The story
APS was founded in 1988 by a group of researchers and scientifically-oriented practitioners who were interested in advancing scientific psychology and its representation at the national and international level. This group felt that the American Psychological Association (APA) was not adequately supporting scientific research because it focused on the practitioner/clinician side of psychology, and had effectively "become a guild". Tensions between the scientists and the practitioners escalated. The two groups had contrasting beliefs about such divisive issues as scientific versus human values, determinism versus Indeterminism, objectivism versus intuitionism, laboratory investigations versus field studies, nomothetic versus idiographic explanations, and elementism versus holism (Simonton, 2000).
The founding of the APS was only the most recent instance of long-standing intra-disciplinary tensions that have characterized the field since APA's inception in 1892. Organized psychology has always represented various constituencies, and beginning in the 1970s, there were several attempts to restructure the APA in an effort to mitigate internal tensions and satisfy the needs of a heterogeneous group. In 1987, the Assembly for Scientific and Applied Psychologists (ASAP) formed to support another reorganization effort, but ultimately this reorganization plan was rejected by the APA membership in early 1988. As a consequence, in August 1988, the ASAP became the APS.
APS surpassed 5,000 members in its first six months. As of June 2026, internationally, ~7,000 psychological scientists with specialties ranging from scientific research, applied science, and psychological education, are members of APS.
From Wikipedia’s article on Association for Psychological Science, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5