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By Robyn M. Dawes
Posted by permission by FMSF. Copyright by FMSF. Originally posted at http://www.fmsfonline.org/dawes.html
ABSTRACT: Many people believe in the existence of widespread “repressed” child sexual abuse and organized satanic cults. Such beliefs occur despite lack of evidence supporting them, influenced instead by reliance on authorities and social consensus. In addition, people fail to understand the fallibility of retrospective memory, erroneously assume that high confidence in a memory means that it is accurate, and mistakenly believe that more information necessarily implies a better grasp of reality. Compounding this problem is the diminution in the scientific training of licensed therapists. When therapists themselves have not been inoculated with scientific skepticism, they will not inoculate their clients and will instead contribute to the epidemic of irrational beliefs.
I would like to begin this paper with a confession: I believe in thereality of global warming. But why do I believe that?
First, I cannot assess the phenomenon directly myself. In fact, the onlysubjectively compelling evidence I’ve personally encountered for thephenomenon consists of the unusually warm winters in Pittsburgh from 1987on — which is probably about the lousiest bit of evidence available. Myknowledge of better evidence is weak; I’ve not taken a chemistry classbeyond high school, and while I’ve taken many graduate courses inmathematics and statistics (originally to compensate for linguisticincompetence and a language requirement), I have never checked out thedetails of the models themselves — and even if I could, I would have noway of assessing the validity of the data on which they are based.
What I have done is to trust authority. I read articles summarizing themodels in such sources as Science and Scientific American and AmericanScientist. When the authors of these articles assure me that the modelsarc coherent — and that recent evidence is confirming the models — Ibelieve them, even though I have no direct knowledge of their data, theirqualifications, or their veracity. I trust.
In addition, all my close personal friends, including the woman withwhom I live, believe in the reality of global warming. None, for example,has anything but anger and contempt for President Bush’s half-hearteddenial that it is real. In my everyday interactions with these peoplewhen the topic of global warming comes up, none has ever suggested that Iretain an “open mind, questioning all authority” and check out theevidence for myself. In short, two critical factors in my acceptance thatthe evidence is “good” are authority and social consensus.
Now I would like to consider a belief that I don’t hold: The reality ofan after-life. I regard the religious authorities who attest to itsexistence as, frankly, “silly,” and very few of the people with whom Iinteract, including the woman with whom I live, believe in its reality.None has ever suggested that I adopt an “open mind, questioning allauthority” and examine the evidence for an after-life on my own.
Moreover, just as in global warming (Pittsburgh is getting hotter in thewinter), I find ersatz evidence of my own experience compelling. Peopleto whom I have been close who suffer severe neurological impairment fromsuch conditions as Alzheimer’s appear to me to be partially non-existent,as people; the inference that when their brain totally shuts down theirpersonal qualities will be totally non-existent is compelling. Further,my own “near death” experience (or was it just an ether dream?) wasnothing like the ones reported by Kübler-Ross. Every feeling of “losing”something valuable I have ever experienced before or after in my life was”rolled into one,” although I didn’t know what I was losing. The universeitself was simultaneously disintegrating and contracting to a singlepoint. I kept screaming “There’s such a thing as life,” although I didn tknow what the words meant. A committed theologian would dismiss both myinterpretations of what has happened to others and my own experience astotally irrelevant to the reality on being resurrected from the dead andjudged by God.
But 80% of the people in the United States believe in an after-life(Gallup & Castelli, 1989), perhaps even some members of this audience.Why? Two important factors are the same as those that I cited for beliefin global warming; trust in authority, and social consensus. People whobelieve in the after-life are reassured of its existence periodically bylearned ministers, and interact (at least in churches) with otherssharing their belief. Moreover, they may readily interpret ersatz”evidence” as supportive.
My first point is to suggest that belief in a high rate of “repressed”child sexual abuse and the widespread existence of satanic cultspracticing sexual abuse on children is influenced by the same factors.Authorities have attested to their existence. Moreover, especially whenpeople attend self-help groups or go into therapy with authority figureswho believe this nonsense, they encounter a great deal of socialconsensus concerning such reality. Finally, they can interpretnon-diagnostic experience as compatible “evidence.” And why shouldn’t webe trusting of authority and influenced by consensus? (at least so far asdeciding what it is we don’t need to investigate on our own). As Stichand Nisbett (1980) point out, a total rejection of authority figures inour life would lead to an inability to function, totally. We could notbuy either a prescription or a nonprescription pill at a pharmacy if wehad no trust in the authorities of the FDA, or for that matter eat foodthat was not grown in our own gardens. (Even raising our own animalsinvolves some trust in the people who are monitoring what the animalsthemselves are fed — as the recent popular book and movie Bitter Harvestpointed out, a trust that is not always warranted.)
Or how could we be here today without trusting a remarkable number ofauthorities? — beginning with the people who program the computers used byour reservation agents, continuing through those who design the airplanesor monitor their safety — and including the architect of this hotel.(Again, this trust is occasionally misplaced — as when one discovers thata confirmed reservation has been “erased,” or discovers that the leftengine is on fire and hopes that the pilot will have enough expertise torealize that it is the left one.) The completely open mind that questionsall authorities would reside in a body that is a blithering mess.
(We might do well to take quite seriously the finding that peopleanswering authoritarianism scales are inconsistently authoritarian butconsistently anti-authoritarian, rather than to ascribe the result to a”response bias.” [For a critique see Rorer, 1965]. Perhapsauthoritarianism comes naturally to people, while the “syndrome”indicated by consistency of aberrant responding — isanti-authoritarianism; “eternal vigilance” is, after all, akin toparanoia.)
Moreover, consider what life would be like if we did not acceptconsensus belief as a quite valid cue to reality. An enormous amount ofwhat we “learn” about the world is provided by the people around us(Simon, 1990), and to be oblivious to their beliefs would trap us in theposition of the hypothetical child raised by an altruistic wolf.
Now trust in authority and consensual validation are not “rational”bases for belief. What I am suggesting, however, is that they are thebases for most of what we believe most of the time — in fact, almosteverything we believe almost all of the time. Is it any wonder then thata contagion of beliefs can occur even though these beliefs do notwithstand critical scrutiny (i.e., ours)? We have certainly observedcontagion of belief in the past concerning belief that we and others havecome to debunk. And we will in the future.
But why these particular beliefs in widespread repressed child sexualabuse and satanic cults? I wish to hypothesize a major factor later. Now,however, I would like to emphasize the difficulty of understanding — morespecifically, believing — the evidence that these beliefs are erroneous.
1. The first evidence concerns the fallibility of retrospective memory.That has been discussed elsewhere (Loftus, Korf & Schooler, 1989;Pearson, Ross & Dawes, 1992), and I don’t wish to reiterate all theevidence concerning this fallibility. The point I wish to make is howdifficult it is to believe that what one remembers is not true. Thepresent is fleeting, the future does not yet exist; consequently,virtually all our conscious knowledge is based on our memory. Moreover,we have good reason to believe that our memory is generally correct (ifit weren’t, we d be dead), even memories involved in “motor programs”such as driving your car or playing a piano. To ask people to questiontheir own memory is tantamount to asking them to question their owninterpretation of reality, which at the extreme is close to asking themto consider the possibility that they are schizophrenic. Just as peoplecouldn’t function with a “perfectly open mind,” they couldn’t function ifthey were constantly to doubt that what they recalled as true was in facttrue.
Moreover, it is perfectly reasonable (Dawes, 1989, 1990) to “project” onothers our beliefs in the validity of our own memories. Even though wemay have been “influenced” to believe one thing or another, that does notmake the memory less real to us — hence less of a basis for makingdecisions in our life. So why should we believe that such factors accountfor the memories of others?
2. Another important bit of evidence is that confidence is not veryhighly correlated with accuracy. But how can I change myconfidence — e.g., in a particular judgment or memory — on the basis ofknowing that confidence is not a good cue to validity, when in factconfidence is confidence about how correct I am?
An anecdote: A close colleague has written a brilliant paper about”outside” versus “inside” judgment (Kahneman & Lovallo, in press). Theexemplar involved asking academics how long it will take for a particularcommittee to achieve its goal. These same academics are then asked tothink of similar committees they have been on with similar goals and howlong it took these committees to achieve their goals. The second timeestimates are an order of magnitude greater than the first. And they aremore accurate.
When I was talking to this same colleague about the upcomingpresidential elections, he stated that he was “absolutely sure” thatClinton could not win, and he gave me a “subjective probability” close to.98. I couldn’t resist asking him how often in general his politicaljudgments were correct when he was that certain, and he snapped back “63%of the time.” We both laughed, but we also both agreed that it isextraordinarily difficult to be uncertain about things when one iscertain. Moreover, a knowledge of the “calibration” literature concerningconfidence (see Fischhoff, 1988), doesn’t help much. Think of individuals”recalibrating” themselves on the basis of this knowledge: “I believethat on judgments about which I am this sure, I am correct 95% of thetime; therefore, I believe that on judgments about which I am thisconfident, I will be correct 79% of the time.”
And once again, when we ourselves treat confidence as an excellent cueto validity, it is perfectly reasonable to “project” that it is anexcellent cue for others as well. Why should we doubt someone who claimsthey are absolutely confident concerning an event (judgment perhaps beinga slightly different matter). If we were to adopt as a general principlethat high confidence about recalled events is not a very good reason tobelieve that these events actually occurred, we’d be faced with a realdilemma about how to run our own lives. “I am very confident that I knowexactly what happened, but it probably didn’t happen that way.”
3. Even though we believe that “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks” andthat “the generals are always fighting the last war,” we ourselves knowthat we get wiser as we grow older (although we may admit senescence insome particular areas). Why? I propose that in addition to all theself-serving reasons, there is a compelling cognitive basis for thisbelief. When we are older we have all the information we had when we wereyounger plus more. It is quite natural to believe that the moreinformation one has, the better one’s grasp of reality. It isparticularly compelling to believe that if information set A subsumesinformation set B, then a belief or judgment based on A must be superiorto one based on B. Ellsberg1 pointed this assumption out with respect tothe debates on the Vietnam War between people who did versus those whodid not have access to classified or secret information. Those who hadaccess knew that they had knowledge others didn’t — while also havingaccess to the knowledge that others did have. Hence, their judgment wasnaturally superior, only it wasn’t.
In fact, additional knowledge can simply cloud judgment, although notconfidence (Oskamp, 1965). But that’s hard to believe. Now, we criticsare claiming that when people believed earlier in their lives that theywere not sexually abused they were correct, while they are incorrect intheir later beliefs. How can that be, given they have access to the sameinformation they had earlier plus more, including the judgment of theauthorities? Certainly, we do not go around proclaiming that “now that Iknow more I know less” or believing that our knowledge is enhanced byliterally throwing away information, and once again we would have littlereason not to “project” that principle on others in general.
In short, asking people to doubt the conclusions concerning widespreadchildhood sexual abuse and satanic cults is asking them not only toreject the usual bases of authority and consensus for establishingreality, but in addition to accept principles that violate foundations ofeveryday functioning.
Now in point of fact we do ask people to accept such principles, andthey do. Few people, for example, believe that the world is flat, eventhough it appears to be, or believe that cigarettes and alcohol are goodfor them, even though both may have very pleasant effects. We return oncemore to the efficacy of authority. People who have no direct experienceof the curvature of the earth believe that it is not flat, and even thegreatest devotees of tobacco and alcohol believe that these drugs areharming them. We accept what we have been told by “reputableauthorities.” (We even accept what has been communicated by very minorauthority figures, such as the person who draws a map that shows the SuezCanal to be longer than the Panama Canal.)
Here, we have a very serious influence on the epidemic of the currentbelief. Specifically, the last 20 years have provided a veritableexplosion of credentialed psychotherapists, with a simultaneousdiminution in the scientific training that would lead them to know whatthey are talking about. I don’t want to go into all the statisticaldetails here, but two statistics are relevant. First, in the paperpresented by Wakefield and Underwager (1992) the (admittedly non-random)sample yields the conclusion that 33% of the therapists supporting thevalidity of the repressed memory syndrome were psychologists and 8%psychiatrists. While the field of clinical psychology has been doublingat the rate of once every 10 years and that of psychiatry has beendoubling at the rate of once only 20 years (for a comparison, the rate oflawyers has been doubling once every 12 years), there are still onlyabout 75% or so more practicing clinical psychologists thanpsychiatrists. Why, then, the 4 to 1 ratio?
The answer I propose is that while the training of psychiatrists stillinvolves required undergraduate courses in science and the first twoyears of medical school in the science of medicine, the scientifictraining of clinical psychologists has — I’m afraid — gone to hell. Fewerand fewer (now somewhere between 13% and 18%) are being trained at thetop 200 graduate institutions, while more and more (almost 40%) are beinggraduated from professional schools. (The former figure was close to 40%in 1970 and the latter was 0.)
It is, of course, not true that a person obtaining an advanced degreefrom an institution of lesser status necessarily has had poorerscientific training that a person graduating from a place of higherstatus, or understands the scientific basis of psychology less well.There is a great deal of overlap in actual training and understanding. Ingeneral, however, as Lee Sechrest claims, “we are graduating people withonly a peripheral knowledge of psychology” (Hayes, 1989). (All thestatistics supporting this conclusion are presented in the first chapterof my forthcoming book: Psychology and Psychotherapy: The Myth ofProfessional Expertise [in press].)
Without training in scientific psychology, it is little wonder that somany practitioners do not accept — or even know about — principles thatviolate our naive assumptions concerning everyday functioning. Given theydon’t know, the “authoritarian” basis for holding or diminishing thisepidemic is lost. When they themselves have not been “inoculated” withscientific skepticism, there is little reason to expect them to inoculatetheir clients.
In summary, this epidemic of belief is consistent with our ways offunctioning in the everyday world, and there is little to stop theepidemic. We may understand the “irrationality” of much of our everydayfunctioning, but often only when it leads to a conclusion that we believeto be untrue. We will have great difficulty teaching people in generalabout such irrationality, because our colleagues themselves do notunderstand it.
I came across the following article in the most recent issue of Science(May 22, 1992). It was entitled: “Open Season on Depression” (Vol. 256,pg. 1137).
Mental illness may be taking another step out of the closet with aproject recently launched by a Harvard psychiatrist: The first nationwidefree screening program for depression. Douglas Jacobs, who practices atMcLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, says depression is a majorpublic health problem, afflicting an estimated 10 million Americans in agiven 6-month period, but only one-third of sufferers get diagnosed ortreated for it
So in 1990, Jacobs started a pilot program at McLean, which was expandedlast year to 90 facilities in 44 states. About 5,000 people attendedlectures and discussions on depression last year at health facilities;3,000 of them filled out self-report forms and had short meetings withmental health professionals who told them about treatment options. Jacobssays half of the people who attended the screening had never had anytreatment for depression, but the self-report forms indicated that halfwere probably clinically depressed. Plans are to expand greatly the nextscreening, scheduled for October. With the support of the NationalDepressive and Manic Depressive Association, a patient advocacy group,the organizers hope to reach up to 400 locations — including non-healthfacilities like shopping malls and libraries — and screen up to 20,000people.
“It’s time that psychiatry not be behind closed doors,” says Jacobs. He’salready thinking about the next advance:A “national substance-abuse screening day.”
That is allegedly science, but how is it really structurally differentfrom the pseudoscience we have been discussing today? I invite the readerto think of similarities and differences.
I would also like the reader to consider the following hypotheticalexperiment. I am going to screen 5,000 people to determine whether theysuffer from the newly discovered mental illness syndromes ofaslantophelia and aslantophobia. I will ask such questions as thefollowing:
Do you ever think about the possibility that either you or your spouse(partner/significant other/best friend) might die before the other does?
Has it ever occurred to you that even though you are doing your job well,the organization in which you work may be in trouble?
Have you ever wondered whether your personal life might be different ifLee Harvey Oswald — or whoever it was who shot President Kennedy — hadmissed?
When people answer “yes” to such questions, phrased positively as above,they will be diagnosed as suffering from aslantophelia, a feeling ofgreat uncertainty and lack of stability in life. When they answer “no,”they will be diagnosed as suffering from aslantophobia, a denial of thedegree to which life is uncertain and unstable. (In the actualquestionnaires, of course, positive and negative wordings will bebalanced.) Both syndromes will follow from their parents’ — particularlytheir mothers’ — inability to provide them as young infants with thenecessary sense of security. The primary recommendation for peoplesuffering from either of these syndromes will be prolonged therapy tohelp them “get in touch” with those feelings they experienced as aninfant so that they can “work them through.” How many takers would Ihave? Could I set up support groups of people suffering from thesesyndromes? If so, could there be an epidemic?
Robyn M. Dawes is a University Professor of Psychology at CarnegieMellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This paper was presented atthe Fourth Annual Convention of the American Psychology Society, SanDiego, June 20, 1992.
1 “You have the information, they don’t; they don’t even have the wisdomto know that they don’t know; therefore they have no legitimate role. Youwill become unable to learn from anyone who does not have theseclearances.” Testimony to a Joint Senate Committee Quoted in T. Fain, K.C. Plant, and R. Milloy (1977), The Intelligence Community: History,Organization, and Issues. New York: R. P. Bowker, 501-514.
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