[From Bruce Abbott (971206.1420 EST)]
Bill Powers (971206.0459 MST) --
Bruce Abbott (971206.0310)
Some seem to
think that this absolves them of criticisms that they want to be dictators
-- after all, they say, we can't really _make_ people do anything.
Is that what you think, that psychologists want to be dictators? The
methods of dictatorial control are well known and astonishingly effective
(e.g., see Hitler, 1936); if psychologists want to be dictators, why don't
they just use these methods?
Because they're illegal in this country, except when applied to children or
prisoners. In the old Soviet Union, psychiatric "treatment" was used to
nullify dissidents: deviation from the party line was prima facie evidence
of mental illness.
Oh come off it Bill. Jim Jones didn't do anything illegal (at least not
until he had his men kill that congressman and others who were with him),
nor did the founder of the Heaven's Gate group. Talk about control! If
that's the sort of thing psychologists wanted to do, there would be nothing
to prevent them from doing it. And calling what went on in the Soviet Union
"psychiatric treatment" is like calling Mengele's experiments "medical
research." Tell you what. Let's call it "engineering" and claim that it's
what engineers want to do, and would if it were not illegal.
I have a different view: psychologists want to understand human perception,
cognition, emotion, memory, learning, psychological development, brain
function, to the point where effective intervention becomes possible when
things go wrong and a person needs help.
The tricky question is who decides that a person needs help.
Yes indeed.
All intervention assumes that
something can be done to change the way individuals function;
It also assumes that the way an individual functions _should_ be changed,
and that it should be changed in a particular way (often, back toward the
average behavior -- see David Goldstein's proposed project). In recent
years, this decision has been left more to the person whose behavior is to
be changed, but that has come about mainly through a long series of court
cases rather than enlightenment on the part of psychologists or psychiatrists.
The result, too frequently, is deranged people who could have been helped to
lead more normal lives, out on the streets contributing to the homeless
population and eating out of garbage bins, or committing suicide. You call
that progress?
Isn't bringing
about an intended change in skills, attitude, and so on an example of
control on Dag's part? If so, does this mean that, in your mind, Dag wants
to be a dictator?No, although Dag may disagree. A dictator wants to control others to suit
his own concepts of how he wants people to behave. A helper tries to find
out what other people are trying to control, and helps them do it better if
he can (and if he agrees he wants them to be able to do it better -- I
don't think I'd want to help a burglar get better at his trade).
And you believe that psychologists want to do the former rather than the
latter. This will come as quite a shock to David Goldstein and other
practitioners on this list.
My point was that if it were possible to control other
people perfectly, many psychologists would (or think they would) jump at
the chance. I spent a year in a behavioristic graduate school of
psychology, and the other students spent what seemed a large part of their
time thinking up fun ways to control other people. And their professors,
after hours, joined in the fun with their own gleeful ancedotes.
I've been associated with psychology for over 30 years now and I can't
recall a single case that even remotely fits your description. The
psychologists I know are humane people who are interested, not in exerting
coersive control over others, but in understanding human nature and
developing ways to assist people in becoming better adjusted, happier
individuals who have the psychological skills to cope successfully with life
as they experience it.
When I was in graduate school, we students were told about an experiment in
which a psychologist decided to eliminate all confounding factors and
_prove_ that stimuli really cause responses. He boiled the procedure down
to presenting a light stimulus and measuring some motor response, I forget
which one. To keep the animal from moving around and altering its relation
to the stimulus, he ended up building a narrow box into which the animal
was inserted, on its back, with a clamps to hold its body, head, and three
limbs still. To keep the animal from closing its eyes and thus failing to
receive the stimulus, he surgically removed its eyelids. And still, the
animal failed to respond every time with the same action given the same
stimulus. Conclusion? Behavior is variable.
The story you recount sounds highly implausible to me. Can you supply the
reference for this gruesome "experiment"? When was it supposedly conducted?
By whom? Where? These days such an "experiment" (if one could call it
that) would never get by the institutional animal care and use committee.
Anecdotal stories like this carry little weight with me; even when they
reflect real events they tend to be highly selected, memorable cases that
are not at all representative of whatever it is they are supposed to typify,
and they are usually described inaccurately in order to emphasize the point
the story-teller wants to put over. These events you describe have no
counterpart in my own considerable experience within the field of
experimental psychology, nor in the broader field of psychology in general.
Regards,
Bruce