Ethics – BPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…..

Quite soon students in management schools will be offered on a plate a perfect example of a dysfunctional organisation (Pilgrim, 2023a). After two years of our campaign to expose poor governance and corruption in the BPS, telling the world what its leaders have preferred to keep under wraps, what have we experienced and concluded?

A short answer is that it feels like moving constantly between Alice in Wonderland and 1984. The vertigo this creates is partly because of the complexity of what we are dealing with. That is a legitimation crisis (Jost and Major, 2001; Habermas, 1975), with its roots in both history and a reproduced leadership legacy culture which survives, albeit precariously, by routinely evading transparency and denying pervasive conflicts of interest.

A sketch of the legitimation crisis

Those members who engage with what is wrong with the Society now distrust its managers and for very good reason. Most others either do not bother being critical, leave in despair, or they are kept in the dark. Accordingly, we have a largely docile membership, which is reflected in the poor turn out for Presidential elections.

The CV advantages of passive membership is a collusive factor, which has given a free pass to the old oligarchy and the newer management class controlling the BPS. The rise of this class, between capital and labour, is not new. However, its power has been amplified by neoliberalism and the norm of the New Public Management (NPM) approach to organisational leadership for now (Smith, 2014; Gruening, 2001; cf. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979).

The oligarchical norm, post-1965, merging uncomfortably with NPM, post-2000, intensified rather than solved the legitimation crisis. Over the past few years there has been Charity Commission ‘engagement’, which has triggered some small reforms in the Board of Trustees, though even they are regressive (see below).

The BPS managers do announce their decisions, post hoc, on the website, which is labyrinthine. The members have few direct mailings about important headline matters and the The Psychologist is light touch. The President and CEO get to portray their view of the world but ordinary or extraordinary events in Leicester are simply not reported. As the editor has told us for emphasis in the most recent edition, it is proudly, ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’. Always loyal to the SMT and BoT, it does a version of that job very well indeed.

The local press fills in this complicit silence from ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’. The Psychologist offers a nearly bare noticeboard and only good news is permitted. Compare that stance with these reports in the Leicester Mercury: (https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/arson-investigation-launched-after-blaze-2490769; https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/trusted-worker-blew-70k-charitys-6618893

Killer joke or suicide note?

In all honesty, the BPS is basically a joke: it is neither a learned nor learning organisation. In fact the organisational state of the Society is so laughable that it recalls the Monty Python sketch from 1969 about the funniest joke in the world. It was so hilarious that one might die laughing on hearing it, as Eric Idle’s mother and the constables did, first on the scene. Eric Scribbler died laughing writing it, which might be prescient for the authors of their own demise in Leicester.

If the enormity of the tragi-comedy which the BPS has become was grasped in its entirety, we risk the same mortal inevitability. Here though we have no single authorial source like Eric Scribbler, merely several key players and in turn this recalls Pirandello’s absurdist Six Characters In Search of An Author. These could include its surviving CEO and his partner in Pollyanna optimism, turning our attention away instrumentally from a corrupt past (Carpenter and Bajwa, 2021).

They could include its oligarchs who, with no insight, have confused hanging around for longer than is healthy, for either membership democracy or the public good, with ‘serving’ the Society. See for example Professor Ann Colley, who was unique as both a CEO for a while and also BPS President. On her retirement another oligarch Professor Carole Allan (President and appointed Honorary General Secretary for while) said this of Colley in The Psychologist 2017, without a hint of irony or insight:

Ann served twice as Honorary General Secretary. The first time was for three years from 1989, when membership of the Society stood at 13,000. The second time was from 2003 to 2008. In between she was elected to serve as President, which office she held in 1993/94. Ann was circumspect about what Presidents can achieve in their short term of office when she was interviewed for The Psychologist, pointing out that initiatives usually only bear fruit after two or three years.

Colley’s modest ambitions for Presidents made sense as a survival strategy in an incorrigibly dysfunctional organisation. Other self-confessed ‘BPS junkies’ (see Miller and Cornford, 2006) offer us no real evidence what to ‘serve’ actually means: serving whom, about what and to what end?

The re-purposed Pirandello play could include the Society’s bombastic leaders from the past, who confused the ego-inflation that came with becoming a professional regulator with organisational probity, while failing to spot that they had created a faux ‘Board of Trustees’. This was not even vaguely independent but was instead awash with conflicts of interest (Newman, 1988).

Maybe it could also include the renegade leaders, who went off on their own to form the Associations of Educational Psychologists, Business Psychologists and Clinical Psychologists in 1963, 2000 and 2017 respectively. They were tired of an arcane self-serving oligarchy that held membership democracy in contempt. And then there are the authors of BPS policies who have betrayed victims of child sexual abuse (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). Or how about the twice President Cyril Burt, with his mixed posthumous reviews? How about his student, Hans Eysenck, in the eugenic UCL tradition, who is still subject to an unresolved investigation (Burt, 1912; Craig, Pelosi and Tourish, 2021; Galton, 1881; Marks, 2019; Pearson, 1904; Pelosi, 2019; Pilgrim, 2008 and 2023b)?

To be fair Eysenck was not a BPS oligarch, though he was a character of both notoriety and adoration. For anyone missing this one, the first to blow the whistle to the BPS was the psychiatrist Anthony Pelosi in 1995, but his request for an inquiry was ignored. This inaction was also evident from Kings College London (Eysenck’s legacy employer) but eventually they got their act together to set up an independently chaired review of the dubious research. Spin forwards to 2019, when KCL eventually acted. The BPS was still silent. The CEO was asked to deal with the Eysenck ‘problem’ by the editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, David Marks, who had successfully pricked the conscience or at least the utilitarian wisdom of KCL. Bajwa did not even bother replying to Marks, which was a common stance of wilful blindness at the time (we have a record of other, multi-signed letters he simply ignored from members).

Some of us now know the context of this weird obliviousness of the CEO, as he had other fish to fry at the time. Without detective effort, the membership were simply left bemused by the absence of common courtesy from the CEO. Three years later, yes three years later, Dr Rachel Scudamore, his subordinate, issued an apology to the complainant for the non-reply but no explanation was offered. Marks has now resigned from the BPS after being a member for over fifty years and has just launched an excoriating attack of the organisation in print (Marks, 2023).

A final Pirandello-style inclusion might be the ex-President, David Murphy, who with two others leaving over a two month period in 2021 felt moved to put his resignation letter on Twitter. Here it is for those who missed it:

This lengthy account from Murphy speaks for itself. However, given that he was arguably an insider in the oligarchy (note his allusion to his 35 year involvement and continuous roles for over 20 years), it is significant that he resigned so publicly and was so critical of his colleagues on the BoT. Damning the organisation with faint praise, while simultaneously washing its dirty linen in public in one defining public performance, reveals the legitimation crisis that leaders in the BPS were denying existed. ‘Problem what problem?’ was the norm, though we were told tantalisingly, with no detail attached, that it had been a ‘challenging year’ (McGuinness, 2021).

At the time of Murphy’s resignation the BoT were adopting a ‘damage limitation exercise’, with its ‘Comms Team’ in overdrive. Managers resort to this particular version of bullshit when the going gets tough, as it does fairly regularly in the BPS. In early 2021, they had to deal with the fraud and so the The Psychologist was dutifully silent. There was at the time an ongoing police inquiry, a suspended CEO and a Chief Finance Officer who had hastily departed, while under investigation. He now works for the National Lottery Community Fund.

The public and ordinary members at the time were oblivious to all of these machinations, until the local, and then eventually the national, press reported and commented. As noted above, the Chair of the BoT pleaded for sympathy, understandably, about a ‘challenging year’ in The Psychologist (McGuinness, 2021). The details of why it had been challenging were, of course, glossed over though MacLennan’s public trashing on Youtube – before his appeal was even heard – was pompously retained, so we all got the message. Whistle blowers tend not to fare well after doing their public duty, so the BoT of the time may look now to their consciences about this intervention, which they approved knowingly (Morgan, 2014).

Unlike the Pirandello play, maybe the dramatis personae for the sad tale of the BPS need to be more than half a dozen, as there are quite a few contenders. The oligarchical culture that keeps reproducing itself seems to be beyond the awareness or defiance of particular actors. It really is not easy to identify those who have been singularly or disproportionately responsible for the legitimation crisis today. However, one thing that is absolutely certain is that Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ applies in buckets in the culture of the BPS.

Indeed the level of hypocrisy is so bizarre that, unwittingly, the rhetoric of official BPS policies becomes a checklist of interest to prospective whistle blowers and to students of dysfunctional organisations. The bullshit culture now running through the BPS, like Blackpool rock, beggars belief. Three illustrative examples will be given in relation to its policies on conflicts of interest, values and the investigation of complaints. All of these worthy documents, when tested out for their actual practice, demonstrate that the leaders in the BPS say one thing and do another with consummate ease.

Conflicts of interest and the good sense of the NCVO

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) withdrew from offering advice on future strategy for fear that its own consultants might be at risk of harm from the toxic culture in the BPS (Farrow and Potkins, 2020). Again few members will be aware of this damning verdict. However, the NCVO does give us all free advice on its website on how a Board of Trustees (bearing in mind that this is still a misnomer in the BPS) should deal with conflicts of interest.

“Identifying, dealing with and recording conflicts of interest/loyalty

The board understands how real and perceived conflicts of interests and conflicts of loyalty can affect a charity’s performance and reputation.
Trustees disclose any actual or potential conflicts to the board and deal with these in line with the charity’s governing document and a regularly reviewed conflicts of interest policy.
Registers of interests, hospitality and gifts are kept and made available to stakeholders in line with the charity’s agreed policy on disclosure.
Trustees keep their independence and tell the board if they feel influenced by any interest or may be perceived as being influenced or to having a conflict.”

The Society’s own conflict of interest policy is aligned with these broad aspirations but here is the rub. The conflicts of interest that are embedded in the appointment norm since 1965 mean that the BoT is rife with them and yet no one on the Board seems to be aware of that fact or is wilfully blind to it. Moreover, despite news of the recent appointment of an independent chair, old habits die hard.

Recently the advertisements for Chairs Board, with short periods of notice for applicants allotted, still include the assurance they will be appointed automatically onto the BoT. The appointment norm and its implicit celebration of a conflicts of interest is so ingrained in the culture of the BPS that the beneficiaries will tend to experience pride not angst or guilt about their role. This lack of insight means membership democracy and public accountability are given barely a glance.

After pressure for reform from the Charity Commission, the BoT, being the wounded dinosaur structure it is, began to realise slowly that the game was up on the old model, with its total lack of independent oversight. Bajwa (November 2022) made this emollient announcement to accommodate the problem, tucked away on the BPS website:

Traditionally, our Board of Trustees has almost exclusively been made up of members, who bring the in-depth knowledge of the organisation and psychology that is needed to make big decisions about the society’s future.

Unlike many similar organisations, however, we have not recruited externally for trustees, and we haven’t specifically looked for people with expertise in areas which are crucial to the organisation’s success but not necessarily directly related to psychology.

Bullshit is about all that is said and not said to disguise the reality of what those in power are up to (Frankfurt, 2005). Note how Bajwa acknowledges (so does not query) the dysfunctional, and at times catastrophic, lack of independent oversight from the past. Instead this is turned into a sort of traditional wisdom, not a confessed foolhardiness.

The old regime of power allegedly entailed ‘in-depth knowledge’, not the vested interests of oligarchs and their fellow travellers. They made ‘big decisions’ (wow!). This Trump-like phrasing signals gravitas (heavy is the head that bears the crown) but it is conveniently short on detail. In truth these ‘big decisions’, included keeping the legitimation crisis under wraps and using a kangaroo court to expel an internal critic. They included the norm of persecuting any incoming President who attempted to change what was rotten in the state of Leicester (MacLennan was not a one-off case). The comparison with other third sector organisations by Bajwa implies some sort of respectable or unremarkable option appraisal, rather than a total failure to comply with charity law expectations of good governance. The BPS have been out of step and out of order in the third sector landscape for decades.

So, Bajwa tells us, three new independent Trustees are to come in but the majority will still be appointees from within the BPS. And it gets worse. The one and only part of the BoT that traditionally has been elected not appointed, the Presidential triumvirate, is now to be removed; again most of the membership will become aware of this after the event. The President will now only provide an ‘ambassadorial’, not a leadership, role on the BoT. This means a regressive not progressive reform to embed, not break up, the cabal.

On this note, remember that after the expulsion of Nigel MacLennan, the BoT simply invented a new rule that excluded candidature from the general membership. This ensured a safe pair of hands (Carpenter) because only BoT members or Senate members were now eligible. This pre-empted a new version emerging of a turbulent President like MacLennan, who might, heaven forbid, ‘say “no” to power’ (Fromm, 2010).

Another example of the bullshit character of the Society’s conflicts of interest policy in practice relates to the CEO himself. If anyone, member or public, wants to complain about him to the BoT they encounter the invented rule that all communications to the BoT are received and dealt with by……the CEO. Bear in mind that a CEO should be accountable to a BoT, not be an arbitrating gatekeeper deciding the relevance of business presented to it. At this point maybe Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 should be added to our list of literary resonances.

Espoused values

Part of the killer joke of the BPS is its capacity to posture about organisational values. Here is the virtue-signalling posing, on the record, which was applicable at the time of the fraud, its cover up and the deafening silence about organisational learning since then:

“Our values are central to the way we work to achieve our core purposes. We aim to work in a culture of:

• rigour and fairness;

• honesty and integrity;

• transparency;

• respect for a diversity of viewpoints;

• the highest standards of professionalism and ethical behaviour, attitudes and judgements, as laid out in our Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

There is nothing wrong with this Kantian checklist at all. The problem is that the BPS culture in practice is at total odds with its spirit and detail. The best hoodwinks are the ones that brazenly claim the very opposite of reality, which is a hallmark of our ‘post-truth’ era (Porpora, 2020).

Would rigour and fairness describe the selective investigation of Nigel MacLennan, while members of the public contacting the BPS were told that it does not investigate complaints against individual members?

Would honesty and integrity apply to the fact that not a single person at the top of the organisation has been held responsible for appointing a serial fraudster, who is now in jail after being appointed to be the PA of the CEO?

Would transparency cover the complicit silence of The Psychologist about both routine BPS business and the scandals that abound in the recent and distant past?

Would respect for a diversity of views cover the policy capture by some groups, at the expense of others, in relation to the controversial gender document and that covering memory and law?

Would the ‘highest standards’ claim extend to the BoT and SMT? In what sense have they behaved honourably in this regard? When answering that, just look at the beans spilt by Murphy in his resignation letter. This checklist is fine in theory but in practice it is simply bovine ordure extraordinaire (Hardy, 2021).

The vagaries of trying and failing to make a complaint

Recently this matter has gone backwards (rather like the BoT membership one) not forwards. Here is what Dr Rachel Scudamore (‘Head of Quality Assurance and Standards’) has just told us about the new, allegedly improved, complaints procedure, which states in Section B.3 that:

“ 3. The policy is not appropriate for addressing the following issues:

a. disagreement with the content of a Society publication;

b. disagreement with a Society policy position;

c. disagreement with a Society decision to take, or not take, a particular course of action.”

So, if a BPS publication contains material against the public interest or at odds with academic probity, then members cannot complain formally. If a policy endangers vulnerable people or is at odds with ethical practice, then members cannot complain formally. If those leading the organisation make questionable or unwise decisions (such as employing someone with a publicly known history of fraud), then members cannot complain formally. The new document is another cabal stitch up in order to block transparency and accountability. It is one of innumerable current examples of organisational bullshit, which permeates the BPS (Spicer, 2020; Christensen, Kärreman and Rasche, 2019).

Members will not be able to make a complaint about BPS policy, as they did in the past, even if it was then typically ignored. The CEO was a master non-reply role model but that wilful blindness will no longer be even required, because some complaints will simply will not be investigated in principle.

Indeed one wonders what anyone can now complain about formally, given the self-serving exclusion clauses. The members were never well served by the old policy on complaints (this was a central concern of the Charity Commission) but now the cabal are being boastfully unaccountable. Elements of the killer joke just keep emerging to threaten our wellbeing and the diminishing prospect of a learning organisation and democracy in the BPS.

We wait to see how the BPS will partition off its new and proud recapture of its regulatory powers. This is now about to be extended to a tranche of mental health workers, who may not even be psychology graduates. This will require the BPS doing something it did prior to ceding its disciplinary powers to the HCPC after 2003: it must reconstruct a credible investigatory and disciplinary infrastructure. That must be rule-bound, truly transparent and credible to the Professional Services Authority, who I believe have unwisely blessed the new regulatory powers of an incompetent and dysfunctional organisation.

If this happens, as surely it has to, will that infrastructure now be applicable to all of the BPS membership? Will those complaining, say against academic psychologists, no longer be batted away with the advice to contact the employing university? Will all those self-employed practitioners confecting ways of working around HCPC registration now come under a new investigatory process?

As they say, “don’t hold your breath”. My hunch is that the managers will think selectively and instrumentally, which they do with great ease. There will probably be one rule for the new tranche to tick the box for the PSA and the rest will be left alone but under the straight-jacket of the new complaints procedure, with its exclusion clauses. And how about complaints against BPS managers themselves? (I have already rehearsed the Joseph Heller and Lewis Carroll rule about the CEO receiving complaints about himself.)

The bullshit checklist of the values noted above finishes on an ambiguous note. Its focus is actually about members but do the staff have another code of practice and can we see it please? Is it the same as the final values point or a different one? How about the conflicted role of the editor of The Psychologist and his understandable selective attention to scandals in the BPS and his routine noticeboard of Pollyanna news about the future from the BPS leadership? He is employed by the BPS, which explains much. Anyone trying to complain about his editorial policies, favouring BPS propaganda, is faced with an uphill task (Harvey, 2023).

Concluding advice

Watch this space, as the absurdist play unfolds. Keep reading the Leicester Mercury.

References

Burt, C.L. (1912) The inheritance of mental characters. Eugenic Review IV, 1-33.

Carpenter, K. and Bajwa, S. (2022) From the President and Chief Executive. The Psychologist January 4-5.

Christensen, L.T., Kärreman, D. and Rasche, A. (2019) Bullshit and organization studies. Organization Studies. 40(10):1587-1600;

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176

Craig, R., Pelosi, A. and Tourish, D. (2021) Research misconduct complaints and institutional logics: the case of Hans Eysenck and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Health Psychology, 26, 2, 296-3

Ehrenreich, B. and Ehrenreich, J. (1979) The Professional Managerial Class. In P. Walker (ed) Between Labor and Capital, South End Press, Boston.

Farrow, A. and Potkins, J. (2020) British Psychological Society: Strategy Consultancy Set Up Phase Report November 2020 London: NCVO

Frankfurt, H. (2005) On Bullshit Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fromm, E. (2010) On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying ‘No’ To Power London: Harper

Galton, F. (1881) Natural Inheritance London: Macmillan

Gruening, G, (2001) Origin and theoretical basis of new public management, International Public Management Journal 4, 1, 1-25,

Jost, J. and Major, B. (2001) (eds). The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis Boston: Beacon Press.

Hardy, N. (2021) Catcher in the lie: resisting bovine ordure in social epistemology Journal of Critical Realism 20, 2, 125-145.

Harvey, P. (2023) Resisting the silence of the cabal: resorting to social and alternative media. In Pilgrim, D. (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Marks, D. F. (2023). A catalogue of shame: the British Psychological Society as a dysfunctional organisation. Journal of Educational and Psychological Research 5,, 1, 575-587.

Marks, D.F. (2019). The Hans Eysenck affair: time to correct the scientific record Journal of Health Psychology, 24, 4: 409-20.

McGuinness, C. (2021) The Society is at a Crossroads The Psychologist June 34, 4-5.

Miller, R. and Cornford, T. (2006) Double top – Ray Miller in discussion with Tim Cornford: The Society’s new President in discussion with the Chief Executive. How do their roles work together, and where do they see the Society going? The Psychologist April, 19, 20-21.

Morgan, J. (2014) Life after whistleblowing. Times Higher Education Supplement July 31^st

Newman, C. (1988) Evolution and Revolution Charter guide, occasional paper. Leicester: British Psychological Society

Pearson, K. (1904) On the inheritance of mental and moral characteristics in man. Biometrika IV, 265-303.

Pelosi, A.J. (2019). Personality and fatal diseases: revisiting a scientific scandal. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(4), 421-439

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2023b) Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology History of the Human Sciences Online January 5th.

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-84.

Porpora, D.V. (2020) Populism, citizenship, and post-truth politics, Journal of Critical Realism, 19, 4 329-340.

Smith, D. (2014). Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-line Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Spicer, A. (2020) Playing the bullshit game: how empty and misleading communication takes over organizations Organization Theory 1, 1-26

Ethics, Gender, Identity Politics

Gender: Cass, GIDS and BPS Guidelines

7th Nov 20227th Nov 2022 AdminBPSWatch

Is the BPS able to tolerate controversy and step up to the current debates?

Pat Harvey posts…

Background

In 2020, I became aware of some of the extensive issues involved in this case:

“The tangled case of the brothers who became girls, aged seven and three. A couple’s own son transitioned – and within months they were given a baby to foster, who became a girl too.” (https://archive.ph/3rEQw)

The details of the discussion of psychological considerations presented in this court case are very disquieting. Accordingly, I went to the current 2019 British Psychological Society Guidelines (currently downloadable at https://www.bps.org.uk/guideline/guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity ). I was naively hoping that my professional body could offer a position statement which would fairly represent a weighing of the dilemmas that would help a court case such as this one.

The document resembled no professional guidelines or policy guidance that I had ever seen during a long NHS clinical, service manager and trainer career, or as a member of the Mental Health Act Commission (precursor to the CQC) or as a panel member of an independent inquiry.

The content of the guidelines was very brief, sketchy yet dogmatic. There was no proper respectful recognition of current controversial clinical issues or social and political context. One approach only appeared to be acceptable, that of non-questioning “affirmation”. Consent issues were not considered. Sexuality and lifestyle issues such as kink and BDSM were lumped together with gender. There were hugely important omissions, such as the dilemmas of working with people who have a sexual interest in children. The limits of the research base were ignored.

I made a very detailed formal complaint about the form, the content and what I had discovered about the process of generating these guidelines. This served to illustrate and to confirm the experience of others – that the BPS complaints procedure was neither adequate, nor was it even followed. The complaint dragged on for months, deadlines were missed, I had to deal with different individuals at different times and important points in my complaint were missed. Unacceptable assertions about the status of evidence were dismissed with “we are a broad church”. The irony of this in the context of an “affirmation only” approach in the guidelines was lost. Only my persistence in the face of these failures got the complaint to Stage 2.

The complaint was closed with little by way of any positive outcomes. There were formal apologies for procedural failing. There was an evasive reply to the assertion I made that the members of the group which generated the guidelines had not all signed off on them. The crucial matter of their woeful inadequacy in the matter of providing responsible guidance for distressed gender questioning children was evaded by a retrospective formal addition, stating “For adults and young people (aged 18 and over)”. This was unaccompanied by any formal public announcement to members, many of who might still be working from the original, unamended version. The contents however, remained ambiguous with respect to age as with the implications that the following paragraph was applicable to minors:

“Assistive reproductive options may be needed and should be discussed openly and frankly, perhaps especially in the case of trans youth who are seeking treatments which will remove reproductive options at an age below that which people commonly consider becoming a parent”.

Hence, since 2020 until the present time, the professional guidance for psychology practitioners and non- psychologists, provided by the British Psychological Society are still held out on their website as follows:

‘These guidelines are aimed at applied psychologists working with mental distress, but may also be applied in associated psychological fields.

The principles they are based upon are derived from both the literature and best practice agreement of experts in the field and may also be applied to other disciplines, such as counselling, psychotherapy, psychiatry, medicine, nursing and social work.”

In my view this is nothing short of a scandal, a failed responsibility to the public. The national Gender Identity Disorder Service was, after all, psychologist led.

Events since 2022, further actions

In August 2022, after the Cass interim report and the subsequent announced closure of the GIDS, I wrote to the Practice Board of the BPS.

I am reproducing the letter in its entirety, followed by the response I finally received in November 2022, after a number of email prompts from myself. I make no further comment beyond my letter and the response in order that the reader might make their own judgement.

********************

Letter to British Psychological Society Practice Board

From Pat Harvey AFBPsS., C Psychol.

16 August 2022

Re BPS 2019 GSRD Guidelines

I am writing to you as a BPS member and an interested party in the process and development of BPS policy statements and the publication of guidelines for psychologists and other professionals working with clients who access services for problems relating to questioning their gender identity.

My interest has developed sequentially from

Experience during 30 years of clinical practice in adult mental health services with Male-to-Female clients, then termed Transsexuals and Transvestites.
Experience directly related to certain high profile and media reported cases of individual families in court.
Engagement with the BPS complaints procedure (August 2020 – April 2021) in respect of the 2019 GSRD Guidelines and the public statements of the Chair of the Task and Finish group responsible for producing those guidelines. There are detailed responses from Karen Beamish which should be available on file.
Responsibility for public content of the critical Twitter account @psychsocwatchuk
Articles published under my authorship on BPSWatch.com.
A chapter authored by me on the 2019 GSRD Guidelines in the forthcoming book British Psychology In Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction edited by David Pilgrim. Phoenix publishers (2022 in press).

I believe that the British Psychological Society has a duty to develop policy and best practice relating to matters central to psychology in the interests of the public and to assist its practitioner members. It also has a duty to keep its members properly informed, but the BPS has a recent history of lack of openness and transparency which operates to the detriment of that those duties. Accordingly, I am writing to you with a series of questions which I believe members have the right to have answered and to be updated on as soon as possible, even if merely to be told that a process of consideration is ongoing.

Are the GSRD Guidelines being reviewed?

I understand that the 2019 GSRD Guidelines may be in the process of revision. I make this assumption on the basis of the twitter exchange below and because the 2019 Guidelines themselves have disappeared from the webpage https://www.bps.org.uk/guideline/guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity without explanation.

Why is there no explanation or clarification?

There have been several ambiguous undertakings made to myself, to others and on the webpage to review the 2019 Guidelines over a two year period:

“in the light of the outcome of the Bell vs Tavistock Judicial Review”, November 2020.
“These guidelines will be reviewed following the outcome of the Bell v Tavistock appeal process” https://www.bps.org.uk/guideline/guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity
“In the meantime the Chair of the Practice Board has already put in place plans to commence a review of the gender guidelines upon the conclusion of the appeal.” (Karen Beamish to me 9 April 2021)
On Twitter to an individual (see above) “following the Cass review” 1 August 2022.

This is a completely unacceptable way to keep members updated. It is also extremely confusing since the 2019 GSRD Guidelines had a retrospective caveat added as a direct result of my complaint (“we have offered to put a statement on the front of our guidelines, on our website and all points/places where the guidelines are referenced to confirm that the BPS guidelines for psychologists working with gender, sexuality and relationship diversity are for adults. We will implement this urgently”) in April 2021. However, the Tavistock cases related to issues of consent of minors under 18. The remit of the Cass review is that it is the Independent Review by a paediatrician of “gender identity services for children and young people”. So, rhetorically – to emphasis the confusion of the BPS – how are those external drivers central to the decision to review guidelines explicitly stated since 2021 as applying only to adults?

Will the supposed review result in guidelines for children and young people?

It is clear that there has been a “moving picture” with regard to external events, first legal, then with the Cass Review and now the planned closure (in the wake of criticism about service accessibility failures, failures of service integration, ideology, data collection and research evidence base) of Tavistock GIDS. That moving picture, which will undoubtedly develop, cannot preclude the provision of guidelines for practising psychologists in the meantime. The BPS has provided nothing useable for its members to date: there is not any set of psychological principles that support ethical and reflective psychological practice, principles that would weather a changing legal social and political milieu.

The BPS should seek confidently to espouse key psychological principles in this contested area and take a lead. These principles include

Psychological understandings of the formation of identity within a developmental context.
Psychological understandings of the issues of informed and valid consent, especially in minors.
Heterogeneity of factors bearing down upon gender questioning in individuals, complexities and persistence or otherwise of their clinical presentations.
Importance of family dynamics, peer pressure, social contagion and the problem of psychological reductionism within a wider social context.
The pitfalls of biological and medical reductionism, e.g. “transgenderism is innate”.

None of this was addressed in the 2019 “affirmation only” Guidelines.

In recent service delivery for gender questioning and distressed children and young people, the foremost service, GIDS, has been psychologist-led. It is therefore astonishing that there have been no effective guidelines for psychology practitioners forthcoming from the BPS as our professional body. The BPS must grasp this situation and take a lead.

Should revised Guidelines separate Gender from Sexuality and Relationship Diversity?

I raised this in my complaint. The independent investigator brought in at stage 2 did not supply a definite answer; nevertheless he agreed this was an important question for any future revision to consider. He stated the following, reported to me in the letter concluding the complaint investigation from Karen Beamish dated 9 April 2021:

“In a future review, there should be further consideration of the issues to validate their inclusion or alternatively to provide any clarification needed…… it should be something for the Practice Board to consider under its remit to lead on the development of the guidelines.”

There are good reasons for separating the topics. Some are as follows:

Gender guidelines should firmly be covering the whole life span. Sexuality and relationship diversity is largely applicable to adults with some references to adolescent development.
It is strongly argued by many that gender questioning should be conceptually separated from sexuality in order to allow for more complex understandings. These understandings would allow for the very different principles of consent to be satisfactorily unpicked. Legal issues are also very different: for example, in the case of minor attracted persons (MAPS) who present commonly with very difficult challenges for practitioners where borderline illegal behaviour is involved.
The respective research and evidence bases are addressing different issues.
For political and social context reasons, gender has overshadowed sexuality in the 2019 Guidelines despite the demographics of numbers presenting in a clinical and counselling context and the differing expertise required of practitioners
BDSM and Kink should not receive consideration when other more prevalent clinical problems of sexuality and lifestyle such as MAPS require attention. This should not have been inserted via an inane caveat “these Guidelines do not, however, relate to anything non-consensual”. As indicated above, consent in sexual relationships is a complex matter, not a binary “consents vs does not consent”. When clients present in a clinical setting it is highly likely that consent will be one concern in the distress or in the perpetration of abusive behaviour. A quick inspection of “Consent” on forums for BDSM/Kink indicates a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding than the throwaway approach of the 2019 Guidelines.

Has the BPS reflected upon better process and outcome for reviewing the guidelines?

My forthcoming critical review of the 2019 GSRD Guidelines leads me to suggest

Appointment of a Chair who is not an activist or campaigner, who can allow debate about conflicting views, and where consensus cannot be achieved can allow the conflict and current uncertainty to be ethically and helpfully represented in the text to help others navigate the difficult cultural climate. The need for a less aligned chair than the chair of the 2019 Guidelines can be seen from problematic statements made in a public academic forum on outcomes of body altering surgery: “sometimes people think there is a debate about that and hopefully I have included enough references for you to think that debate is shut. There is not a debate about this anymore” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usyYi3Cevdo (@40mins 27 secs in). In an interview about a specialist post, she stated : ”The details of Gender Diversity can be learned, but an open and inquiring mind cannot. Bigots and exploitative theoreticians need not apply! Clever, open people who are interested in clinical practice, research, truly multidisciplinary working, and developing this emerging field are most welcome.”

Appointment of members with differing views including from amongst those psychologists with experience and expertise who felt they had to leave their work in services committed to “affirmation only approach” (See Cass Interim report 4.17, 4.20).

A more lengthy, detailed and critically reflective tone and content, akin to that of the BPS Autism Guidelines (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/working-autism ). In the less than 11 full pages that comprise the body of text of the 2019 GSRD Guidelines, the phrase “Psychologists should” appears 15 times in the 27 headings and an additional 42 times beneath the headings! This is self-evidently not advisory.

Full discussion and critique of the current evidence and research base and inclusion of methodological problems and criticisms which can allow for readers’ insight into the current situation. This cannot wait for the longer-term findings that may come from the Cass research programme. It is needed now by those tasked to provide services.

Balanced consultation with users and user groups representing differing perspectives, not, as previously, just Stonewall and LGBT Foundation. Consultation should also be made with “de-transitioners”.

Sufficient time allowed for well-publicised member consultation, engagement and subsequent amendments.

All task force members should be expected to either sign off the final revision or be recorded as dissenters with “minority report”. This would indicate a move away from what is perceived as an intimidatory climate where differing views are not permitted (see Cass).

I hope you will be able to answer my questions, inform members of the current situation and produce a very much more helpful set of guidelines for the psychological work within the field of gender questioning.

To quote Cass directly:

“4.19 Speaking to professionals outside GIDS, we have heard widespread concern about the lack of guidance and evidence on how to manage this group of young people.

4.20. Some secondary care providers told us that their training and professional standards dictate that when working with a child or young person they should be taking a mental health approach to formulating a differential diagnosis of the child or young person’s problems. However, they are afraid of the consequences of doing so in relation to gender distress because of the pressure to take a purely affirmative approach. Some clinicians feel that they are not supported by their professional body on this matter.”

This is most definitely applies to members of the British Psychological Society. It will, if not addressed, continue to deplete the pool of psychologists prepared to use their expertise to work with and help gender questioning children and adults.

Reply from BPS

Regarding: BPS 2019 GSRD Letter (August 16th 2022)

3rd November 2022

Dear Pat

Thank you for your letter, we welcome the views of our members. The guidelines are designed to support and enable psychologists to work with people of diverse genders, sexualities and relationships (e.g. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people) in a way that is respectful, inclusive and upholds psychologists’ duties under the Equality Act (2010).

Below is a response to your questions regarding the Guidelines for Psychologists working with Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity.

Are the GSRD Guidelines being reviewed?

Yes, the 2019 GSRD Guidelines are being reviewed. All guidance documents are routinely subject to a review at regular intervals to ensure they remain appropriate given the possibility of changing contexts, legislation and evolving evidence. They may also be reviewed at any point in the case of a major change in legislation, evidence or context. As this is a scheduled interim review of the document, the original authors are leading the review process. The Practice Board will ensure the document is externally peer reviewed before publication.

Will the supposed review result in guidelines for children and young people?

This will be considered by the review group and peer reviewers as part of the review process. The review group will take into account the recent NHS review of The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London and the public consultation on a new service delivery model.

The Practice Board will consider any recommendations from the review regarding additional evidence-based guidance for children and young people.

Should revised Guidelines separate Gender from Sexuality and Relationship Diversity?

This will be considered by the review group and peer reviewers as part of the review.

Has the BPS reflected upon better process and outcome for reviewing the guidelines?

We continually reflect on our guidance writing and consultation processes and welcome feedback from members and the public. We conduct all of our work in a context of continuous improvement and in that spirit we are grateful for your comments.

Yours sincerely,

Diversity and Inclusion Team

British Psychological Society

e: inclusion@bps.org.uk w: http://www.bps.org.uk

"The Psychologist", Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Ethics, Governance

Is an authentic history of the BPS possible?

6th Jan 20228th Jan 2022 AdminBPSWatch

This post has been modified to include an addendum (shown after the references) to include feedback received since the original posting = Blog Administrator (8 January 2022).

David Pilgrim posts….

During 2021 the large fraud in the BPS was dismissed as a minor footnote in the Society’s accounts. Three elected Presidents disappeared over a two month period. Two resigned and another was expelled after a kangaroo court and a rigged appeal. In the interim period between the latter two events, he was publicly disparaged in a YouTube video.

For most of the year the CEO was suspended in the wake of the fraud. A temporary President was drafted in, with the help of a contrived illegitimate election, to bolster the diminishing credibility of the Board of Trustees. The Psychologist played its faithful role, as ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’, in what it reported and, more importantly, what it did not.

In the midst of these political events, poorly explored in public, there was another that went under the radar. An over-worked and under-paid part time archivist, in the History of Psychology Centre (HoPC) resigned, leaving it with no academic director or archiving staff and an uncertain future. Although the HoPC is not the singular route to build up a history of British psychology, it is fairly important. Accordingly, its sustainability, as a vaunted part of the BPS, is crucial for scholarly activity both inside and outside the Society.

The SMT have done little or nothing to protect it in recent years. Their mind has probably been elsewhere, managing the crisis they both inherited and amplified. One tactical option they seem to have chosen is to suppress history and to be evasive about their own detailed accountability. If that interpretation is correct then their motivation to support a proper history, especially recent history, will be weak or absent.

Whatever else we might say about the BPS, it is not a learning organisation. That aspiration would entail organisational norms, which celebrated transparency and honest reflection about current problems and their antecedents. Many of the postings on this blog have explored failures of probity and the evasion of learning from them on the part of the SMT and Board of Trustees. Here I want to just focus on the possibility of a history of the BPS.

Celebratory and critical histories

Until the middle of the 20^th century, British psychology was expanding slowly and loosening itself from the constraints of both medicine and philosophy. Early historical accounts, such as that of my old teacher, Lesley Hearnshaw, paid little critical attention to the Society and focused mainly on epistemological tensions (Hearnshaw, 1964). His task was empirical: map out what could be discerned to date about theory and findings, within the strengths and weaknesses of the British empiricist tradition. A critical take on that history awaited (cf. Pilgrim and Patel, 2015).

At that juncture, some early signs of malaise had to be acknowledged during historical uncovering. Hearnshaw was a friend of Cyril Burt and began to write a celebratory history of his work after his death in 1971. As the proofs were being prepared, accusations were emerging of Burt falsifying data and people. Hearnshaw had, as an old fashioned honest scholar, to re-write his ending. Hagiography had to be replaced with Burt being damned with faint praise. He had been President of the BPS (1941-1943). He was the trusty servant of the eugenic tradition developed by Pearson and Spearman at University College London. He was the main man in the mid-20^th century.. He was a public intellectual promoting an elitist eugenic view of human nature and he was not challenged by his peers of the time (Chamarette, 2019). At that time he was Mr British Psychology.

Burt succeeded Spearman as Professor of Psychology at University College in 1932. He always maintained the Spearman-Pearson position on ‘innate general cognitive ability’, which could be ‘objectively determined and measured’ (Burt, 1909). After the Second World War, he shaped the structure of British schooling and his advice to policy makers was well received in his Eugenics Society lecture (Burt, 1946).

Hearnshaw sadly had to record Burt’s fall from grace for the first time, leaving others to squabble over the best post-mortem (Hearnshaw, 1979; cf. Mackintosh, 1995). These efforts reflected efforts to respect the Popperian hope that science is self-correcting, via falsification and open contestation about findings and interpretation. In recent years, psychology in Britain and elsewhere has faced two challenges in this regard. The first is the replication crisis and the second relates to cheating; at times in psychology and other disciplines these have overlapped.

The Burt scandal reflected badly not only on British eugenics and British psychology but also on the BPS itself, given his past Presidential role. The force of eugenic psychology meant that ideology preceded findings; Hearnshaw used the phrase accurately from logical philosophy of Burt ‘begging the question’ (Pilgrim, 2008). Findings were co-opted selectively and then massaged (or invented) to maintain a pre-existing ideological position. This drama has repeated recently in the critique of Burt’s student, Hans Eysenck.

At the time of writing I understand that this matter is being reviewed by a group in the Society. Eysenck’s implausible findings about cancer and personality were reviewed by King’s College (KCL). Eysenck successfully courted funding from the tobacco companies. In exchange he offered them the comforting theory that cancer-proneness and addictive tendencies were inherited. The narrative of these coming together to account for lung cancer incidence could then displace the idea that big business was encouraging addiction for profit and was the source of a major public health problem. Favourable research might augment cigarette marketing.

In 2019 the KCL review* of Eysenck’s work concluded that it was ‘unsafe’ and incompatible with expectations of good clinical research. Criticisms of this work had been known since the 1990s and eventually lobbying from those like Anthony Pelosi prompted the KCL review and the incipient look back from the BPS (Pelosi, 2019).

An organisation without a memory?

Will the BPS be forced to deal (eventually) with the Eysenck question, as they had in days gone by to deal with Burt and his dubious findings? The jury is out for now, but the following might be relevant to note. The editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, David Marks, wrote to Sarb Bajwa in November 2018 asking for the BPS to take its responsibilities seriously about Eysenck, and received no reply.

Three years of radio silence later and after a prompt, Marks still had no reply from the CEO but he did get a response from Rachel Scudamore (‘Head of Quality Assurance and Standards’) apologising for Bajwa’s inaction. She opted to use the first person plural to avoid a third person accusation of her manager.

Why Bajwa did not reply apologetically himself is not known. However, it was a time when those at the centre of the BPS would quite often fail to reply to concerns. (We have reported this norm of contempt from the centre in previous postings, often about very serious matters.) One manifestation of secrecy at the centre of the BPS has been a casual indifference to membership inquiries and concerns.

As is often the case with scenarios like this, when trying to communicate with the powers that be in the BPS, we enter an Alice in Wonderland World, while being asked to take those leading the Society seriously. Credulousness is demanded in the face of the incredible material facts. The BPS until proved otherwise, is a self-deceiving and secretive bureaucracy. For now, with its governance unreformed and a cabal culture normalised, it is an organisation without a memory (cf. Donaldson, 2002).

This much we can say

In light of the above we can see a pattern of a rhetoric of history being taken seriously, alongside evasiveness in practice about any meaningful historical reflection. The HoPC has great rhetorical value for the BPS: just go onto the website and see it there as a key advertising feature for an alleged learned body. For now, like with much that is claimed from the cabal, this is bullshit.

The casual use of censorship by the cabal and the biddable role of The Psychologist reflect a disdain for academic freedom. Even if the HoPC were to be rescued from its near oblivion, what chance it developing and defending a critical, rather than a sycophantic and celebratory, history of the BPS? Will the SMT bother to finance such an academically independent Centre? Alternatively, will they continue to let it wither on the vine, while retaining its vacuous image cynically on the website? The BPS has huge reserves, some of which are being squandered on a poorly justified ‘Change Programme’ to the tune of (at least) £6 million. ‘Spare some change for the HoPC, governor?’ ‘Sorry mate, busy spending it elsewhere.’

As for the Eysenck review, we are all curious to watch its development. Though never given a Fellowship of the BPS, his leading role in British psychology has to be acknowledged by friend and foe alike. After his death in 1997 an annual memorial lecture was set up in his honour in the Society. It sits proudly in celebration of the British eugenic tradition, alongside the Spearman Medal.

Some have already queried the point of mulling over Eysenck’s flawed work (maybe like digging up Cromwell’s body and chopping off his head during The Restoration in 1661) (Hall and Scarnà, 2019). However, if the BPS cannot pronounce on the integrity of Eysenck’s work then who else can? Maybe the review of these alleged sins of the past is a convenient diversion from those of the present. Either way, his own words might be an ethical guide:

I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he (sic) sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts. (Eysenck, 1990: 229)

The KCL reviewers were unimpressed by the facts he favoured. At the time of writing, fourteen retractions from journals have been recorded of Eysenck’s work. His critics trace problems going back to just after the Second World War. Their vulnerability lies in Eysenck’s eugenic thought, repeating the problem of his mentor. A contradiction of his approach was that he was both a methodological behaviourist and a biogenetic ideologue. His cancer work reflected that: heredity accounted for causes but the treatment of patients warranted CBT (behaviour therapy was its ‘first wave’.)

How the BPS review of Eysenck’s work exactly came into being, and who was chosen to be part of it, remains a mystery. As with much that goes on in the BPS we will never know. Groups emerge by grace and favour and a tap on the shoulder to candidates who will not rock the boat. Given the preference of the CEO and the illegitimate President to look forwards, Pollyanna fashion, and never backwards, the prospect of an honest history of the BPS in the recent past looks slim indeed (https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-35/january-2022/president-and-chief-executive).

Conclusion

The Burt and Eysenck examples show that historical clarifications, guided by Popperian criteria of scientific correction and probity, are not easy, but they are at least possible in an open democratic society. Sadly it looks as though currently the BPS does not have the intellectual culture to deliver the same expectation. Toxic managerialism and a lack of independent trustees (a structural fault traceable to 1965 and not rectified when the opportunity arose in 1988) have suppressed, rather than celebrated, the obligation to learn from experience in the public interest.

Anti-intellectualism, censorship, secrecy, PR, spin, impression management and rigged expulsions and elections, for now dominate the decision-making priorities of the leadership. As a consequence, bullshit constantly displaces implausible claims of transparency. Maybe we will have to look outside for an authentic historical reckoning. It may have to come from the courts and investigative journalists.

References

Burt, C.L. (1946) Intelligence and fertility. Eugenics Society Occasional Papers Number 2.

Burt, C.L. (1909) Experimental tests of general intelligence. British Journal of Psychology III 94-107.

Chamarette, M. (2019) Psychologists as public intellectuals: Cyril Burt at the BBC in the 1930s. Stories of Psychology Meeting organised by the History of Psychology Centre, November 7th.

Donaldson, L. (2002) An organisation with a memory. Clinical Medicine 2, 5, 524-7.

Eysenck, H.J. (1990) Rebel With A Cause London: Transaction

Hall, J. and Scarnà, A. (2019) An aggravating controversialist or ahead of his time? The Psychologist November, 32, 5.

Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979) Cyril Burt: Psychologist Icatha NY: Cornell University Press.

Hearnshaw, L.S. (1964) A Short History of British Psychology London: Methuen.

Pelosi, A.J. (2019). Personality and fatal diseases: revisiting a scientific scandal. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(4), 421-439

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-284.

Pilgrim, D. and Patel, N. (2015) The emergence of clinical psychology in the British post-war context. In J. Hall, D. Pilgrim and G. Turpin (eds) Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives HoPC Monograph No 2. Leicester: BPS.

Mackintosh, N.J. (ed) (1995) Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

* The Institute of Psychiatry, where Eysenck worked, was subsumed into KCL in 1997, hence that College of the University of London now being the academic ‘owner’ of his legacy.

Addendum

This post has prompted email feedback from colleagues. I am grateful to them for the following minor corrections and their invited clarifications.

1. The archivist who resigned in 2021 was now, I understand, full-time not part-time. She left behind an assistant to work on her own in Leicester. To date the review group, set up three years ago to reinvigorate the HoPC still has had no formal commitment from the CEO or SMT to support an academic director, who would be guaranteed full autonomy in their role. To my knowledge no meeting has taken place in the interim between the Chair of the review group and the CEO. I understand from anonymous sources that a consultant may be imported temporarily to advise on archiving. However, I have been unable to confirm this possibility and its source, if any, in SMT decision making. (A theme on this blog is the arcane nature of decision making at the centre of the BPS.) We would of course welcome a full and clear update from the CEO or the ‘Director of Knowledge and Insight’ about their intentions about the ailing HoPC. I would put a very low probability of this happening, as the SMT have opted for a wilful and consistent policy of non-engagement with us. I have also sent a letter about my concerns about the HoPC to the ‘Director of Knowledge and Insight’ (copying to the CEO). Based on past trends, there is little likelihood that I will receive a reply. Currently I am Honorary General Secretary of the History and Philosophy Section but I sent my letter in a personal capacity. The Section will of course be taking all of the above matters seriously in relation to the vulnerability of the HoPC now and its future prospects.

2. The Spearman Medal has now been abandoned by the BPS in the face of criticisms about its eugenic roots. It was awarded finally in 2020 but, note, was only set up in 1962. The latter date reflects a mainstream commitment to the eugenic tradition in British psychology well after the Second World War. The British Eugenics Society changed its name to the Galton Institute in 1989. This euphemistic naming and the current rationale for the Institute can be found on its website. In 2020 University College London, removed the names of Galton and Pearson from its rooms and buildings.

Ethics

BPS Ethics Procedures – fit for purpose – 2?

18th Jan 202112th May 2021 AdminBPSWatch

As a follow-up to my last post I have, at last, been given the name of the current Chair of the BPS Ethics committee. Just for the record, I contacted the BPS Office on 11 December 2020 and got a reply on 5 January 2021. Even allowing for COVID-19, working from home and the “festive” season, this seems an excessive delay. Additionally, I can only contact the Chair via the BPS Office. Below is a copy of the email that I asked to be forwarded:

Dear Dr Paxton,
I am contacting you in your capacity as Chair of the BPS Ethics Committee.
You will be familiar with the controversy surrounding the late Hans Eysenck’s research with Roland Grossarth-Maticek, including the letter to The Psychologist (September 2019) from Colman et al. requesting the the BPS formally investigate. The response from the Society (via an unnamed and unattributable source) effectively bypassed this by handing the responsibility on to his then employers.
That has now been done and a report published by Kings College (freely available and in the public domain). They concluded that at least 26 studies were “…unsafe…” and contacted the relevant journal editors to inform them of this.
Where does the BPS stand now? A senior and high-profile psychologist of international repute has had parts of his work formally and thoroughly investigated by an independent group and this work has been found unsafe. Surely the BPS owes its members and the wider public some sort of response?
The BPS is ostensibly dedicated
to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied and especially to promote the efficiency and usefulness of Members of the Society by setting up a high standard of professional education and knowledge.and to maintain a Code of Ethics and Conduct for the guidance of Members and to compel the observance of strict rules of professional conduct as a condition of membership;
At a time when science as whole is under such close scrutiny (if not threat) surely we cannot ignore this, hope that it will go away or hide behind some anodyne statement?
I would be grateful if you let me (or, even better, the membership) know what the BPS is planning to do.
Best wishes,
Peter Harvey AFBPsS (former Chair DCP).

As of today (18 January 2012) I have had no response, no acknowledgement, nothing. The title of this post remains apposite.

Peter Harvey.

Ethics

The BPS Ethics procedures – fit for purpose?

12th Dec 202012th May 2021 AdminBPSWatch

A reaction to Ashley Conway’s post from Peter Harvey:

It is an understatement to say that Hans Eysenck was no stranger to controversy. However, two papers published in 2019 highlighted serious concerns about possible ethical issues – specifically relating to his work with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. In his editorial, David Marks includes an open letter to the CEO requesting that the BPS conducts “…a thorough investigation of the facts together with retraction or correction of 61 papers.”. His plea was based on a well-referenced and highly detailed paper published in that same journal by Anthony Pelosi who concluded:

There is a complicated and multi-layered scandal surrounding Hans Eysenck’s work on fatal diseases. In my opinion, it is one of the worst scandals in the history of science, not least because the Heidelberg results have sat in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly three decades while dreadful and detailed allegations have remained uninvestigated. In the meantime, these widely cited studies have had direct and indirect influences on some people’s smoking and lifestyle choices. This means that for an unknown and unknowable number of individual men and women, this programme of research has been a contributory factor in premature illness and death. How can members of the public and their policymakers turn to science for help with difficult decisions when even this most extreme of scientific disputes cannot be resolved?

In a letter to The Psychologist (September 2019), Colman, Marks, McVittie & Smith noted that the BPS is “…uniquely placed to conduct a formal investigation and audit, and we call on them to act as soon as possible.”.

In an anonymous response (i.e. headed ‘Society reply’), after one paragraph describing the Society’s purpose (hopefully already known to its members) and another quoting from the Code of Ethics and Conduct, the third paragraph states:

However, the conduct of research lies with the academic institution which oversees the work carried out by its academics and we welcomed the investigation into this research carried out by King’s College, London.

In May 2019, Kings College reported on its internal enquiry into publications authored by Professor Hans Eysenck with Professor Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. Apart from the laudable speed and thoroughness with which this was both commissioned and made available in the public domain, its conclusions are of considerable significance:

The Committee shared the concerns made by the critics of this body of work. We have come to the conclusion that we consider the published results of studies that included the results of the analyses of data collected as part of the intervention or observational studies to be unsafe and that the editors of the journals should be informed of our decision. We have highlighted 26 papers (Appendix 1) which were published in 11 journals which are still in existence (see list of journals and editors Appendix 2). We recommend that the Principal write to the editors of these journals to inform them that, based on our enquiry, we consider the results and conclusions of these studies are unsafe.

The Director of Research Governance, Ethics and Integrity at King’s has written to the academic lead for research misconduct at the University of Heidelberg to confirm Professor Ronald Grossarth-Maticek’s affiliation with them at the time in question, and to clarify their procedure for investigating allegations of research misconduct.

So whilst the BPS welcomed the Kings investigation, its serious conclusions and actions seem to have gone unremarked. In a much more detailed analysis of the history of this scandal and the BPS’s lack of action Craig et al., (2020) state, quite unequivocally:

The Eysenck case is a stain on the record of psychology and on science itself.

So what has the BPS done? As far as I can ascertain – absolutely nothing. I have searched the 2019/2020 archive of The Psychologist and there is no record of any statement by the BPS (I am happy to be pointed in the right direction should I have missed it). I am trying to contact the Chair of the BPS Ethics Committee – a task made harder as their name and contact details are absent from the BPS website (I will post as soon as I get a response). However, in attempting to find out about about the complaints procedure I came across the following statement:

In order for the Society to be able to take any action you must provide the evidence required, as outlined in the procedures of the Member Conduct Rules. The Society will then decide if the member has breached the rules, and decide on the appropriate action. The Society does not have a function to investigate complaints against its members, but can take action when the Society has evidence of the outcomes from any appropriate third party investigation.

I was shocked to read that the Society does not have an investigatory function. It is the one body that has access to the expertise necessary to evaluate the validity of an ethical breach. In my opinion it is a serious dereliction of duty to outsource the investigatory process. In this case, that has been done and the review raises serious questions about the integrity of widely-cited research by a very senior psychologist. So why hasn’t the BPS, quickly and authoritatively, responded? Where is the acknowledgement of the Kings Report (initially ‘welcomed’ by the BPS). They have done their duty – why not the BPS? Surely the BPS shouldn’t shirk its responsibilities in this way.

'False Memory Syndrome', Ethics

Does the BPS Care About Ethical Standards Enough to Enforce Them?

5th Dec 202012th May 2021 AdminBPSWatch

Ashley Conway writes:

Following on from my earlier post –

The Charity Commission says that the BPS must follow the demands of the Royal Charter and Statutes and Rules of the Society. The Royal Charter states: that the Society should “…maintain a Code of Ethics and Conduct for the guidance of Members and to compel the observance of strict rules of professional conduct as a condition of membership.”.

I believe that this is an area where the BPS completely fails to fulfil its obligations.

About a third of BPS members are also registered with the HCPC, and the BPS is happy to pass on responsibility for dealing with rule violations by them. But what of the other two thirds of the membership? The answer seems to be that the BPS does everything it can to avoid taking any responsibility, usually passing the buck to the member’s employer. But what if they have no employer (i.e. are self-employed?) or their employer uses Non Disclosure Agreements to avoid scandal, as some universities do (see here and here)? This could mean that ethics violations go unreported and can be repeated by a guilty individual, possibly causing great harm to vulnerable people.

I cannot find anything in either the Charity Commission requirements or the BPS Charter that says that this responsibility about ethical standards can be farmed out to third parties or ignored.

What follows is a specific example of the problem. Elizabeth Loftus is an Honorary Life Fellow of the BPS who enjoys a high profile internationally, despite considerable controversy. This, from The Psychologist (July 2011, 24, 490-503):

Star power arrived at the 2011 Annual Conference this year in the form of Elizabeth Loftus (University of California, Irvine), the doyenne of false memory research who’s had the mixed fortune of attracting death threats and the highest academic accolades.

However, there are, I would suggest, serious ethical questions to be raised about her conduct.

As far back as 1995, complaints were made to the American Psychological Association (APA) against Loftus by Lynn Crook and Jennifer Hoult. Both have complained that Loftus grossly mis-represented their life stories (see here and here). Loftus resigned from the APA just before the complaints process was about to be initiated. There were allegations that she had been tipped off about it, because for both the APA and Loftus, resignation was the best way to avoid the investigation and unwanted publicity.
She has come in for strong criticism from judges for the nature of her expert witness testimony. In the case referenced in her TED talk described below, referring to Loftus’s actions in question (Loftus falsely claiming to be a clinician’s supervisor to gain personal information for her use), the court stated “In our view, intentionally misrepresenting oneself as an associate or colleague of a mental health professional who has a close personal relationship with the person about whom one is seeking information would be a particularly serious type of misrepresentation …” . In another case Judge John Fedora dismissed Loftus’s opinion as “Having been rendered after an uncritical review of an absurdly incomplete record carefully dissected to include only pieces of information tending to support Appellant’s repressed memory theory …”.
In her TED talk there is further evidence of possible ethical breaches. (i) She reveals the name of a victim of abuse who was promised anonymity, when her very personal story was used as a case study by respectable psychologists; (ii) Loftus states: “She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory” without informing us that actually the person in question had made revelations of abuse as a little girl, which had videotape and verbatim documentation. So the accusations were based on much more than an adult’s “repressed memory”, and the truth goes very much against the false memory hypothesis that Loftus is seen to support. (iii) Loftus states: “I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy.”. But the litigation issue was not about speaking out on matters of great public controversy. The real reason that she was being sued was for “… for defamation and invasion of privacy…” as she herself reveals in this same talk.
There have been important questions raised over the validity of the data in her famous “lost in the mall” study.

I have raised this issue of Loftus’s behaviour on a number of occasions with the BPS. This year I wrote to the CEO about this and related issues three times. I received no reply, which I now know has been the experience of many others. I did, finally, get something back from a very senior member of the BPS who said “In relation to Prof Loftus, election as an Honorary Life Fellow confers membership of the Society so the member conduct rules would apply, as they do to all members. I would draw your attention to the fact that, since the Society is no longer a regulator, it normally requires ‘allegations to first have been determined using other appropriate procedures’ such as by the appropriate regulatory body.’” I genuinely do not understand this response. What would be an appropriate procedure and who would be an appropriate body for Loftus? The complainants above did not find one. Where in the Charity Commissions rules for the Society, or the Royal Charter, does it say that the Society is no longer a regulator? If this really means that the BPS takes no responsibility for enforcing its Conduct Rules or Code of Ethics, what is the point in having them?

And BPS – how does this fit in with the requirement to “… compel the observance of strict rules of professional conduct as a condition of membership.”?

I think that the BPS owes us all an answer to this question.

Category: Ethics

On the ghostly contributions of Carroll, Orwell, Idle and Pirandello