes to the current stance of the editor of The Psychologist. Politics is what he wants it to be because he is in charge of a node of power; but of course, someone is also in charge of him.
References
Abramsky, S. (2004). Memory and manipulation: the trials of Elizabeth Loftus, defender of the wrongly accused. Orange County Weekly September 9th. hhtp://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231173915eekly.com/features/features/memory-
Brand, B. and McEwen, L. (2016). Ethical standards, truths, and lies. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 17. 1-8.
Dalenberg, C. J. (2014). Protecting scientists, science, and case protagonists: A discussion of the Taus v. Loftus Commentaries. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 29(18), 3308-3319.
Freyd, J. J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7(1), 22–32.
Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the defense. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Pilgrim, D. (2023). BPS bullshit. In D. Pilgrim (Ed.) British Psychology in Crisis. Oxford: Phoenix Books.
Sabbagh, K. (2009). Remembering our Childhood: How memory betrays us Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Salter, A. (1998). Confessions of a whistle blower: Lessons learned. Ethics and Behavior. 8(2), 115–124.
Tosi, J., and Warmke, B. (2020).Grandstanding: The use of moral talk. Oxford University Press Online
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