Impacts of Psychological Science on National Security Agencies Post-9/11

By: Susan E. Brandon
Federal Bureau of Investigation;

Acknowledgement: I thank Pam Flattau, Jim Griffin, Michelle Keeney, Philip Rubin, Allison Smith, and Barbara Wanchisen for their useful suggestions relevant to this article.
The views expressed here are mine only and not those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In the decade since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, psychologists have “gathered” [information], “cooperated” [with governmental agencies], and “applied” psychology (Yerkes, 1918, p. 87) to military, intelligence, and defense problems much as they did in the century before, despite a call for increased human-based intelligence that may have provided unique opportunities for psychological science (e.g., Consortium of Social Science Associations, 2005; Defense Intelligence Agency, 2007; Flynn, Pottinger, & Batchelor, 2010; Gates, 2008; National Research Council, 2002b; U.S. Department of Defense, 2006b, 2010). This article offers a description of how psychologists “gathered, cooperated, and applied” psychology to military problems in the First World War and how those activities laid the groundwork for similar but expanded activities in the Second World War, which saw the emergence of psychologists also working within U.S. intelligence agencies. This history is followed by examples of how psychological science has impacted policies and practices within U.S. intelligence, defense, and homeland security agencies (referred to here collectively as “national security agencies”) since the attacks of 9/11.

Pre-9/11

At a meeting chaired by Edward Titchener on April 6, 1917, the same day that the U.S. declared war on Germany, the “Experimentalists” decided that psychology should “gather,” “cooperate,” and ensure the “application of methods” to varied aspects of the actual and possible practical applications of psychology to military affairs (Yerkes, 1918, p. 87). American Psychological Association (APA) President Robert Yerkes—also an Experimentalist—drafted a letter to this effect to the APA Council. On April 14, 1917, George Hale, Chairman of the National Research Council (NRC), sent a telegram to (Major) Yerkes to ask that a psychology committee be organized in connection with the NRC and that the President of the APA act as chairman of the committee and member of the NRC. At a special meeting of the APA held on the evening of April 21, 1917, committees were formed to make the full resources of academic psychology available to the U.S. military. Among these, one committee was tasked to write a bibliography of the psychological literature related to military affairs (Chairman Madison Bentley). Several other committees were set up to cooperate with the military on issues of selection, training, and assessment: the psychological examination of recruits (Chairman Robert Yerkes); the selection of men for tasks requiring special aptitude (Chairman E. L. Thorndike); and psychological problems of vocational characteristics related to retraining (Chairman John B. Watson). Three committees focused on applications of psychology that might make Americans better soldiers and reduce the risk of injury: a committee for acoustics and characteristics of the sense of hearing that considered training men to discriminate different projectiles by their sound (Chairman Carl Seashore); a second committee on problems of vision (Chairman Raymond Dodge); and a third committee on psychological problems of aviation (Chairman H. E. Burtt, MD) (Yerkes, 1917).

By January of 1918, some 1,726,000 men had been tested for mental aptitude by the Army in 35 training camps via Yerkes's “Committee on Psychological Examination of Recruits,” and approximately 100 officers and 300 enlisted men were trained in Army psychological examinations such as the Army Alpha Test, the Army Beta Test, and the Woodward Personnel Data Scale (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1921). The Army created a Division of Psychology in the Medical Department in 1919, and a school of military psychology at the medical training camp in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to train personnel to conduct mental testing of large groups (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1921). Civilian versions of these Army tests, which included novelties such as group testing and multiple-choice questions, were incorporated into personnel testing practices in industry and education and formed the theoretical bases not only for the current service-wide aptitude test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, but also for civilian tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Graduate Record Examination (Banks, 1995; Samelson, 1977).

The development of methods and procedures for personnel selection and training continued in the buildup to World War II. In 1939, given the need to meet recruitment requirements, the NRC appointed an Advisory Committee on Classification of Military Personnel at the request of the Army Adjutant General. This office (which eventually became the Army Research Institute) had responsibility for the development, construction, validation, and standardization of all personnel screening test and interview techniques for the U.S. Army (U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, n.d.). In 1941, psychologists were commissioned in Naval Reserve hospitals to assist in the selection and placement of personnel for flight training and in the development of personnel programs at naval bases and stations; that same year, the Civil Aeronautics Administration asked the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the NRC to form a Committee on Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots (Hunter, 1946).

The theory of signal detection, originally developed to interpret blips on radar screens, was applied to problems of perception and decision making (Swets, Dawes, & Monahan, 2000). Military leaders understood the usefulness of psychology for improving the “brains, eyes, ears and muscles of the service personnel” (Hunter, 1946, p. 481). One instance of such early human factors engineering was the 1941 development of red goggles for producing dark adaptation. Another was microphone and telephone training: Many soldiers did not know how to hold a microphone or a telephone and had various strong regional accents (“faulty articulation”), which caused communication problems. Psychologists collected data on “human–microphone interactions” for the transmission of intelligible speech under conditions of ambient noise and demonstrated the most effective way to hold a hand microphone to naval officers in the Submarine Service (Hunter, 1946, p. 486). (See Nickerson, 2011, this issue, for more description of the significant contributions of human factors and ergonomics research to national security challenges.)

As early as 1940, a panel of psychologists on the Army General Staff helped wage psychological warfare for the Office of War Information and conducted morale studies in the Army's Division of Special Services. The number of psychologists in such roles was significantly increased in 1941 when General Donavan, the new Head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—recruited prominent psychologists, economists, and geologists to supplement the staff of regional specialists working for the OSS Research and Analysis Branch at the Library of Congress (Banks, 1995). The OSS Psychology Division, headed by Robert Tryon from the University of California, had a staff of 16 psychologists whose mandate was to collect and analyze all available data pertinent to psychological factors relevant to the national and international war fronts (Hoffman, 1992). Psychologists investigated the mentality of Adolf Hitler, Nazism's appeal to Germans, and the probable response of Germans to particular types of propaganda and occupation policies (Hoffman, 1992). OSS psychologists also continued in personnel assessments, creating innovative and novel methods of assessing some 5,500 individuals, who might serve as a “branch chief in Cairo, leader of native resistance groups in Burma, etc.” (Murray & MacKinnon, 1946, p. 76, see also Banks, 1995).

After the Korean War, sociologists and psychologists were commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to study why “virtually all prisoners of war who have been interrogated intensively in recent wars have divulged some information to their captors” (Biderman, 1960, p. 121). The investigators questioned repatriated U.S. Air Force personnel who had been held in captivity in North Korea and China during the Korean War. They found that physical assaults and threats were less frequently effective than noncoercive tactics and that when more than name, rank, and serial number—all that is required by the Geneva Conventions—was offered, it was to preserve and protect the prisoner's “viable social role and [an] esteemed self image” (Biderman, 1960, p. 121). The studies were originally published via Air Force reports (Biderman, 1957; Segal, 1956) but shortly thereafter were also published in scientific journals (e.g., Biderman, 1957, 1959, 1960; Schein, 1957). A review of behavioral science data relevant to what are currently referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which concluded that these were likely to be ineffective, was published in 1961 (Biderman & Zimmer, 1961).

U.S. POW experiences in Korea prompted other psychological research. In 1974, the New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted experiments on U.S. citizens during the 1960s (Hersh, 1974); in the summer of 1975, congressional hearings revealed that both the CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) had experimented with psychoactive drugs, with both cognizant and unwitting human subjects, as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior (Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, 1975). The CIA program, known eventually by its code name MKULTRA, had begun in the 1950s and was an attempt to understand, replicate, and improve upon the “mind-control methods” used by the North Koreans on Americans in the prison camps. More than 150 individually funded, university-based research projects were part of MKULTRA and related CIA programs (Marks, 1978; Project Mkultra, 1977). In 1963, the CIA inspector general recommended that unwitting testing be terminated, but Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms continued to advocate covert testing on the grounds that “positive operational capability to use drugs is diminishing, owing to a lack of realistic testing. Without increasing knowledge of the state of the art, we are less capable of staying up with the Soviet advances in this field.” Helms is said to have attributed the cessation of the unwitting testing to the high risk of embarrassment to the agency as well as the “moral problem” (Church Committee report, S. Rep. No. 94-755, 1976, pp. 400, 402). Most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed by then-Director of the CIA Richard Helms in 1973.

World War II and the years immediately after saw the construction of much of the federal infrastructure that would support psychological research for the rest of the 20th century and continue on into the 21st. This infrastructure building began as part of the war effort. In June 1940, anticipating that the United States would be pulled into World War II, President Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee to “coordinate, supervise and conduct scientific research” to work on warfare-related problems of underwater sonar operators, fire control, acoustics, and optics” (“Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development,” n.d.). In 1941, he signed Executive Order No. 8807 (1941), creating the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) “for research on scientific and medical problems relating to the national defense” (p. 3207). OSRD, renowned for its research on the atomic bomb via the secret S-1 Section research program and oversight of the Manhattan Project, had 23 units, including an Applied Psychology Panel.

After the War, OSRD Director Vannevar Bush (a former Dean of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) asserted that it “is essential that the civilian scientists continue in peacetime some portion of those contributions to national security which they have made so effectively during the war” (V. Bush, 1945, p. 6) and sought a mandate from President Roosevelt to consider what kind of government structure and support would be necessary to support basic research in the private sector. The resulting 1945 study, Science: The Endless Frontier, recommended a structure similar to the OSRD to support basic research (Stewart, 1948).

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) served as an early federal patron of extramural psychological research. The Naval Research Laboratory had been set up in 1923; in 1932, the secretary of the Navy authorized an experiment to study the psychological and physiological effects of deep sea diving on Navy personnel (Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, 1995). After President Truman approved legislation establishing the ONR in 1946, it played a much expanded and major role in the formulation of America's postwar science policies. From 1946 to 1950, ONR's Contract Research Program, absorbing more than half of the $86 million ONR budget, was almost entirely devoted to promoting advances in academic science departments and in support of basic research projects initiated by university-based investigators (Page, 1954). And, during this brief period at least, the ONR was able to support science with public funds, largely free from the demand for demonstration of public benefit (Sapolsky, 1990). ONR's first chief scientist, Allan Waterman, became the first director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950.

In addition to extramural support to psychological science via grants and contracts with academic institutions, there was a significant amount of psychological research conducted within U.S. military, intelligence, and security agencies and departments. ONR supported intramural psychological research, including the burgeoning field of decision making and behavioral economics. The failure of the USS Stark to defend itself from a missile fired during the Iran–Iraq War in 1987 and the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian commercial airliner the following year were the impetus for ONR's Tactical Decision Making Under Stress (TADMUS) program in the 1990s (Office of Naval Research, n.d.-b). The Air Force Research Laboratory, established in 1948 and headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, grew by 2009 to nine technology directorates, including the 711th Human Performance Wing, which conducts research on human systems integration (U.S. Air Force, 2009). Ames Research Center, established in 1939 as the second laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (and renamed NASA Ames with the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958), conducts human factors research (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, n.d.). The Army Research Institute (ARI) for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, initially located in the Pentagon as the Army Personnel Research Office, expanded from test and test development to training, human engineering, social psychology, and physiological psychology. Since the 1960s, ARI has devised marketing strategies for recruitment and conducted research in collective field training, “training while fighting,” team cohesion, and leadership (U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, n.d.).

The American Institutes for Research (AIR), founded in 1946 by John Flanagan (a psychologist who created the “critical incident technique” for personnel selection), developed screening processes for pilots, conducted studies to improve highway safety, and currently supports behavioral science research related to education and health (American Institutes for Research, n.d.). The Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO), founded in 1951 by psychologist Meredith P. Crawford and funded by the Department of the Army, focuses on personnel issues (Human Resources Research Organization, n.d.). The Advanced Research Resources Organization (ARRO) was founded in 1976 by psychologist Edwin Fleishman, previously of AIR and Yale University (and best known for a taxonomy of individual differences in perceptual-motor performance; “Distinguished Scientific Award,” 1981).

In 1991, the DoD Joint Security Commission recommended that the DoD's Polygraph Institute—originally the U.S. Army Polygraph School, established in 1951—serve as the “executive agent for a robust, interagency-coordinated and centrally funded research program concentrating on developing valid and reliable security and applicant screening tests; investigate countermeasures; and conduct developmental research on PDD [physiological detection of deception] techniques, instrumentation, and analytical methods” (National Center for Credibility Assessment, 2011, p. 15). The DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, established in 1958 as “American's response to Sputnik” [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, n.d.]) sponsored the 2000 Augmented Cognition program, intended to enhance human cognition in stressful environments (Schmorrow & Kruse, 2002). In addition, there are 16 national laboratories under the auspices of the Department of Energy (DOE), and although behavioral science is not their focus, several have supported behavioral and social-science-based research (including Sandia National Laboratories, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Los Alamos National Laboratory, partner with the University of California in Los Alamos, California; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland, Washington).

From 1980 to 1987, all forms of defense research and development (R&D) spending nearly doubled in real terms, motivated most likely by high Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union (Koizumi, 2000). By 1987, defense R&D was two thirds of total R&D, but funding then fell in the 1990s as the DoD and the defense activities of the DOE made a rough transition to the post–Cold War era. This decline was matched by declining defense spending overall. However, federal R&D funding to colleges and universities increased steadily between 1975 and 2000, during which time real-terms federal support of academic R&D more than doubled, probably because of an increase in basic research as a share of the federal R&D portfolio and because of the campaign to double the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget between 1993 and 2001 (Koizumi, 2005). The bulk of this increase was in the life sciences, with psychology seeing smaller increments beginning in 1982 (National Science Foundation, 2004). Psychology R&D has fluctuated between 1% and 4% of total federal R&D since 1970. The DoD (including Army, Air Force, and Navy laboratories) provided between 20% and 40% of total psychology R&D between 1970 and the early 1990s, reaching about 40% in 1985 and again in 1992 but declining since 1992. Since 1980, R&D support to psychology has come primarily from NIH (National Science Foundation, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009).

Thus, the 20th century saw the development and expansion of a national security psychology research infrastructure. Within this infrastructure, psychologists now work within three loosely formed communities. One is the community of operational (clinical) psychologists, who, like their early precursors at OSS, are embedded within these institutions and support military and intelligence operations and training (Palarea, 2007; Williams, Picano, & Roland, 2006). The second community is a cluster of PhD psychology researchers and research managers who conduct or manage research programs, also from within the defense and intelligence agencies, such as those that commissioned or conducted the interrogation research studies in the 1950s and 1960s. These two communities have access to many of the operational functions of the agencies and departments in which they reside, but at varying distances; some research is conducted by the operational psychologists themselves, and some is conducted by research psychologists almost entirely separate from operational units. Finally, there is the community of psychological scientists in industry and academia, largely isolated from operational units, who conduct psychological research via funding from these agencies.

Within the larger military-industrial-congressional complex (Brinkley, 2001) that supports the research, development, testing, and deployment of ships, missiles, guns, and jet fighters, these communities of psychologists and their supporting infrastructures are relatively small. What I consider next is whether the attacks of 9/11, conducted not via long-range ballistic missiles nor an army of tanks but by 19 men with box cutters, provided psychological science any new opportunities.

Post-9/11

President George W. Bush (2001) described his administration's views of the attacks on 9/11 in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001: “Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution” (p. 1347). The motivation for the attacks, he implied, were American liberties, not American policies: Terrorists “hate us” because of “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” (G. W. Bush, 2001, p. 1348). From all accounts, it seemed clear that members of the Bush administration were angry, committed to going to war, and determined (because 9/11 occurred “on their watch”) that no expense or effort would be spared to contain those who attacked the United States and those who threatened to attack again. Local events perhaps reinforced this siege mentality. On October 9, 2001, letters containing weapons grade anthrax were sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in their Washington, DC, offices. As of November 7, 2001, 22 cases of anthrax had been identified; the majority of cases in persons working at postal facilities in New Jersey and DC or at media companies in New York City or Florida. A total of five people were killed, and 17 were sickened. The “Beltway sniper” attacks took place during three weeks of October 2002: 10 people were killed, and three others were critically injured, in and around the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area.

Gathering

What Congress, executive agencies, and the White House wanted from the science community was advice relevant to economic damage and military vulnerability. In the 12 months after September 2001, more than 120 pieces of legislation (not including appropriations and authorization bills) addressed problems related to terrorism; between September 2001 and June 2002 there was a 276% increase in federal funds designated to combat terrorism (U.S. General Accounting Office, 2002). The U.S. Government Accountability Office (n.d.) website listed 538 reports from federal agencies on national security-related topics (many on counterterrorism specifically) dated between September 12, 2001 and April 11, 2011. Responding to this call for help, the National Academies gathered 146 volunteer scientists soon after 9/11 to contribute to Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism (National Research Council, 2002b). The report, signed off on by all three National Academy presidents, focused primarily on technological vulnerabilities and technology-based solutions.

A summary of 200 reports, letters, and activities of the National Academies between 9/11 and June 2005 (Wulf, 2006) lists three publications reflecting psychological perspectives: Terrorism: Perspectives From the Behavioral and Social Sciences (National Research Council, 2002c); Discouraging Terrorism: Some Implications of 9/11 (sponsored by DARPA and addressing “the nature and determinants of terrorism itself and… the nature of domestic responses to terrorist activity,” National Research Council 2002a, p. viii); and Preparing for the Psychological Consequences of Terrorism: A Public Health Strategy (National Research Council, 2003). The remainder of the summary focused on other topics: 41 reports, letters, or activities concerned with transportation threats and vulnerabilities (a remarkable demonstration of the availability heuristic; cf. Kahneman & Tversky, 1973); 33 about biological and chemical countermeasures or therapies; 31 on postal system safety (remember the anthrax attacks and threats) and radiological and nuclear threats; 20 on biometrics, privacy, and sensitive information protection; and 20 identifying various other R&D gaps (Wulf, 2006).

Kathie Olsen, a psychologist who identifies herself as a neuroscientist, became the highest ranking psychologist within the White House in 2002 when she assumed the Senate-confirmed position of assistant director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). During her tenure at OSTP, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) launched an Antiterrorism Task Force that included psychologists. At the time of the this task force, John Marburger, a physicist from Brookhaven Laboratory, was President George W. Bush's science advisor and as such, the director of OSTP; Olsen reported directly to Marburger.

The Antiterrorism Task Force, in an attempt to identify gaps and opportunities, assembled an inventory of current practices, policies, and research programs within federal agencies that were relevant to homeland security. Four interagency working groups were formed to focus on “biological and chemical preparedness,” “radiological, nuclear and conventional explosives preparedness,” “protection of vital systems,” and “social, behavioral and educational (SBE) issues.” James Griffin, an educational psychologist who was at that time OSTP assistant director for social, behavioral and educational sciences (reporting to Olsen), co-chaired the “SBE issues” group, along with Norman Bradburn (assistant director of the NSF Social, Behavioral & Economic Science Directorate) and Raynard Kington (NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research). The SBE Working Group made several recommendations, including developing an infrastructure to support distributed, redundant geographic and spatial imaging data for state and local emergency responders; distributing information to state and local emergency responders on how people assess risks and react to extreme events; supporting research on terrorist networks and on traumatic stress in survivors, witnesses, family members and emergency responders exposed to terrorist attacks; and conducting socioeconomic and policy research to identify economic vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks and other disasters. The 2005 NSTC report Combating Terrorism: Research Priorities in the Social, Behavioral and Educational Sciences (National Science and Technology Council, 2005a), perhaps the first psychology-centered policy report ever issued from the White House, was in part a product of this working group.

Since that report, there have been relatively few references to the behavioral or social sciences in NSTC reports. A 2005 report, Grand Challenges for Disaster Reduction, described Grand Challenge #6 (out of a total of six) as “Promote Risk-Wise Behavior,” the only reference to the effects of behavior on disaster mitigation (National Science and Technology Council, 2005b). There were no reports recognizing the behavioral sciences as critical players in solving problems or as high priorities in the President's science and technology budget or planning in 2006 through 2008. In a letter forwarding the National Science and Technology Council (2009) report Social, Behavioral and Economic Research in the Federal Context, Marburger (2009, para. 2) pointed out that

research information provided by the SBE sciences can provide policymakers with evidence and information that may help address many current challenge areas in society, including education, health care, the mitigation of terrorism, the prevention of crime, the response to natural disasters, and a better understanding of our rapidly changing global economy.

Olsen left OSTP in 2008; as of the writing of this article, there are no behavioral or social scientists in the OSTP (although plans are developing to hire one and perhaps two), and no behavioral or social scientists have been in equivalent leadership positions at OSTP since 2008.

Immediately following 9/11 and for the next several years, there was a vigorous outreach on the part of Washington, DC–based psychological professional association policy offices to national defense, security, and intelligence agencies. This engagement occurred in the face of revelations about Abu Ghraib and black sites, Guantanamo waterboarding, and the invasion of Iraq. Invitation-only meetings brought defense, intelligence, and security personnel together with scores of research psychologists to engage in unclassified discussions.

On February 28, 2002, APA, the University of Pennsylvania, the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, the Decade of Behavior Initiative, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Behavioral Science Unit convened a one-day, invitation-only conference, “Countering Terrorism: Integration of Theory and Practice,” at the FBI's Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. About half of the more than 70 attendees came from academia and half from law enforcement or intelligence agencies. The conference attendees discussed 10 “scenarios” written by FBI agents that described some of the field challenges they faced after 9/11; one scenario began, “A woman contacts her psychologist from whom she has been receiving therapy for the past year for bouts with depression. She reports that she has just learned that a friend of her 19-year-old son appears to be recruiting her son for a martyrdom mission” (Pinizzotto, Brandon, & Mumford, 2002, p. 15).

APA organized two workshops on deception co-sponsored by the RAND Corporation, the first in July 2003 on “The Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory” (“APA Works With CIA and RAND,” 2003) and a second in late June 2004 on “Interpersonal Deception” (“Interpersonal Deceptive Practices,” 2004). A workshop on “The Nature and Influence of Intuition in Law Enforcement” was held earlier in June 2004, co-sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the FBI (National Institute of Justice, FBI Training Academy, & American Psychological Association, 2004). The new Threat Awareness Portfolio in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sponsored a “Social & Behavioral Sciences Partnership Program,” first convened in November 2005 to discuss the DHS/Homeland Security Council All-Hazards National Planning Scenario #1 (in which an improvised nuclear device is detonated in downtown Washington, DC) with DHS analysts and policymakers (“DHS Social & Behavioral Sciences Partnership,” 2006). In the summer of 2005, there was a series of seven workshops organized and sponsored by the OSTP and the NSF on the topic of “behavioral, psychological, and physiological assessments of individuals in the conduct of security evaluations,” with participants from within federal as well as state and local intelligence, defense, and security agencies and research psychologists from across the United States (National Science Foundation & Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2006). In the summer of 2006, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sponsored a six-week summer gathering of intelligence analysts and academic researchers and scholars—many of them psychologists—to discuss terrorism (Director of National Intelligence, 2006).

These invitation-only but otherwise public gatherings faced significant challenges and had limited impacts. In addition to the usual difficulties of translating science to policy and practice (ensuring science literacy on the part of policymaker and end-user communities; reliably training new methods; ensuring field validation; e.g., Biglan, Mrazek, Carnine, & Flay, 2003; Druckman & Swets, 1988; Littell & Shlonsky, 2010; Mears, 2010; National Research Council, 1988, 2010; Torney-Purta, 2009; Turkheimer & Parry, 1992), the government's tendency to classify information and programs made effective exchange of information within the meetings almost impossible. Government attendees could not share information about the operations, activities, plans, and policies of their agencies. The visiting scientists gave talks in rooms with government personnel who sat in silence around the edges with name badges that all said “Bob” or “Bonnie.” The reticence of the government to share information often increased its perceived value (the assumption was that information was classified because it was important and viable) and frustrated the academic researchers. Oftentimes, government personnel were not even allowed to admit to what they did not know because information gaps and vulnerabilities were classified (the rationale being that we do not want our adversaries to know what we do not know). This led to security concerns that made little sense to the psychologists from outside the government (and to many of those within the government). One meeting, for example, on “how 'radical' groups form” was classified SECRET and “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” as if Americans have a firm understanding of this highly complex phenomenon and have to keep it secret or that we do not have such an understanding and that also has to remain secret. (No one has this complicated issue “solved,” of course.) For the scientists from outside the government, there were additional implications: Was the Government unaware of the fact that what was known about the fundamental psychological and social processes of group formation had already been published in the open-source, scientific literature? Did the government believe that the scientists would “discover” exactly how groups form at this meeting and so have to keep that knowledge secure? Did the government believe that even if such a groundbreaking set of discoveries were possible that knowing how groups form would significantly impact the fundamental processing underlying group formation, any more than knowing how a rainbow works means that we can make them come and go at will within natural weather conditions?

This kind of reasoning meant that the proceedings of even unclassified meetings often were not released for public distribution by government sponsors, nor were they published in any publicly accessible venues. This increased the likelihood that the participants and proceedings would be perceived by the (nonparticipant) psychological research community and general public as aiding and abetting the government in various nefarious activities—this happened most notably, of course, for meetings with any relevance to interrogations. That the recommendations, guidance, and various research agendas often were not available for external peer review also lessened their quality. When reports were “leaked,” bits and pieces were described out of context in ways that discouraged both the government and the academics from further cooperation. One notable exception was the report released after the 2002 FBI Academy meeting referred to earlier (Pinizzotto, Brandon, & Mumford, 2002), which was posted on the FBI's public website as late as 2007.

Cooperating

A less public outreach and, in many ways, a far more successful effort was a project begun by the Intelligence Science Board (ISB) in September of 2004 to examine the science behind interrogation methods. The ISB, established in 2002 to advise the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other intelligence community leaders on scientific and technical issues of importance to the intelligence community, consisted of renowned attorneys, engineers, and scientists from academia and industry (the membership was classified, as were its meetings and minutes). One of its members, a Boston-based forensic psychologist, prompted the ISB to begin a study on a topic that was highly sensitive and controversial at the time (and is still) both within and outside the intelligence and defense communities. In June of 2004, the Washington Post had described some of the 24 interrogation methods approved for use on Guantanamo detainees, including putting prisoners in uncomfortable positions for hours, deceiving them into thinking they were in the hands of Middle Eastern interrogators, providing cold or unpalatable food, and putting them in isolation (Priest & Graham, 2004). That same month, Seymour Hersh exposed prisoner abuse at Abu Graihb, a prison in Iraq under the control of U.S. forces, in the New Yorker magazine (Hersh, 2004). In this charged political context, the ISB Working Group, which in addition to its chair included three other psychologists, worked in tandem with an Experts Committee on interrogation composed of individuals from within the government, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, DHS, the FBI, the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, the National Defense Intelligence College, and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (which provides the “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” [SERE] training, which is based, in part, on the Air Force Korean prisoners study [Bloche & Marks, 2005]). The project was paid for by funds from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA's Intelligence Technology Innovation Center, and the DoD's Counterintelligence Field Activity.

Over a period of two years, the ISB Working Group, with input from interrogation experts from inside and outside the U.S. government, produced a literature review and a series of articles on the history and status of U.S. interrogation practices, which are compiled in the report Educing Information (Intelligence Science Board, 2006). The report, released as “For Official Use Only” in 2006, pointed to an alarming lack of R&D effort on the part of the U.S. government on how to conduct effective interrogations and claimed that there had “been little or no development of sustained capacity for interrogation practice, training, or research within intelligence or military communities in the post-Soviet period” (Fein, 2006, p. xiii; cf. Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam and Iraq [National Defense Intelligence College, 2008]).

Applying

The demand for operational psychologists has most likely increased since 9/11 (Kennedy & Williams, 2011), but because their numbers and associated budgets most often are classified, and because these psychologists are distributed across military and civilian intelligence and defense agencies, it is difficult to quantify any change in status. There has been a perceived need for “human factors” and “human terrain” expertise as the U.S. military spends less time shooting and more time trying to convince its opponents. Currently, operational psychologists are employed in the assessment and selection of personnel, especially those who will have access to highly classified information, an activity that has increased sharply since 9/11 with the increase in the number of security clearances being issued (Young, Harvey, & Staal, 2011). Operational psychologists provide indirect assessments on individuals or groups that cannot be directly examined (Morgan et al., 2006), such as those being targeted for “psychological operations.” In a manner reminiscent of the “psychological profiling” used in World War II, psychologists also collect classified and unclassified information to develop profiles of world leaders and terrorists. After 9/11 there was an increase in demand for psychologists to consult to counterintelligence operations and counterterrorism operations (e.g., to determine the suitability of individuals for undercover assignments or to work as intelligence sources; Kennedy, Borum, & Fein, 2011; Shumate & Borum, 2006) and for the support of operational psychologists in DoD interrogations (Dunivin, Banks, Staal, & Stephenson, 2011).

Operational psychologists work in many DoD components, such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where they provide consultation and assessment, research, and training in support of operational and administrative elements. Although research is not often their primary duty, these men and women are in unique positions to provide advice to operational communities about outdated, ineffective methods and tools. For example, in the early 2000s, psychologists at the CIA halted the use of graphology to inform case officers who were recruiting or handling assets and discouraged the use of psychological tests that were based on personality inventories created in the 1920s (Kirk Kennedy, personal communication, July 2010). Psychologists within this community also spoke out against ill-advised and abusive interrogation tactics and strategies (Ewing & Gelles, 2003) and, in 2004, initiated a series of meetings with APA to seek counsel on professional ethical issues relevant to psychologists' role in supporting various military operations, including interrogations (American Psychological Association, Presidential Task Force on Ethics and National Security, 2005). (Some of these support activities had been alluded to in the scenarios offered at the “Countering Terrorism” conference at the FBI Academy in 2002, described earlier; Pinizzotto, Brandon, & Mumford, 2002.) These actions prompted amendment of the APA “Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct” (American Psychological Association, 2010), and had direct impacts on two DoD policies on the role of psychologists in interrogation settings: “DoD Intelligence Interrogations, Detainee Debriefings, and Tactical Questioning” (DoD Directive 3115.09; U.S. Department of Defense, 2005) and “Medical Program Support for Detainee Operations” (DoD Instruction 2310.08, U.S. Department of Defense, 2006a).

Outside of DoD and DOE laboratories, there are relatively small programs within national security agencies that apply psychological science to intelligence problems. The U.S. Secret Service had conducted evidence-based analyses of assassins and school shooters in the 1990s (Fein & Vossekuil, 1998; Fein, Vossekuil, & Holden, 1995) and continues to conduct psychological research on threats made to the President. The DoD Counterintelligence Field Activity (DoD Directive 5105.67, U.S. Department of Defense, 2002) had a Behavioral Science Program that supported research in espionage factors, intelligence interrogations, and behavioral indicators of deception from 2004 until 2008 (when the Counterintelligence Field Activity was disbanded). The Defense Intelligence Agency's Behavioral Science Program, established in 2008, supports research in espionage indicators, and the new High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), set up by the Obama Administration via Executive Order No. 13491 (2009), supports research on intelligence interviewing and interrogations (discussed in more detail below). The CIA employs operational psychologists whose duties include “applied research” (Central Intelligence Agency, n.d.). These programs have small budgets (the exact amounts are classified) and support unclassified research via contracts primarily with U.S. academic institutions.

Since 9/11, defense, intelligence, and security national policies and priorities statements have pointed repeatedly to needs for more effective methods for the collection and analysis of “human intelligence” (HUMINT), that is, information obtained from human sources (e.g., National Research Council 2002b; U.S. Department of Defense, 2006b, 2010). The U.S. intelligence budget reportedly increased by 250% between 2001 and 2010 (even excluding military activities and domestic counterterrorism programs), and within nine days of 9/11, Congress had committed $40 billion to launch a global counteroffensive, an amount that was supplemented by $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003 (Priest & Arkin, 2010). There was a transient increase in 2003 and 2004 in support to psychology via the DoD (which contains nine of the 16 intelligence agencies), but support has been declining since 2004 to levels not seen since the late 1970s (National Science Foundation, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009). However, since 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has funded psychological research at levels between 10% and 19% of that provided by DoD (National Science Foundation, 2009).

The 9/11 attacks may have produced some shift within nondefense and nonintelligence agencies toward applying what funds were already available to terrorism-related research. Immediately after 9/11, NSF solicited funding proposals related to terrorism via its “Small Grants for Exploratory Research” mechanism, designed to get money quickly into research projects so as to capture data that might not be available at later points in time. A search of the NSF database as of the writing of this article found five NSF research grants with the word terrorism in the title from 1989 to 2001, and 59 since then. NSF's 2004 Human and Social Dynamics cross-cutting priority area—the first such priority led by the social and behavioral sciences—likely received impetus from the events of 9/11; its first-year budget was $18 million. The National Institute of Justice has funded approximately 40 contracts or grants related to terrorism since 9/11. Most of the NIH terrorism-related funding went to bioterrorism via the Centers for Disease Control, with approximately 50 terrorism-related grants from 1999 through 2001 and then about 95 per year through 2010.

Although the level of funding for HUMINT is miniscule compared to what is spent for large defense items such as satellites, ships, and missile defense systems, two DoD research programs with significant budgets were initiated after 9/11 that reflect a higher prioritization of HUMINT. In 2008, the Biosystems Directorate of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Research and Engineering Research Directorate (renamed the Human Performance, Training and Biosystems Directorate in 2010) solicited proposals to its new Human Social, Culture and Behavioral Modeling (HSCB) Program. HSCB seeks research in “human behavior based theories for DoD-relevant models” and tools to “allow decision makers to have available forecasting tools for socio-cultural [human terrain] responses at the strategic, tactical and operational levels” (Office of Naval Research, n.d.-a). This program, under the direction of experimental psychologists working within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, began with approximately $6 million in 2008 and increased its budget to more than $9 million in 2010. The second initiative was the MINERVA project, a 2008 DoD-sponsored, university-based social science basic research program initiated by DoD Secretary Robert Gates. MINERVA focused on areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy and sought “to increase the department's intellectual capital in the social sciences, improve its ability to address future challenges, and build bridges between the department and the social science community” (U.S. Department of Defense, 2008, para. 3). The awards, reviewed and administered by the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, were expected to be about $50 million over five years. Some portion of these funds was transferred to NSF; via their “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” solicitation, the NSF awarded nearly $8 million in basic social and behavioral science research projects in 2010. This included awards to the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland and to the Social Psychology Department at San Francisco State University. The MINERVA program is continuing with Phase 2 in 2011 (U.S. Department of Defense, n.d.).

From the perspective of 2011, there have been two significant new U.S. national security and intelligence policy initiatives involving psychological science since 9/11. The first was within DHS. The DHS Science & Technology Directorate supports psychological research and the application of psychological science to understanding and countering terrorism through several of its Centers of Excellence programs. Currently, there are 12 DHS Centers of Excellence, including the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), based at the University of Maryland, which focuses on conducting social and behavioral science research into the causes and consequences of terrorism. START began in 2005 with a $12-million grant from DHS (renewed in 2008) to complete projects in the areas of terrorist group formation and recruitment, terrorist group persistence and dynamics, and societal responses to terrorist attacks. Since START's founding, the Center has conducted a significant amount of psychological research related to these topics. In addition, several of the other DHS Centers of Excellence partner with behavioral scientists to answer the questions they focus on, for example, the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism, led by the University of Southern California, and the National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Responses, led by Johns Hopkins University. The DHS Science & Technology Directorate, Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division also provides direct support to psychological research. Research topics there include understanding the differences between groups that do and do not engage in extremist violence; identifying psychological indicators of deception, insider threat, and hostile intent; measuring and promoting community preparedness and resilience; and enhancing human performance.

The second significant security and intelligence policy initiative post-9/11 was the HIG, the interagency initiative of the Obama administration. Reporting to the National Security Council, the HIG has as its primary function the conducting of strategic interrogations both within the United States and overseas, but it has an important and explicitly mandated supporting function, which is to conduct and support research on interrogations for dissemination across the U.S. government. This research is focused on the application of psychological science to effective and ethical methods of gaining valid information from another person by talking with them, using the principles and data of psychology over the last century (e.g., how memory works, methods of persuasion and negotiation, communication theory, verbal indicators of deception, and decision-making processes). The ISB interrogations Working Group described earlier had a significant impact on the nature of the function, structure, and mission of the HIG, as well as the mandate for research. For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government supports a science of intelligence interrogations.

Conclusions

It is difficult and no doubt unwise to make any general assertions about the impacts of psychological science on the policies or practices of national security agencies only a decade removed from 9/11. In addition to the DHS Centers of Excellence that support psychological science, the DHS Science &Technology Directorate's Human Factors Program, the ONR's HSCB program, the DoD's MINERVA program, and the interrogation research program at the HIG are all significant new initiatives supporting psychological science since 9/11. There also have been instances of particular individual psychologists in significant policy positions, even if only temporarily: A psychologist with expertise in traumatic stress and community resilience served on the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Council. A decision science and risk analysis psychologist served on the DHS Science & Technology Advisory Committee. An experimental psychologist initiated the HSCB program. An educational psychologist was the assistant director for Social, Behavioral and Educational Sciences at OSTP in 2001, and he ensured that the National Science and Technology Council Task Force appreciated the role of the behavioral and social sciences in creating effective national counterterrorism strategies. He was followed by an experimental psychologist, also acting as assistant director, who managed the review and production of the social and behavioral science–focused report on “Combating Terrorism” in 2005 (National Science and Technology Council, 2005a). A DHS clinical psychologist and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow personality psychologist collaborated with a DHS biophysicist who was convinced that the behavioral sciences would be important to DHS, and together they articulated the need for a DHS Science & Technology Human Factors Division.

It appears, however, that the impacts of psychological science on national security agencies' policies and practices overall have been relatively limited since 9/11, despite some modest increases in funding levels and mechanisms. One might have expected greater impacts, given that counterterrorism strategies can work only if they are based on sound behavioral and social science principles. For example, and although there must be exceptions, the research on terrorism conducted at the DHS START Center has not appeared to significantly impact terrorism-related intelligence or law enforcement policies. The research on violent extremist behaviors supported by the DHS Science &Technology Directorate's Human Factors Division has not led to any appreciable adjustments on the part of federal, state, local, or tribal law enforcement dealings with communities vulnerable to international or national terrorist agendas. The DoD HSCB and MINERVA programs have yet to have an impact on the policies or practices of the DoD. The HIG research program on interrogation has had no impact on interrogation policies or practices. By all accounts, these limited impacts are not due to failures on the part of program managers, participants, or research constituencies. What all these efforts have in common, and what might be at least partially responsible for inefficacies, is the challenge of translating research findings into policies and practices. A lack of infrastructure, resources, and policies to assess behavioral and social science findings in operational contexts and to ensure appropriate field validation has plagued behavioral and social science for the past several decades (National Research Council, 1988, 2010, 2011).

It might be that limited impacts are part of a larger problem, which is that science- or evidence-based arguments currently do not have success within any branch of government, as illustrated by recent failures to enact climate-change-related legislation despite significant evidence of the effect of human systems on the global climate (see Weber & Stern, 2011). Science literacy is rare among members of the three branches of government (Mervis, 2010). The impacts of a lack of science expertise are exacerbated by the fact that there are no psychologists in mid- to high-level policy positions in any U.S. national security agencies or in any other executive branch agencies (including the White House). It is unlikely, therefore, that psychological science will affect national security agency or other executive office agendas, budgets, planning, or priorities. This void also allows for methods or tools that lack any sound scientific basis to make their way into practice—thereby not only possibly endangering the lives of those who use them but also wasting taxpayer money. Examples include the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, indicators of voice stress, and the polygraph as assays for personnel screening or security breaches. Furthermore, the lack of a senior psychologist voice means that when behavioral or social science is proposed as a means to help solve significant social or security challenges—such as energy consumption or counterinsurgency strategies—there is no one to speak truth to power, that is, to point out that such issues may be at least as much a matter of politics as of science (Loewenstein & Ubel, 2010).

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