Overview
With over 190,000 members, the American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest psychology association in the world.
Students who grew up in the American education system are likely to have been taught about the MLA style guide for formatting writing. The APA style guide is an alternative that many students see but haven’t been introduced to unless they spend time specifically exploring social science literature.
Commentary
As a result of being the largest psychology association in the world, the APA has sociopolitical significance that regularly leads to controversy and public scrutiny.
The Resignation of Christopher J. Ferguson
In 2021, Christopher J. Ferguson wrote an open letter to the American Psychological Association that he “cannot in good ethical conscience continue” membership as he feels “the APA has lots its way as either a science organization or an organization representing good clinical practice.”
Keep in mind that the APA President in 1946, Henry E. Garrett, was a rabid racist and eugenicist. He gave testimony in favor of school segregation in a case that was combined into Brown v. Board (1954), claiming that desegregation would bring “total demoralization and then disorganization in that order.” The Univerity of Virginia brought him on as a visiting professor in the Department of Education in 1955. In 1961, he published “The Equalitarian Dogma” where he argued “Blacks” were biologically intellectually inferior to “Whites.” In 1968, he wrote “Despite glamorized accounts to the contrary, the history of Black Africa over the past 5,000 years is largely a blank” and “The crime record of the Negro in the United States is little short of scandalous.” He would go on to accuse Jews and Jewish organizations of spreading the dogma, and in 1972 became Director of the Pioneer Fund, an organization inspired by the leading Nazi eugenicists behind the Nuremberg Laws. The American Psychological Association openly acknowledges the eugenicsts existed within their ranks existed into the 1980s. The 1997 winner of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science, Raymond Cattell, supported eugenics and publicly acknowledged neo-Nazis and white supremacists so much so that the backlash to the announcement led to his withdrawal.
So surely, Ferguson must be objecting to the slow pace at which the APA prunes its ranks of pseudoscientific and harmful ideas right? No. The opposite actually.
Ferguson’s first complaints are about the APA distorting evidence on violent video games, spanking, and “guidelines for Men and Boys” that are “disparaging more traditional men.” He does not elaborate on what any of this means; one might reasonably speculate that this is just prefacing the discussion about race with a layer of other objections to imply that he’s spotted a constellation of issues.
On discussions of racism, his argument is that “adopting a dystopian and data-deficient view of the present is likely to do more harm than good.” Don’t let the expert credentials and clinical tone fool you, this is simply rehashing the standard “victim mentality” rhetoric used to dismiss the prevalence of racism by relocating the issue to internalized hysteria. The decline of explicit or implicit racism on average in no way suggests that existing discussion of racism is somehow fearmongering over a fantasized dystopia. Just because the average person on the street is less likely to think racial slurs when they see someone of a different race or would vote for Barack Obama over McCain and Romney doesn’t mean that racism has disappeared in other aspects of society.
Studies have repeatedly shown no statistically detectable decline in anti-Black hiring discrimination since 1989, with a 2017 meta-analysis by Lincoln Quillian showing that White applicants received 36% more callbacks than equally qualified Black applicants. A 2024 study by Josh Leung-Gagne reveals that the deadliest local police departments kill almost 7 times more frequently than the least deadly departments. Police violence is the 6th leading cause of death for men ages 25 to 29, with Black Americans almost three times as likely to be killed than White Americans. These trends can also be found in Native American and Latino communities. Further, a 2021 study published in The Lancet estimates that over half the deaths from police violence were either unreported or misclassified in the National Vital Statistics System used by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ferguson’s only discussion of this “complex and nuanced issue” is to accuse the APA of having a distorted perspective through the availability heuristic and social pressures that lead to an excessive focus on the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. Ironically, it’s Ferguson who has fixated on these cases while an absolute avalanche of evidence about the persistent effects of racism have been produced by his colleagues.
He also lazily brings up the claim that “evidence suggests class issues, rather than race, may predict negative outcomes” as if the preponderance of evidence doesn’t indicate both play a role. A 2024 study of the 100 largest US municipalities found that violent crime was mostly associated with income inequality and educational attainment rather than race, but a 2025 analysis of fatal shootings across >32,000 ZIP codes found that race remained an independent predictor after controlling for other factors.
Further, certain forms of racism have actually gotten worse over time. Anti-Asian hate crimes multiplied by a factor of nearly 5 from 2019 to 2021 following COVID-19, so Ferguson’s jab at the term “pandemic of racism” as a cliche is almost willfully ignorant of the long history of associating illness with “outsiders” and “foreigners”, or the Other. An NBER study found that even as public violence overall was declining, there was an observable increase in racially motivated violence against Asian Americans. Roughly one-third of Asian Americans reported experiencing some form of bias in the wake of the pandemic. FBI data shows that hate crimes in general increased 32% from 2019 to 2020, with anti-Black hate crimes increasing 49% and anti-Asian hate crimes increasing 77%. A recent 2026 paper by Manuel J Galvan et al. that models the distribution of racism finds that discriminatory effects are widespread rather than concentrated in just a few bad areas. Even though the total number of hate groups in the United States have been declining, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified that white-nationalist groups increased by 55% from 2017 to 2019.
And then, Ferguson drives his car right off the roads into the lake of culture wars, as he claims the APA “appears to sway with the political currents to what may be its optimal inward-focused gain at any given time. This appears to be as true regarding its historical involvement with the mistreatment of detainees as documented in the Hoffman Report as it is regarding its capitulation to ‘wokism’ in the present.”
The Hoffman Report was a 2015 analysis that found that leaders of the American Psychological Association had cooperated with the Department of Defense to develop ethical guidelines that allowed psychologists to participate in post-9/11 interrogations involving torture, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It is a Facebook-tier argument to suggest that the forces of “wokism” have the same influence on scientific institutions as the United States military. Remember that there is a long history of pseudoscientific eugenics tied to sociopolitical movements that Ferguson could have pointed to if he wanted to show the APA’s pattern of straying from science, but he chooses instead the comparison to the DoD that alludes to coercive and corrupt intentions.
It also seems Ferguson had no colleagues proofread this letter, as it is impossible to overlook that he says on one hand that “we also give extreme power to outrage and moral grandstanding as well as inaccurate sources of information such as anecdotes and ‘lived experiences’” while saying just one paragraph away that his opinion is “informed in part by my own time on the Council of Representatives, but also watching the APA’s public facing communications.” Outrage over ancedotes for me, but not for thee.
And of course, we can’t end one of these vague general complaints that everyone is talking too much about racism without a preemptive ad hominem defense that implies some maverick or underdog status: “I understand that my words will be unwelcome to the APA and perhaps many others aligned with this current movement on the sociopolitical left (and note, I identify as a liberal myself).”
Why shouldn’t they be unwelcome, when they rely on dystopian and data-deficient views of the present that is likely to do more harm than good? We would only be adhering to the standards Ferguson himself wishes the APA to adopt to keep out confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance driven by lived experiences.
Alumni
Presidents
Like many other professional and research organizations, the APA President is elected to a one-year tenure. Only Granville Stanley Hall and William James have been exceptions to this as they were elected before the one-year limit was in place.
-
Granville Stanley Hall (1892)
-
William James (1894)
-
Hugo Munsterberg (1898)
-
John Dewey (1899)
-
William James (1904)
-
Edward Lee Thorndike (1912)