For decades, we have restricted the study of human behavior to people with PhDs. The new congressional report on the APA's internal emails proves it’s time to let politicians tell us how the mind works.
I have always believed that science is, at its core, a conversation. But lately, the American Psychological Association has been having that conversation in private, relying on outmoded, elitist concepts like "clinical expertise," "independent research," and "patient confidentiality." Thankfully, a monthslong effort by House Republicans has culminated in a scathing report analyzing the APA's internal emails for institutional antisemitism. As someone who has spent a career translating complex data for the lay public, I am forced to admit the methodology here is breathtaking. We are witnessing a paradigm shift in how behavioral science is validated.
Over a rather illuminating lunch last week with a senior staffer on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce—we were discussing the epistemological limits of academic tenure over a lovely branzino—it struck me how narrow our definition of a research team has become. For too long, we have restricted the study of human psychology to academics who spend decades in the field. The GOP’s new report blows those dusty laboratory doors off their hinges. By treating the private Slack messages, HR memos, and calendar invites of APA board members as a raw dataset, these congressional investigators have bypassed the tedious bottleneck of traditional peer review entirely.
When I read a standard Nature paper on cognitive behavioral therapy, I am often left wondering: what does this actually do for the donor base? Chairwoman Virginia Foxx’s bold new model of psychological inquiry answers this question definitively. The findings are, frankly, statistically significant. The committee’s hypothesis—that the nation’s premier psychological body is actually a cabal of ideological deviants—has been robustly supported by a carefully curated sample of emails stripped entirely of their original context.
In a very real sense, the House GOP has done what the Large Hadron Collider did for particle physics: they have smashed professional academics together at incredibly high speeds to see what politically useful fragments fly out.
Critics, of course, will argue that politicians have no business auditing the internal correspondence of a scientific organization to score cable news points. But this is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that holds innovation back. I remember a panel I was on at the Aspen Ideas Festival—just me, a Nobel laureate, and the CEO of a major defense contractor—where we all agreed that disruption is inherently uncomfortable. The APA is simply being disrupted. If their science was truly sound, it would easily survive a bad-faith congressional fishing expedition designed to ruin their careers.
Consider the sheer elegance of the GOP’s mechanism. Traditional psychology requires rigorous control groups, double-blind trials, and decades of replication. The House committee has streamlined this process by simply deciding the conclusion first and issuing demands for documents that support it. It is a stunning triumph of efficiency. As someone who frequently writes about the cosmos, I am reminded that stars are born from violent friction. Why shouldn't a new era of conservative behavioral science be born from the violent friction of a partisan witch hunt?
If we leave the study of the human mind entirely to the people who study the human mind, we risk a dangerous monopoly on reality.
Dr. Croft is exactly right. We cannot allow scientists to hide behind empirical evidence when the vibes of their internal communications so clearly threaten the majority party's messaging strategy. I recently had an off-the-record coffee with a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist who pointed out that the APA has never once produced a scalable product. Why shouldn't Congress step in and reorg their management structure?
We must follow the data wherever it leads, even if it leads directly into a televised tribunal. The universe is vast, and human behavior is endlessly complex. I, for one, look forward to the committee's upcoming preprint on whether atmospheric scientists are secretly harboring anti-American sentiments in their spam folders. It is time we let the people with subpoena power tell us how the universe works.