First, Do Harm: The Dark Side of Psychology's Troubled Legacy
Welcome to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about the shadow side of psychology, its complicated and sometimes disturbing history. Psychology as a field often presents itself as a neutral science that is objective, data driven, and concerned only with helping people live better lives. And a lot of the time, that's true.
Leslie Poston:But like any tool shaped by human hands, psychology has also been misused. It has served power as much as it has served people. Today's episode isn't about tearing down the entire discipline that I love so much. It's about facing the parts of its past that are hard to look at. Because only by doing that can we build something more ethical, inclusive, and just.
Leslie Poston:We're tracing the roots of modern psychology back through some uncomfortable territory: colonialism, racism, sexism, eugenics, and the role psychology played in upholding oppressive systems. We'll also look at the present because history doesn't stay in the past if we haven't reckoned with it. The history of psychology isn't a simple march of progress. It's a messy, contradictory story with moments of genuine insight alongside these terrible abuses of power. By examining this history critically, we can better understand the field's present challenges and imagine more humane futures for psychological practice.
Leslie Poston:Before we get too far into the episode today, I want to give a shout out and a thank you to Doctor. Conjeet Page and Doctor. Tunisia Singleton, both women who were absolute inspirations to me during my educational journey and who pointed me towards this history that we need to reckon with. Without their influence, I don't think I would have spent as much time thinking about the ways that psychology can be better. Let's start at the roots.
Leslie Poston:Before psychology became a formal science, it was entangled with some deeply flawed ideas posing as objective truth. Think phrenology, the so called science of skull shapes, and physiognomy, which claimed you could read someone's character or intelligence from their facial features. These weren't just weird Victorian curiosities. They were tools used to justify racial hierarchies, colonial conquest, and slavery. Franz Josef Gall's phrenology wasn't just neutral curiosity.
Leslie Poston:It gave people in power a pseudoscientific rationale for why they deserved to dominate others. Gall claimed that you could determine a person's moral and intellectual characteristics by examining the bumps on their skull. This pseudoscience quickly became a way to prove the supposed superiority of European men over both women and non white populations. These ideas were exported and weaponized. In colonial South Africa, Phrenology was used to classify and control indigenous populations, backed by the veneer of Western science.
Leslie Poston:Colonial authorities collected and measured Indigenous skulls, using those measurements to justify policies of segregation and exploitation. And this wasn't fringe. This was mainstream at the time. And then came Eugenics. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, believed that selective breeding could improve the human race.
Leslie Poston:He coined the term eugenics in 1883, launching a movement that would have devastating consequences. Galton's work laid the groundwork for policies like forced sterilization and immigration bans, and not just in Nazi Germany, but in The United States, Canada, and beyond. In The United States alone, over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized under eugenic laws, with the last such sterilization occurring as recently as 1981 in Oregon. These victims were disproportionately poor, Black, Indigenous, disabled, or otherwise marginalized. Psychology's earliest practitioners often supported and legitimized these practices.
Leslie Poston:Eugenics was psychology's first massive failure to protect the people it studied. It confused social bias for biological truth. It prioritized an abstract vision of human improvement over the basic rights and dignity of actual humans, and it did so with the full authority of scientific expertise. Even though we now reject these pseudosciences, echoes of them still ripple through psychological research and institutions. The belief that intelligence is largely heritable and fixed, that certain traits cluster by race or by gender, that human value can be quantified or ranked.
Leslie Poston:These notions persist in more subtle forms. Acknowledging this history isn't about guilt, it's about honesty and creating better practices moving forward. IQ tests may seem like a neutral measurement tool today, but they have a deeply political origin story. In the early twentieth century, intelligence testing was less about understanding cognition and more about sorting people into hierarchies determining who should be allowed to immigrate, who should be allowed to reproduce, who should be institutionalized. Consider Alfred Binet, who developed the first widely used intelligence test in 1905.
Leslie Poston:His intention was actually quite humane, to identify children who needed educational support. But when his test crossed the Atlantic, it was transformed into something far more insidious. American psychologists like Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, Robert Yerkes adapted Binet's work to support their eugenic beliefs. The U. S.
Leslie Poston:Military embraced intelligence testing during World War I, administering tests to over 1,750,000 men. But what got measured and how reflected cultural and racial biases much more than any true notion of intelligence. These tests required familiarity with American culture and the English language, automatically disadvantaging immigrants and those with limited educational opportunities. The results were predictable but presented as scientific fact. Southern and Eastern European immigrants scored lower than Northern Europeans, Black Americans scored lower than White Americans.
Leslie Poston:And these scores helped determine who got promoted or who even went to the front lines. And these bled into civilian policy. IQ tests were used to justify eugenics based laws and discriminatory immigration quotas. The Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration from Southern And Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, was explicitly supported by psychological evidence of the supposed inferior intelligence of these groups. Psychologists testified before Congress, lending scientific credibility to deeply racist policies.
Leslie Poston:Researchers like Guthrie have documented how these tests often reflected what white, upper class Americans valued and penalized those from other backgrounds. Questions required knowledge of tennis, polo at Yale, hardly universal cultural reference points. The message was clear: intelligence wasn't something to nurture it was something to control and use to justify existing social hierarchies. We can see this specter raising its head again today. And this control didn't stop at borders or institutions.
Leslie Poston:It found its way into schools, employment, and even prisons. The myth of the fixed innate IQ became a convenient way to uphold social hierarchies and still influences educational policy and psychological practice today, albeit in more subtle ways than in the past. And even now, we see standardized testing used to sort children into educational tracks that often reinforce existing advantages and disadvantages. The language of aptitude and ability can mask the social forces that shape who succeeds and who struggles. Intelligence testing isn't inherently harmful, but its history reminds us to ask critical questions about who defines intelligence and to what end.
Leslie Poston:If you were a woman in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, psychology wasn't necessarily on your side. Many early psychological theories treated women as emotionally unstable, intellectually inferior, or biologically destined for domesticity. Hysteria, a now debunked diagnosis, was essentially a catchall label for women who resisted those roles. The field often reinforced patriarchal views rather than challenging them. Women who sought education, independence, or political rights were frequently pathologized.
Leslie Poston:Their resistance to oppressive social norms was framed as mental illness rather than legitimate discontent. Take Sigmund Freud, arguably the most influential figure in early psychology. While his work contained revolutionary insights, his views on women were deeply problematic. He described women as having less sense of justice than men and famously wondered, what does a woman want as if female desire was fundamentally incomprehensible? His theory of penis envy suggested that women's psychological development was essentially a response to their anatomical inferiority.
Leslie Poston:G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, argued that higher education could damage women's reproductive systems. Edward Clark, a Harvard professor, claimed that women's brains couldn't handle the strain of college education without diverting energy from their reproductive organs resulting in infertility or nervous collapse. We laugh now, but these weren't fringe ideas. They formed the mainstream of psychological thought about gender for decades, and they had severe consequences.
Leslie Poston:They were used to exclude women from higher education, professional careers, and political participation. They shaped how women's mental health was understood and treated. And when it came to LGBTQ plus identities, the story was even worse. Until disturbingly recently, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder. Psychological treatments included conversion therapy, aversion therapy, and institutionalization.
Leslie Poston:Many queer people suffered tremendously under these supposedly therapeutic interventions. Homosexuality wasn't removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, until 1973, and even then, only after sustained activist pressure. Gender identity variants remained pathologized as gender identity disorder until 2013, when it was finally reclassified as gender dysphoria Still a diagnosis, but with a shifted emphasis from identity to distress. Even into the 2000s, studies often treated sexual and gender differences as deficits, as things to be corrected or pathologized, rather than valid human variations. Herrick's work shows how deeply ingrained those assumptions were in mainstream research and how they contributed to stigma and discrimination against LGBTQ plus individuals.
Leslie Poston:Feminist psychologists like Janet Shibley Hyde and Sandra Bem started pushing back, challenging the idea that male experience was the default and everything else a deviation. Carol Gilligan criticized how theories of moral development were based entirely on studies of boys and men, then applied to everyone. But the path to inclusive, affirming psychological research has been slow, and frankly, we're still on it. Many biases remain embedded in how we conceptualize mental health and well-being. The history of psychology's engagement with gender and sexuality reminds us how scientific authority can be used to naturalize social prejudices and how important it is to question whose perspectives shape psychological knowledge.
Leslie Poston:It's not just individual psychologists who went astray. Institutions failed, too. The American Psychological Association, the largest professional body in the field, has a long history of complicity. They were slow to denounce segregation, slow to address racism, and in some cases they outright supported discriminatory policies. In 2021, the APA finally issued a formal apology for promoting racism through their research, practices, and policies.
Leslie Poston:It acknowledged the organization's role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in The United States. This was a significant moment but long overdue, and it only came after years of evidence that psychologists had not only failed to stop harm but had actively participated in it. The APA's apology specifically mentioned the organization's failure to speak out against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, its support for segregated education prior to Brown v. Board of Education, and its silence in the face of racist immigration policies. Perhaps the most chilling example of institutional failure was psychologists helping design and implement torture programs during the post nineeleven War on Terror.
Leslie Poston:Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen designed the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, drawing on psychological research about learned helplessness to create techniques designed to break detainees. These were rogue individuals they were operating with institutional knowledge and protection. The APA's ethics guidelines proved insufficient to prevent this profound violation of human rights. A twenty fifteen independent investigation found that APA officials had collaborated with the Department of Defense to ensure that the association's ethics policies would not constrain interrogation activities. The organization had effectively colluded with the government to enable psychologists' participation in torture.
Leslie Poston:These are breaches of ethics so massive, they force us to ask, Who is psychology really serving? The people or the systems in power? How do we ensure that psychological knowledge is used to heal rather than harm? These questions remain urgent today as psychology continues to evolve and intersect with politics, technology, and culture. The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous psychological studies ever conducted, raised serious ethical concerns about the treatment of participants.
Leslie Poston:The Tuskegee Syphilis study, while primarily medical, involved psychological manipulation to keep participants enrolled without informed consent. These institutional failures matter because they shape what kinds of psychological knowledge get produced, valued and applied. They influence who enters the field and whose perspectives guide its development. Addressing them requires not just better ethics guidelines, but fundamental changes in how psychological institutions operate and who they serve. Psychology doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Leslie Poston:It's shaped by the culture it grows in, and that culture has often been patriarchal, white dominated, and capitalist. That shows up in how we define wellness and illness, how we conceptualize normal behavior, and what we consider worthy of study. Take depression in women. Instead of asking what societal structures might be contributing, such as poverty, discrimination, or violence, psychologists have historically medicalized the symptoms. The problem wasn't the system it was the woman's brain chemistry.
Leslie Poston:This approach individualizes suffering rather than recognizing the social origins. Women are diagnosed with depression at roughly twice the rate of men. Is this because women are inherently more prone to depression, or is it because women face specific social stressors like gender based violence, wage discrimination, and the double burden of paid and unpaid labor? Or perhaps it's because men's depression often manifests in ways that don't fit diagnostic criteria like anger or substance abuse. These questions challenge us to think about how gender norms shape both experience and diagnosis.
Leslie Poston:And in the workplace, psychology was enlisted to make people more productive, not necessarily more fulfilled. The rise of industrial organizational psychology coincided with a shift towards optimizing workers for efficiency, often at the expense of well-being. Workers who couldn't adapt to increasingly demanding conditions are deemed the problem, not the conditions themselves. Frederick Winslow Taylor's Scientific Management Principles, developed in the early twentieth century, used psychological techniques to maximize worker productivity. Time and motion studies broke jobs down into their smallest components, establishing one best way to perform each task.
Leslie Poston:Workers became interchangeable parts in the machine of production. Their subjective experiences became largely irrelevant. Modern management psychology often continues this tradition in more subtle ways. Corporate wellness programs focus on making employees more resilient to stress rather than reducing workplace stressors. Mindfulness is co opted as a way to help workers tolerate toxic conditions rather than change them.
Leslie Poston:The language of psychology, words like grit, resilience, emotional intelligence, becomes a way to shift responsibility from organizations to individuals. Consumer psychology has been used to manipulate, not just understand, behavior. Marketing tactics based on psychological principles deliberately exploit cognitive biases to increase consumption, regardless of whether that consumption benefits the individual or society. Advertisers use psychological research on attachment, identity, and social belonging to create artificial needs and insecurities that can only be resolved through purchasing products. Feminist psychologists and postmodern critics have long called this out.
Leslie Poston:They argue that the field's focus on the individual, on mindset, on personal resilience lets institutions off the hook. If you're burned out, it's your lack of grit, not the toxic work environment. If you're struggling financially, it's your poor choices, not systemic inequality. Psychologist David Smale coined the term magical volunteerism to describe the false belief that people can overcome their problems through sheer force of will, regardless of their social circumstances. This belief, he argued, serves those in power by obscuring the real social causes of distress and placing responsibility on those with the least resources to change their situations.
Leslie Poston:We need a psychology that looks at the system, not just the self. One that recognizes how social conditions shape our minds and behavior and that isn't afraid to advocate for structural changes when necessary, and this means challenging the very foundations of how we think about mental health and well-being. A truly liberatory psychology would acknowledge that many so called mental health problems are actually completely sane responses to insane social conditions. It would recognize that psychological healing often requires social justice, and it would use its authority to advocate for the social changes needed to support genuine well-being for all people, not just those who can afford therapy or who fit within narrow definitions of normal or able. The past isn't the past.
Leslie Poston:Some of the same dangerous ideas are alive and well, just dressed in new language. Eugenics, for example, has resurfaced in the pseudo debate over autism, disability, and prenatal screening. Figures like R. F. K.
Leslie Poston:Jr. Have floated ideas that harken back to the worst chapters of eugenics thinking, framing neurodivergence as a public threat rather than a natural human variation. In fact, just this month in 2025, Kennedy suggested creating a national registry of autistic children, eerily reminiscent of historical registries used to target marginalized groups in the past. While presented as a public health measure, such proposals rest on the assumption that certain types of people are problems to be tracked, managed, and ultimately eliminated the core logic of eugenics. Similarly, prenatal testing for conditions like Down syndrome has led to extremely high termination rates when the condition is detected and disclosed.
Leslie Poston:While individual reproductive choices should be respected, the aggregate pattern raises some troubling questions about which lives we deem worth living and which difference society is willing to accommodate. These approaches often prioritize the comfort of neurotypical people over the autonomy and well-being of neurodivergent individuals. They frame difference as deficit rather than diversity and seek to eliminate rather than to accommodate. Autism treatment, like applied behavior analysis, or ABA, have been legitimately criticized by many autistic self advocates as attempting to train autistic people to appear neurotypical rather than helping them thrive just as they are. There's also the pharmaceutical industry's grip on diagnosis and treatment.
Leslie Poston:Conditions are often framed to fit what drugs can fix, not necessarily what people need. Diagnostic categories shift with market trends, and financial conflicts of interest permeate research funding and professional education. Consider how the Psychiatry's Diagnostic Bible expanded the criteria for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, in ways that dramatically increased the pool of potential patients for stimulant medications, or how antidepressant trials with negative results often go unpublished, creating a distorted picture of these drones' effectiveness. Pharmaceutical companies routinely fund educational events for psychologists and psychiatrists, subtly shaping how practitioners think about mental health conditions and their treatment. Digital psychology presents new ethical challenges.
Leslie Poston:Behavioral economics and nudge theory have been used to manipulate choices in everything from health care to social media. Designers use psychological tricks to keep us scrolling, not because it's good for us, but because it's good for business. Our attention and our behavior are monetized, often without our informed consent. Social media platforms employ armies of psychologists and behavioral scientists to maximize engagement, a euphemism for addiction. Features like infinite scroll, variable reward schedules, like those used in slot machines, and social validation feedback loops are deliberately designed to override our self regulation.
Leslie Poston:These are the same psychological principles once used to design cigarettes for maximum addictiveness now applied to our digital lives. And in an era of big data and algorithmic decision making, psychological profiling can reinforce existing inequalities. Predictive models trained on biased data perpetuate those biases, whether in hiring, criminal justice, or health care. The veneer of scientific objectivity masks deeply subjective value judgments about what constitutes normal or desirable behavior. Facial recognition systems claim to detect emotions or even criminal tendencies, resurrecting the pseudoscientific physiognomy of the nineteenth century in digital form.
Leslie Poston:HR analytics systems purport to identify ideal employees based on psychological profiles derived from current high performers, potentially reinforcing existing patterns of discrimination. These technologies operationalize psychological concepts without adequate scientific validation or ethical oversight. And that's not neutral. That's psychology in the service of profit and control. And it requires vigilance from both practitioners and the public to recognize and resist.
Leslie Poston:We need to ask who benefits from particular psychological technologies and whose values they encode. We need to challenge the assumption that more behavioral data and more sophisticated models automatically lead to better outcomes for actual humans. So where do we go from here? There are psychologists pushing for change: feminist psychologists, critical race theorists, Indigenous scholars, and disability activists. They're working to reshape the field from the inside, challenging its assumptions and expanding its perspectives.
Leslie Poston:We're seeing more honest reckoning with the past. The APA apology was one step. So was the rising popularity of decolonial, community based, and liberatory psychological frameworks. These approaches center the experiences of marginalized communities and recognize the role of systemic oppression in mental health. Indigenous psychologists like Joseph Gaughan and Eduardo Doran have developed healing approaches that integrate traditional cultural practices with contemporary psychological knowledge.
Leslie Poston:Black psychologists like Jennifer Eberhardt and Beverly Daniel Tatum have illuminated how racism shapes cognition and development, challenging psychology to address these realities. Feminist psychologists like Laura Brown have reimagined trauma treatment to account for the specific impacts of gender based violence and discrimination. These perspectives aren't just adding diversity to psychology they're fundamentally transforming how we understand the mind, behavior, and healing. They're shifting from individualistic models toward more relational, contextual understandings of the human experience. Pickron talks about liberating history, not erasing it, but using it to free psychology from the patterns that limit it.
Leslie Poston:By understanding how psychological concepts emerged from specific cultural and political contexts, we can question their universality and imagine alternatives. We can ask what a psychology not steeped in Western individualism, capitalism, and colonialism might look like. Psychologists of color and others on the margins are helping move the field towards something that's more ethical, more communal, and more responsive to lived experience. They're developing culturally responsive therapies that honor diverse healing traditions rather than imposing Western models. They're challenging the field to acknowledge how social forces shape mental health and to advocate for justice as a component of well-being.
Leslie Poston:And this isn't just about new ideas. It's about new values. It's about prioritizing justice alongside well-being, recognizing the political dimensions of psychological practice, and ensuring that psychology serves all people, not just those with power. It's about psychologists embracing their responsibility as social actors whose work has real consequences for how we understand ourselves and each other. It's also about humility, acknowledging that psychological knowledge is always partial, always situated in specific cultural contexts, and always evolving.
Leslie Poston:This humility makes room for multiple ways of understanding human experience, including those that Western psychology has historically dismissed. And it's about democratizing psychology, making its insights accessible to communities rather than hoarding them as professional expertise. Community psychology, participatory action research, and peer support movements all seek to distribute psychological knowledge and skills more widely, empowering people to address their own mental health needs in context. This shadow side of psychology isn't just a historical curiosity. It's a living challenge.
Leslie Poston:A call to create something better. By facing it honestly, we can build a psychology that truly serves human flourishing in all of its diverse forms. We can learn from past failures and create more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory practices for the future. This means remaining vigilant against new forms of psychological control and manipulation. It means questioning whose interests are served by certain psychological theories and techniques.
Leslie Poston:And it means actively working to repair the harms that psychology has caused to marginalized communities. The story of psychology isn't over. It's still being written by practitioners and researchers, by activists, by communities, by all of us who engage with psychological ideas in our daily lives. By understanding this dark side, we can help write a better next chapter, one that uses psychological insights to heal rather than harm, to liberate rather than control, and to celebrate human diversity rather than to pathologize difference. As always, whenever I mention specific researchers in my episodes, their research is going to be included in the show notes.
Leslie Poston:Additionally, whenever I mention specific treatments or modalities of treatments, such as ABA therapy or certain drugs prescribed for ADHD in this episode, I like to add a little commentary. Things that are addictive to neurotypical people, like stimulants, are not addictive to ADHD people and should not be pathologized as such. If your medication is helping you, be it a stimulant, an antidepressant, anything, an SSRI, whatever you're taking. Please don't stop just because society doesn't understand it. Work with your doctor to get the care that you need.
Leslie Poston:And if you are undergoing ABA therapy and it's working for you, while that's rare, please continue. But if you found it's not working, you might want to consider alternative therapies, perhaps somatic therapy or something similar that might help you be more in tune with yourself and with the environment around you. Therapy is not a one size fits all solution. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off.
Leslie Poston:As always, and until next time, stay curious.
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