In their paper, “Academic Freedom, Civil Liberties, and SPSSI,” S. Stansfeld Sargent and Benjamin Harris (1986) give an account of the threat to individual liberties that characterized SPSSI's early years. Based to some extent on my personal experience during the post‐World War II peak of this threat (i.e., the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy), I add a brief supplement to Sargent's and Harris's account. I provide a description of initial attempts by SPSSI members to discover the social psychological principles that help to understand the erosion of individual rights and freedoms that took place in those