American Psychological Association Elects Activist President

The American Psychological Association, psychology’s foremost professional organisation, is no stranger to Left-wing activism.

Back in 2019, the APA issued its first ever “guidelines for practice with men and boys”, which claimed that something called “traditional masculinity ideology” is “psychologically harmful”. What exactly did they mean? According to the APA, “traditional masculinity ideology” includes things like “achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness and adventure”. (Being male and liking adventure? That’s harmful, apparently.)

Then in 2021, the APA apologised for its “longstanding contributions to systemic racism”, announcing that it was “profoundly sorry” and “should have apologised to people of colour before today”. What exactly did the APA do that was so bad? One of the examples given is the development of supposedly biased intelligence tests. (Ironically, intelligence testing is one of the few areas of psychology that has actually survived the replication crisis.)

Then in 2022, the APA adopted a “racial equity action plan”. This included redoubling efforts to “ensure equity, diversity and inclusion” and to “attract, retain and advance racially and ethnically diverse people”. (It was a call, in other words, for fewer white men.)

Fast forward to October 5th this year, and the APA announced that Candice Hargons had been elected as its newest President. What does this have to do with Left-wing activism?

Well, Hargons has a rather unusual “liberation-oriented approach” in which the role of the psychologist is to help free oppressed groups from the socio-political structures that are oppressing them. “My vision,” she noted in a statement, “is to bring psychologists together… with a liberation and love ethic.” Hargons reportedly rejects “the positivist paradigm’s assertion of objectivity”, believing that “true integrity means being accountably subjective”.

And her published work does raise an eyebrow. Hargons’s most-cited paper is ‘Critical consciousness of anti-Black racism: A practical model to prevent and resist racial trauma‘, while her second most-cited paper is ‘Black Lives Matter: A Call to Action for Counselling Psychology Leaders‘.

But it gets weirder. In 2015, she co-authored ‘“Make Sure You Wash Your Monkey”: Multigenerational Vaginal Hygiene Messages from Black Women‘. In 2022, she was lead author on ‘“White people stress me out all the time”: Black students define racial trauma‘. And earlier this year, she co-authored ‘Sexual healing (and harming): The radical transformative potentialities of nonbinary Black womxn’s sexuality‘. If nothing else, Hargons knows how to get her readers’ attention.

Understandably, not everyone welcomed the news of Hargons’s ascendance. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggested that it reflects a long-standing Left-wing bias within the APA. Another psychologist, J.D. Haltigan, was a little less diplomatic, asking: “Are you insane?”

It’s one thing for a discipline to have a handful of activists while most scholars get on with serious work. It’s quite another for the activists to be running the show. At a time when social media and AI are creating unprecedented challenges, rigorous psychology is needed more than ever. The APA, unfortunately, has completely lost the plot.