(Un)ethical consequences: How psychology's cold war defense of military personnel led to enhanced interrogation techniques in the war on terror.

Abstract

Cold War interrogation scholarship generated a research literature that included many prominent 20th century psychologists. The return of Korean War prisoners, many of whom had confessed falsely or otherwise collaborated with the enemy during confinement, amplified the intense anti-Communist fears of the Cold War. These events prompted substantial military and other government responses. Many scholars in psychology committed their time, scholarship, and expertise to the protection of United States military personnel in the event of capture. In this article, we reconstruct some of these efforts, connecting them to psychologists' involvement in the more recent War on Terror. We argue that a critical historical awareness of these connections can help contemporary students, scholars, and practitioners of psychology to develop greater critical reflexivity about their work and its impact on society and to avoid unethical research and the potential misappropriation of psychological science to unethical ends. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).