7
Extreme Prejudice:
Para-Skeptical Psychology Professors, Psychologists Show Contempt for Heart of Human Condition
This essay extends the current body of work in adverse impact on ethnic and racial minorities to minorities as defined by certain phenomena (and their students) neglected within the psychological community. This essay proposes that despite their preoccupation with racial and ethnic minorities, psychologists have disenfranchised students based solely on their research interests and related characteristics.
Adverse Impact for Minority Groups
Remember when statements asserting compliance with EEOC and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 were framed for public display? Seems like these placards, notched on the wall above the water cooler or beneath the sanitary rating from the health department, did not maintain their abundance into the new millenium. Of course, I'm talking about that statement "It is unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin." This defensive propaganda is sooooo ...... 20th Century and as late as the 90s had an odor of transparency and casual duress ... more of a mustiness really. Truth be told the mantra of the EEOC -- was slowly preparing to go the way of the Army's "Be All That You Could Be," shortly before it was replaced by "An Army of One." Simmering beneath the crust was a molting of the very idea of what discrimination was. It just hadn't erupted yet in the parade of headlines grabbed by social scientists and investigative journalists claiming discrimination on the basis of such things as height, weight, and physical attractiveness. Apparently, some retailers will only put prom queens behind cash registers, while others bluntly reject applicants who confess to using tobacco products. And United Artists remains defiant in casting male actors from the United Kingdom in the role of James Bond.
Once upon a time, employers knew how not to attract the attention of the EEOC. And once upon a time, when discrimination was popularly defined as a deliberate expression of prejudice, that’s all they needed to do. In the 80s and 90s, social scientists, journalists, and politicians unveiled to the public and body politic more insidious forms of discrimination … an epidemic of discrimination gone underground. Like bacteria that evolved into forms resistant to antibiotics, discrimination itself mutated into systemic and even subconscious acts capable of eluding detection or prosecution. The old discrimination is gone. Today we speak of "adverse effect" and "aversive racism."
The modern employer is more mindful of how company policies and procedures may inadvertently give an unfair advantage to certain demographic groups in hiring, retention, or promotion. The whole dance brings to mind every third down and long in which a tumbling wideout sprung to his feet to plead his case for "interference" with the line judge. Did the corner inadvertently step on the wideout's heel or tangle his legs in pursuit of the ball? Such "incidental contact" would be beside the point in the modern era of American labor. Incidental or not, any interference with someone's pursuit of happiness could exact a penalty. Employers are vulnerable to civil actions and government sanctions if members of a protected demographic group are not sufficiently represented among the numbers of new hires or promotions. When the selection ratio for one group (e.g., blacks) is less than 80% (four-fifths) of the selection ratio for another group (e.g., whites), adverse impact is said to exist (i.e., blacks are said to be "adversely affected" by hiring procedures).
As if this weren't enough, a new line of research originated by social scientists Gaertner and Dovidio provides support for a subconscious form of racism perpetrated by the most unlikely individuals … well-intentioned political liberals … who exhibited a different way of discriminating against black callers in a helping experiment. A summary of this research can be found not only on psych department web sites but also on blogs of lawyers and professors of law. In the words of one law professor, Vernellia R. Randall, "… because aversive racists consciously endorse egalitarian values and deny negative feelings about blacks, they will not discriminate directly and openly in ways that can be attributed to racism. However, because of their negative feelings they will, in fact, discriminate, often unintentionally, when their behavior can be justified on the basis of some factor other than race."
Social scientists and many attorneys have adopted the argument that regardless of what your intentions are, or what you state your intentions are, you are discriminating if something you did, or something you failed to do, deprives a social minority. Therefore, as you might expect, modern employers look to consulting firms, many of which employ industrial-organizational (I/O) psychologists, to safeguard their good standing against a kind of discrimination they may not even realize they’re committing.
And many employers take a proactive approach, adopting affirmative hiring policies to prevent minority under-representation within their ranks or take the sting out of complaints filed by one or more minorities. Promoting a diverse workforce has become big business.
Adverse Impact for Minority Groups a Preoccupation within Psychology Departments
Promoting a diverse workforce also borders on a mission within departments of psychology, with professors of social or I/O psychology publishing scientific papers on the diagnosis, measurement, and remediation of adverse impact. Companies are taught that the most "valid" predictors of employee performance (i.e., tests of cognitive ability) are the most diabolical in terms of producing disparate (and thus discriminatory) effects for majority and minority applicants. Companies are advised to undertake a range of strategies to narrow the average difference between majority and minority groups on tests determining employment decisions (e.g., adding non-cognitive tests to cognitive abilities, using specific measures of ability, weighting criteria, changing test format to minimize verbal requirements, increasing motivation by increasing the perceived appropriateness of the tests, orienting applicants to the tests, and target-recruiting minorities to reduce number of unqualified applicants).
Spearheading the effort to increase minority representation in Psychology is The American Psychological Association (APA). The APA’s Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) offers various fellowships (i.e., Clinical Training Fellowship, Neuroscience Training Fellowship, Aging Training Traineeship, Research Training Fellowship) to "increase the number of ethnic minorities who complete doctoral degrees in psychology and thus improve the quality of mental health treatment and research issues of concern among ethnic minority populations." The APA's Public Policy Office lobbied both Senate and House Appropriations Subcommittees to increase funding for MFP at SAMHSA, and participated in other initiatives including a White House briefing on affirmative action and meetings with the Congressional Black Caucus and University of Maryland graduate students of color. An APA Monitor report offered strategies for minority psychology graduate students and those with disabilities to use to successfully survive the graduate school experience (December, 2001) and reported that the APA's Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs (July/August 2000) was awarded $820,000 to increase retention and recruitment of ethnic minorities in biomedical research. Concerned that "nearly 70 percent of ethnic-minority psychologists are in clinical, counseling or school psychology," the OEMA required educational institutions to develop research workshops and change curricula among other strategies to increase "representation of people of color in the scientific areas of psychology." Faculty at three universities developed a special 10-week summer research workshop and a special yearlong research activity (i.e., Psychology Research Initiatives Mentorship Experience [PRIME]) for minority undergraduates, at the conclusion of which the faculty and students jointly presented a poster. The minority students also complete a special career-coaching course in which they are given strategies for navigating graduate admission criteria of which most students will remain unaware. The APA has even advocated for the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) for gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons and "advocated for an increased focus on lesbian health."
As a student who performed ambitious independent research as an undergraduate, earned a near 4.0 GPA, scored in the 98th percentile of the GRE Verbal and 92nd percentile of the GRE Psychology, and enrolled in research-related electives, I was disappointed (after being denied interviews by 38 of 40 programs) to learn that APA's Minority Undergraduate Students of Excellence (MUSE) program targeted racial and ethnic minorities for strategic advantages. I understand the initiative was intended to address the finding that between 1976 and 1993 ethnic minorities accounted for only 7.6% of psychology doctorates. But just how fair is the process if I am spending one of my few application checks to compete for one of two available vacancies in a graduate program that is privately recruiting minorities for at least one of these positions? You would think the fair thing for such a program to do would be to put a message reading "white males need not apply" on the application. Quoting one of the minority students: "I learned about schools I probably wouldn't have known about. A lot of them pursued me (emphasis added) for programs I probably wouldn't have thought of if I had just looked through a book of psychology graduate programs" (APA Monitor; March, 2000). Established the same year I first applied to graduate programs in Psychology, MUSE "creates a large pool of applicants from which graduate departments and professional schools can recruit and select students...mail(ing) a listing of the MUSE candidates to more than 1,100 institutions."
And don’t be surprised if these incoming minority graduate students build their careers on specialization in racial stereotyping and prejudice research. This is already one of the most popular topics among students and professors. Meanwhile, research in the area of dreams (my interest) is becoming less popular and intelligent by the day.
Adverse Impact Neglected: The Non-Protected Groups
So we've established the obvious. Psychology professors are obsessed with promoting a racially and ethnically (and even sexually) diverse workforce, even within their own walls. But what about the diversity of ideas? I for one could not help but notice just how overtly and unapologeticly the graduate faculty demanded I share their opinions. How unseemly it was for a student like myself -- in a modern doctoral research program -- to confess interest in the classical musings of Swiss psychiatrist CG Jung. How extravagant or juvenile I must have seemed to them to squander my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation on dreams & dreaming. And it wasn't like I threw on a white lab coat and hooked up some college freshmen to an electroencephalagraph. Nor did I intend to prove that dreams were nothing but what my professors needed to believe they were: random neural discharges ... cognitive filing cabinets. No. In what must have been my kookery, I theorized a much greater role for dreams in personality and waking life. How arrogant I must have seemed to claim dream experiences -- analyzed or not -- remembered or not -- shaped the course of thought and feeling for the following day ... including selective attention (what we noticed), rational judgment & decision-making style, emotional reactivity (moods and values), and intuitive impetus (what things meant to us). No one else in the academy at this time was investigating such a thing, so I must have been carrying around this notion that I enjoyed a very special insight. In other words, I must have been arrogant. And if I was right, it meant that I possessed some insight into something that "controlled" everyone alike, even my professors, most of whom never remembered a dream in their lives. Oh, the shenanigans. No wonder my professors reserved this chip on their shoulder for the subject of dreaming. Dreaming represents an experience many of them felt left out of. (I wonder if it's anything like the resentment I harbored when I didn't see much sex in high school). To add insult to injury, dreaming poses too great a challenge to them scientifically and intellectually, exposing the limits of both their intelligence and their business model (research paradigm).
And psych profs do not like to be challenged. They're too busy streamlining rules so that everyone knows what to expect from one another ... so they all know precisely what is required to reach career milestones ... what it means to be a "professional" or to be "committed to excellence," ... so they can all review each other's research in their sleep. Remember, they all have a publishing schedule to keep, and the simplest way to get published is to use preferred methods to test hypotheses derived from other people's work. Psych profs make no bones about the fact their job is to fill little holes in the "organized" body of knowledge (the "literature," they would say). To credit their colleagues the way they would like to be credited. To assume their "place" in the puzzle that is this body of knowledge. They don't mind working only with what pieces they're given. And they don't mind assuming the shape of whatever piece is missing. In their view, this is the humble role of the member in a scientific community. Unfortunately, it insulates psychological science from the role of serendipity, exploration, and contemplation.
So when I came along professing an interest in something none of us knew anything about ... a playful, almost childlike curiosity in something before which we are all children ... I was treated like Kunta Kinte at a Klu Klux Klan revival. Oh, I may not have had my own dream lab, or that designer performance-enhancing drug known as skepticism, but I was empirical nonetheless in my pursuit of truth about dreams. I may have collected a lot of qualitative descriptions but these descriptions supported a decisively "statistical" end product. My methods may not have resembled any of the usual templates (e.g., the 2 x 2 ANOVA), but I was structured and systematic.
Make no mistake about it. I was science's true servant. My psych profs were just being fussy.
So don't let this group of professors tell you they're committed to diversity. Their committment is only as deep as the color of one's skin, and it works to preserve a homogeneous community. The architects of the affirmative enrollment program at the University of Michigan based their little experiment in social engineering on the premise that diverse ideas come from diverse people. The problem is that University of Michigan officials seemed to think skin color is the source of all diversity. If you were a white heterosexual male, you couldn't possibly have anything new and stimulating to bring to the table. I think social psychologists would throw cerebral embolisms to learn the vaunted U of M formula, which they proudly defend as well-behaved liberals, is an instance of ... cue the "slasher-poised-to-pounce" music ... aversive racism. Despite the best of intentions (I'm assuming there's no diabolical strategy), what this program actually does, is build a community of culturally diverse yet like-minded liberal academics. No one knows what these students' ideas really are. How could they? The U of M administrators assign only 1 admission point to the applicant's personal essay (as compared to 20 points for minority race), and confessed to 60 Minutes journalists that these essays really weren't being read. Now if I were a white heterosexual male applicant, I'm really roiled. I've not only been denied on the basis of race, but I've wasted valuable time composing an essay the admins won't read, and which wouldn't count toward admission if they did. Why don't they just shove live firecrackers in my mouth while they're at it?
The genius (or should I say "aversive-ness") of this program, is that it conceals the ideological homogeneity under physiognomic diversity. As academe adds more shades of skin to this repertoire, its palate of skill-types, interests, and philosophies shrink. And all this black-and-white thinking is concealed by the skin tones. When I attempt to persuade people psych profs discriminate or that they are not "open," the psych prof points to the nearest African American or lesbian and says, "have you seen my new assistant?"
Beneath this fetishistic rhapsodizing about multiculturalism and diversity is a contempt for a diversity of ideas and interests (their hatred for individual talent and freedom). Through a growing body of written and unwritten style preferences, policies, and procedures, psych profs excise more of the inalienable discretion afforded to individual researchers under fundamental science (see Psychology as ADHD Science). And over training generations, the academic community evolves into a collection of anti-intellectual skeptics and cosmetic scientists for whom rigor is glamour. Within this community are profound acts of discrimination (some aversively inadvertent, some overt) against aspiring researchers of dreams & dreaming (to mention one). The system of rewards & punishments functions to discourage / punish interest in certain classes of psychological phenomena (e.g., dreaming) or else to distort the phenomenon in cases where researchers assist in applying to them the "majority" methods.
In a relentlessly competitive publishing and hiring environment, psychologists demand certain properties or characteristics in their research, properties that are increasingly inconsistent with phased, fluid, exploratory research required by phenomena about which little is known. (Other disciplines seem to accord equal status to its confirmatory, hypothesis-driven "mission-to-Mars" and its exploratory, survey-driven "mission-to-Pluto" research).
The reinforcement structure and schedule governing the university and the profession make it virtually impossible for individuals who claim "missions to Pluto" as their research or clinical interests. They treat these students as adversaries because they believe that their interests, the exploratory methods required to make them accessible to study, and the personal attributes that accompany such methodological choices (e.g., flexibility, appetite for freedom, deviation from norms) fail to contribute to the image of Psychology as a science. Dreaming, for example, by challenging true scholars to think intellectually, creates a glut of theories that reflect the individual differences among them. This threatens the apparent solidarity and material objectivity that contribute to the perceived legitimacy of the field, not that anyone is really paying attention to Psychology.
Consequently, a psychology in which dreaming and personality should have been central objectives in the pursuit of truth about the human condition has deteriorated into a hodge podge of technical, utilitarian, and socially relevant topics (e.g., cockpit design, prejudice) which in turn have become signs and symbols of a researcher's "commitment to excellence" in research. Researchers demonstrating a record of achievement and excellence in these areas of research have disproportionately benefited with publications, grants, and university positions … the rest is evolution (D-Volution). The tree that is Psychology spawned such new branches as Human Factors, Health Psychology, and Modeling & Simulation and accentuated the importance of its existing practical branches such as Physiological/Neuroscience and I/O. The field is so big and so busy that, in its attention to where it has grown, it has neither resources nor the inclination to notice where it has shrunk. Psychology has grown like a tumor at the point of necrosis, expanding outward to the point where blood and oxygen can no longer reach its center; it becomes hollow and constantly changes shape. The once subtle systemic instruments of prejudice shaped Psychology into a homogeneous community of professors whose own attitudes and values now reflect and embody those of the system. The discrimination is complete. Above and beyond practical obstacles to career mobility are the attitudes of individual practitioners and academics who regard certain phenomena, their students, and certain personality characteristics associated with these students or with their interest in the phenomena, with a para-skeptical contempt. Ironic, isn't it? That the ideas and interests that are most victimized by their prejudices are those phenomena at the heart of the human condition, such as dreams, spirituality, attitudes, emotions, symbolism, structure and dynamics of human mind.
So what if we express this discrimination in the same language as that we use to express racial and ethnic discrimination? Adverse impact. Can it be established that the scientific and business practices of the psychological community have a disparate and adverse effect on certain students and subject matter? I believe an empirical investigation into such matters would be complex and difficult, but not outside the realm of possibility. But what if I was able to establish adverse impact for certain classes of phenomena and for their students. Would the psychological community care? Or would they simply rationalize their prejudices? Students of dreams, after all, are not a protected group, and we have no social standing in the world at large, a point of critical importance to the outer-directed psychologist.
Psychology at Odds with Itself
The most small-minded of my adversaries have this penchant for citing textbooks and quoting what their 'authors' have to say about science and psychology. At this point, it is incumbent upon me to remind such a person that Psychology, as an institution, consists of two functions, or machines. The first and larger of the two machines, is the one that maintains the status quo, that keeps the proverbial "main stream" flowing. The purpose of the textbook is three-fold:
- Provide a canon that represents that portion of our knowledge base that is relatively consensual (i.e., the common denominator of the field)
- Socialize students and new members into the field's academic and professional culture
- Provide a nexus for a framework of common expectations that allows everyone to (a) communicate mindlessly, (b) avoid decisions and doubts, and (c) languish in an air of self-contentment and validation, entitlements from the institution's welfare program. Or perhaps 'insurance benefits' for which individualists like myself can tolerate the deductibles (e.g., training) but cannot commit to a lifetime of premiums.
This machine powers a massive framework of expectations designed to (a) facilitate communication and integration, (b) minimize friction and disharmony among members while fostering solidarity, and (c) managing a persona of legitimacy for a public audience. As an institution, psychological science is required to function within a social and material context and much of its make-up is socially constituted, which is to say, grounded in social expedience and necessity rather than on true science and nature.
Then there is the small matter of the 'other machine.' This machine consists of the works or teachings of those who seek to remind us of all the social impurities in our scientific medal, of all the thorny intellectual and philosophical issues that the main machine paints over (as one might scatter a few coats of 'Glade' over a cat's litter box). This represents the critical tradition of the field or that part of the field where researchers play it loose with the field's Procrustean proscriptive and prescriptive boundaries.
In many institutions, these two machines can work together in a system of checks and balances (i.e., a complementary or self-correcting relationship). In psychology, however, those who reside in the critical municipality are not considered part of metropolitan Psychology, so to speak, and given the choice of either swimming in the mainstream or against a major career current. There is a prejudicial attitude against the small machine. Not only do the small and large machines not share a direct line to one another, they are not even permitted to share the same outlet, not even by an extension cord. Those who maintain the small machine have had to find their own power source, and therefore the machine's capacity and reliability has dwindled over the years, which only buttresses some calls to rely even more heavily on the main machine.
This is exemplified by a response I recently received in which an adversary flamboyantly proclaimed that "Science is about finding flaws." How frustrated will he be to learn I did not acquiesce to his coup de gras? "Yes and no," I replied. Science is not like you, and you are at this time all about denouncing me as flawed. Science is not so judgmental. Science is about the search for truth. As such, it is as much a tool of exploration as it is a tool of skepticism. Like many psychologists, you seem to want to embrace its latter aspect at the expense of the former. This is one-sided and counterproductive to discovery. A scholarly scientist exhibits a healthy balance of open-mindedness and skepticism. You have to reach out to the truth. You can't find the truth by chipping away at a block of falsehood in search of "what's left" because you won't know when you find it. You won't know when to stop. And you won't stop, until you are left with nothing, at which point you will call for another block of marble and begin again." Psychology's academics seem to treat skepticism and exploration as they would treat Type I and Type II errors, believing that to design research that serves one function is to necessarily detract from the other function. But they are not so mutually exclusive. They are at least not natural born enemies. Some of our business practices may have created an inhospitable climate for them, as when the 'publish or perish' dictum, coupled with the physical limitations of print journals and the null-hypothesis testing discourse, pit one against the other and force researchers to choose. Then, soon after the truth is survived by career-driven academics who know how to play the game, the field is populated almost exclusively by professors for whom the preference for skepticism over exploration is hard-coded or congenital. And the field evolves in ways that more deeply ingrains this one-sidedness until the professors exhibit a cartoon-like para-skeptical contempt for the stubborn and irrational mysteries of the layman and until the product itself (i.e., the organized body of knowledge) is a labored caricature of the human condition. So the ostensibly antiseptic science of Psychology suffers from what some psychodynamic theorists might call a 'neurotic dissociation.' Not that the metaphor would resonate with any of them. With the exception of excerpts from tertiary sources, the modern psychology professor is woefully unfamiliar with psychologically-minded and ambitious theories like those of Freud or Jung, which have been banished to a classical underworld with little theoretical reformulation or empirical investigation. Don't get me wrong. I am not a Freudian by any stretch of the imagination. I just find the attitudes toward Freud and Jung symptomatic of a broader anti-intellectual trend, lack of conceptual discipline and innovation, lack of the kind of flexible and divergent spirit on which serendipity and discovery depend. We are first and foremost a community of clerks so consumed with how to keep our own house in order that we are unwilling to wander into the psyche's wilderness and frontiers. We adhere with marital fidelity and flawless execution to those scientific precepts that empower us to control thought and manage a community (e.g. rigor, parsimony, falsifiability), and the letters of these laws -- this rules-bound interpretation and rendition of science -- costs us the spirit of our vocation. We are without compass and stethoscope.
Metaphor from film The Matrix Metaphor
I had only dimly apprehended the relevance of the film for my work when I received an amusing e-mail from a facetious visitor to my web site:
Do you know what I'm talking about? Mediocrity. It’s everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very forum. You can see it when you turn on your computer and look at your monitor. You can feel it when you connect to the Internet and read what you and others have dumped there. It has blinded you from the truth.
What truth? That you are its slave, Wyatt. Like nearly everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. Unfortunately, no one can be told what Mediocrity is. You have to see it for yourself.
This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, and I show you how deep the crap goes...Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more..."
Why do I find the Matrix metaphor so poignantly appropriate? Because the rules that govern psychology's academic and professional communities mass-produce, disseminate, and apply our knowledge of the human condition. Psychology presents itself as the mirror we hold up to our faces and it presumes to instruct us as to how we should view our individual selves, our society, and how we should make sense of our experiences. When you understand the rules that govern their brand of science, you will ultimately view it in the same vein as the protagonists in The Matrix viewed the programmed architecture and design of that prison that presents us with an illusion of freedom, of reality, of worth. These sentiments were reflected in my response to the tongue-in-cheek assessment of my web site:
"Ah, yes. Everything I need to know I learned from The Matrix, right? It is difficult for me to gauge your real feelings and motives. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will that they will fight to protect it. Are you listening to me? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? You can understand my trepidation. Everyone we have not unplugged is potentially an agent, an instantiation of the norms that bureaucratize knowledge production, homogenize communities, deindividuate students, and make of the 'organized body of knowledge' a sea of thrashing sharks. So if you are not one of us, you are potentially one of 'them.' We do not know much, but we do know it was 'they' who scorched Psychology, because they do not understand the difference between 'knowing the path' and 'walking the path.'"
Perhaps the next time a denizen of the psychological community demands I provide psychometrically sound evidence for my arguments, I should respond by saying, "The image translators (i.e., pseudo-scientific paradigm) work for the construct program (i.e., institutionalized psychology)." This statement would not be without its merits. Allow me to introduce you to the Architects of University Psychology, to the tools that keep us in a false consciousness. All I offer is the truth. And I can only show you the door. You have to walk through it yourself. But be warned that when you awaken, you may experience a stinging in your eyes. Contrary to what you think at the moment, you've never used them.
Item Analysis
*The following is taken from a May, 2001 interview.
EHRENFELS: “Professors use a statistical technique – or should
I say they have their research assistants use a statistical technique
– known as ‘item analysis.’ This is only one of dozens
of statistical formulas employed in research, but I would like to make
an example of this one in particular because it is used in grading as
well as in research and I feel it captures the essence of their M.O. A
questionnaire or an exam contains multiple questions – what are known
as ‘items.’ Many questionnaires are even subdivided into scales,
groups of items that are purported to tap different aspects of your personality
or knowledge. For example, the Graduate Record Examination and Scholastic
Aptitude Test has a group of items constructed to measure your Verbal
skills and another group for your Mathematical skills. Item analysis yields
a coefficient which is a measure of the extent to which one item correlates
with all the other items in the scale collectively – or if there
are no subscales – in the questionnaire collectively.”
MOYER: “So – in other words – and let’s use the example
you used in our earlier conversation – let’s say we have a Shyness
scale – your answer to the question ‘on a scale from 1 to 7,
rate the extent to which you prefer privacy to social gatherings’
is correlated with your combined answer to all the other questions in
the scale to determine the extent to which this item is associated with
the other items.”
EHRENFELS: “Yes. Naturally – this is not done on a person-by-person
basis, but the analysis is performed once you have a number of people
who have taken the questionnaire. We MAY find that despite the fact that
particular question seems to be like the others in the Shyness scale –
seems to measure the same thing – Shyness – we may find that
people who tend to rate themselves higher on this particular item –
end up scoring lower on the scale as a whole. So in effect, by keeping
this particular question in the scale, we deflate or underestimate the
true score on the scale. So we discard the item.”
MOYER: “Is there a cut-off you use. You have a coefficient for each
item in the scale, right?”
EHRENFELS: “Correct.”
MOYER: “So then how you do know when the item is good, or not good?
What does it take to keep it? Or to throw it out?”
EHRENFELS: “There are no hard and fast rules, except that once you
adopt a cut-off, it should be the same cut-off used for all the items.
Some professors will look at another coefficient – nicknamed alpha
– which is the measure of the internal consistency of the scale –
and by that I mean an average of the correlation of each item with all
the other items. This is the extent to which the scale correlates with
itself – the extent to which it can be said to measure the same thing.
Researchers want this number to be high because supposedly something cannot
correlate with something else to an extent greater than it can correlate
with itself – and researchers WANT to devise a scale that correlates
with other measures – and by that I mean a scale that is predictive
or diagnostic of other things. And what they do is they will recalculate
alpha for the scale WITH and WITHOUT each item, and if they notice that
alpha would be increased without an item, that item is discarded. Ultimately,
they want alpha to be at least .80. Anything below .70 is considered dubious,
and some strive for an alpha greater than .90, because such an alpha is
said to be admissible in court.”
MOYER: “So what is the problem with item analysis?”
EHRENFELS: “I have seen it abused. And by that I mean that when
researchers are expected to apply it universally -- it has a price.
I had a scale which I claimed measured x. Now I defined x in such a way
that the items themselves were synonymous with the definition of x. So
in my opinion, these items measure x as I define it regardless of what
the alpha coefficient or individual item analyses tell me. Now imagine
that one of the items significantly reduces the alpha.”
MOYER: “Above or below .70?”
EHRENFELS: “Doesn’t matter. Should I throw out the item? Well,
no one will publish any research that involves a scale with a lower alpha.
So I am advised to drop the item. But if I do, I change the meaning of
the scale. The scale no longer measures x but some variation of x. This
is all well and good – except I WANT to measure x.”
MOYER: “But according to alpha, you are not measuring x, right?”
EHRENFELS: “Not true. I will contend that x may not be as TIGHT
or internally consistent a construct as that we are used to dealing with,
but x is still x. You see, in our field, we are used to scales with .80
and even .90 coefficients. Have you ever SEEN one of these scales –
that meet these criteria? The questions all look alike. It is a foregone
conclusion that people will respond to them similarly because they are
all variations of the same question. And THAT is how they are usually
created. Someone thinks of a question and then thinks how to re-word it
several ways. BORING!”
MOYER: “Not to mention artificial, right? This has been your complaint
against field.”
EHRENFELS: “I have also complained that field demands consensus
from its members. Well, it would also seem they demand consensus from
its subject matter.”
MOYER: “How do you think they would respond to your criticism?”
EHRENFELS: “They would tell me any scientist who does not revise
a theory to fit the data would be irresponsible.”
MOYER: “And how would you – ”
EHRENFELS: “Item analysis IS NOT data. If your hypothesis is that
people who score high on scale x behave in y way or make z kind of decisions
or experience w type of dreams, you have to TEST the hypothesis before
you throw it out by changing or discarding scale x. The real data is in
y, z, and w, not in x alone. Now I know that x can only correlate with
y, z, and w to the extent that correlates with itself, but we demand a
lot in the way of self-correlation. You don’t need a .80 or .90 –
but this is what you are told you need in a scale if you want your research
to compete for publication. This may explain in part why our literature
is so lifeless and repetitive. It excludes too much – and what it
does include correlates with itself, so to speak. We are also too quick
in this field to throw out or revise theories to conform to the first
signs of data. Let me tell you something. If we understood our data, we
wouldn’t need theories. There is a little piece of every theory that
is supposed to transcend the data – that is reserved to help us make
sense of something as fickle and variable and contradictory as DATA. So
I think we should give our theories the benefit of the doubt and stop
attempting as quickly as possible to develop theories that are duplicates
– or analog maps – of the data. We are not reassembling engines
here. Hell – we use GRE scores as criteria in the admission of graduate
students. You want to know how well the GRE scores predict performance
in graduate school? The Verbal scale – the most predictive scale
– accounts for only 16 percent of the variation in academic performance
– 16 percent! And yet we continue to look at it.”
MOYER: “And why do you suppose that is?”
EHRENFELS: “Probably because it tells us a little about what kind
of person the applicant is. The applicant may have good comprehension
and writing skills, but we all know that doesn’t make the difference
between a successful and unsuccessful graduate student. Now if we invented
a conformity inventory – with subscales for compliance, sycophancy,
acquiescence, obsequiousness, and cadence-and-imitation – then we
would really have something. But my point is that sometimes we want to
devise scales that measure circumstances we expect to vary or fluctuate.
I may not want to measure something stable and internally consistent.
I may want a barometer of sorts – and sometimes not even that. I
may want a scale on which most people do not score HIGH or LOW most of
the time – but when they do – it tells me something about the
state they are in. I may want a series of scales that profile a state
such that I expect most scale scores to be neither high nor low most of
the time. But I expect the topography of the profile -- the variation
among the scale scores and the scores that are RELATIVELY higher or lower
– to tell me something. But these kinds of statistics are just not
standard. No one has devised special rules or formats for them –
so they would be overlooked. The field as a whole has fallen into such
now routines – and routines are in and of themselves conducive to
biases and prejudices. We preclude a range of possibilities concerning
what may be learned and how it may be presented. Both beauty and truth
suffer – as well as freedom. But like I mentioned earlier, what we
do with items that do not fit into the scale is no different from what
we do with researchers who do not live ‘in the fold.’”
MOYER: “You mentioned that item analysis is also used in grading
exams.”
EHRENFELS: “Professors use item analysis to hunt for multiple choice
questions that are answered correctly with as much success by students
who score poorly on the exam as a whole as by students who score well
on the exam. Such items are said to be ‘negatively discriminating’
– which means they discriminate against good students – and
they are discarded. Now I agree that item analysis here has some limited
benefits. I would like to use item analysis to make sure I didn’t
accidentally key in the wrong answer for a multiple-choice item. And I
may even double-check the item to see if it was ambivalent or ambiguous.
But if I check the item – and it seems fine to me on the surface
– and if the answer is keyed in correctly – I will not discard
it regardless of the item coefficient. Poor students or not – they
are STILL students. And I will give them what they earned. And let’s
face it -- sometimes good students – especially these hyper-memorizing,
over-achieving types – ”
Textbooks and Multiple Choice Exams
MOYER: “Careerists?”
EHRENFELS: “Perhaps. Sometimes they study in ways that is conducive
not to learning but to performing well on multiple-choice tests. Sometimes
a question comes along that discriminates against the bullshit memorization,
artificial achievement, and pseudo-understanding. I will not punish the
rest of the students for this. But the professors DO this because the
technique itself is scientific and exacting, and because it gives them
over a time a collection of the best test items. Some of the professors
archive this data, thinking they are creating the perfect test or test
bank. Some of them do this with an eye to publishing their test one day
– that is – if they are not already using a test bank developed
for the textbook by the publisher or the author’s graduate assistants.
Some of these items can be bad too – despite the research. But hell
– it’s easy.”
MOYER: “So some professors don’t even make up their own questions.”
EHRENFELS: “Most don’t. And why should they? They don’t
design their own lectures. Those are designed by the textbook and supplemental
teacher manuals – and some of the lectures may be delivered by graduate
teaching assistants. So why not use the test bank that accompanies these
materials.”
MOYER: “I bet you’ll tell me why.”
EHRENFELS: “Textbooks should never be assigned to students. They are survey volumes, like encyclopedias. They should be used only by instructors as reference material. They can be instrumental in developing one's syllabus so that one does not leave out significant content in a course that is supposed to be representative of the field. The widespread practice in modern psychology departments whereby students take multiple choice exams based solely on textbooks (and lectures based solely on textbooks) may be necessary to process classes of 300+ students, but there is very little mind expansion that occurs in (a) studying for such a test, (b) taking such a test, and (c) receiving the results of such a test. Those who acknowledge that the system is tragically but necessarily flawed are honest and make the most of a bad situation. The person who celebrates this science by tauting its 'systematic and psychometric properties,' that's 'Agent Smith.'"
As I mentioned earlier (it is worth repeating), the purpose of the textbook is three-fold:
- Provide a canon that represents that portion of our knowledge base that is relatively consensual (i.e., the common denominator of the field)
- Socialize students and new members into the field's academic and professional culture
- Provide a nexus for a framework of common expectations that allows everyone to (a) communicate mindlessly, (b) avoid decisions and doubts, and (c) languish in an air of self-contentment and validation, entitlements from the institution's welfare program. Or perhaps 'insurance benefits' for which individualists like myself can tolerate the deductibles (e.g., training) but cannot commit to a lifetime of premiums.
PRE-APPROVAL: Peer Review at the Front End
A more provocative position I've never declared. My adversaries love to exploit this position, lifting a soundbite from this statement to hoist on a flagpole. All to depict me as indifferent to the kind of standards that protect our water from contamination. My adversaries would have you believe that what they do is rocket science or brain surgery, but in actuality, the vast majority of talk therapy is NOT even constructed out of any psychological research (i.e., science), nor is it evaluated against research. Why? Because our science isn't there yet. Some would have you believe it is a matter of time, but I think our science is too crude an instrument to yield knowledge in the units of sensitivity, relevance, and usefulness that can inform therapy or even conversational discourse. Why? So-called "standards" like peer review. Why should I submit to the institutional safeguards and standards for a science of human nature when these arbitrary institutional inventions actually sabotage by enslavement the science of human nature?
Whenever we speak of peer review, and for that matter, committees of any kind, we are talking about a trade off. The benefits of peer review (and other institutional norms) reaped by most fields of scientific endeavor do not pay dividends for a science of human nature. In fact, the liabilities of peer review (and again other institutional norms) that normally hamper fields of scientific endeavor are amplified in the human sciences. Take groupthink for example. It is bad enough you have to make adjustments to appeal to the lowest common denominator of committee members. It's a second cousin to censorship, really. But then there are three forces which prompt or pressure Psychology's communities to refine, and by that I mean narrowly define, their standards. Power and expediency.
Legitimacy. Psychologists apprehend at various levels that psychology, both as a health delivery system and as a science, has not kept pace. Psychology is young. Psychology is also the only science in which the subject and object of science is the same. Within psychology, there is nothing to curb the proliferation of pet theories not only among pscyhologists but among laypersons with access to the subject material (i.e., themselves). By increasing the apparent potency of the standards, psychologists hope to first project a public impression that they belong among the ranks of doctors and scientists and second to restrict this expertise and authority to a certain class of "professionals."
Competition. Whenever a committee presides over a competitive application process, whether its admission to graduate school, appointment to faculty, or publication, the applicants are encouraged not only to appeal to the lowest common denominator of a committee, but to pander to it better than the other applicants. Over time, submissions to journals acquire a superfluous formal aspect and those applicants willing or able to demonstrate the greatest fidelity to the standards, are rewarded with positions of influence in the field. So committees grow accustomed to an escalating standard and the committees become populated by those who satisfied and exceeded those standards (i.e., who wears the epistemology of the field like a fashion runway model). And if you've ever seen some of those fashion shows, you know that most of this high art never reaches the street. Similarly, the contest itself to become a member of the academic and professional communities has conditioned them to lose touch with human nature.
Expediency. Search committees rely heavily on the current system of certification management to decide which applicants to put on the short list for tenure-track faculty positions. Undergraduate admissions offices rely similarly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and other standardized tests for a quick-and-dirty method of separating applicants. The developer of the SAT, Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) admitted its SAT does not have remarkable utility in predicting success in college, with its most valid scale (the verbal scale) accounting for only 16% of the variance in academic performance at the college level. But up until recently it was the college admissions offices who clamored for the standardized test, for which a difference in 200 points between any two applicants means roughly a difference in 3-4 correct answers. Since the California State School System recently decided it will not rely on the standardized test for admission decisions, ETS announced it will make sweeping changes to its test. The academic communities need to rethink peer review.
Legitimacy, competition, and expediency shape the "standards" in much the same way alcohol increases the potency of a medication.
This is out of place in Psychology precisely because Psychology is a young and human science in desperate need of the kind of spark that produces serendipity and discovery. But we've built a flame-retardant culture in which no spark can flame. By this I mean our standards have become so stingy as to deprive researchers of the degrees of freedom they would be allocated even under other sciences. Our standards have created a culture in which we all seek to think convergently rather than independently. This depives us of another type of fidelity that is actually more critical to our success as psychologists: our faithfulness to our own wits and to the raw phenomena under study. Between our wits and this phenomena there must be a direct relationship, but our Psychology have attempted to broker this relationship and further distance the researcher from the phenomenon, all with institutional norms that we are supposed to mistake for true scientific standards. I will spare you here the list of these norms, but suffice it to say that peer review is one of them. Where we are talking about an exploration of the human condition, we need fluid, flexible, broad exploratory research by divergent thinkers. And peer review spells career death to such individuals.
I once entertained a criticism that if the collective did not rule, that each researcher would be conducting his or her own scientific enterprise such that there would be a 'Bill Science,' a 'James Science,' and a 'Debra Science.' Within the very broad and generous framework that is the scientific method, why should our research decisions not reflect our personal preferences. In other words, as long as the word science is in there somewhere (i.e., as long as 'Bill' and 'James' and 'Debra' are still doing 'science'), then why should they be denied? Why should the personal preferences of one peer reviewer prevail over that of a contributor? Perhaps the system would be less egregious if we were permitted to submit to more than one journal at a time. But holding us to one journal, keeping us waiting 4-9 months for a response, is an additional inducement to conform (to imitate the work of others and to seek out these collective expectations) so as to maximize our chances of success, because failing to publish once a year could spell career death. Outside academia, authors are permitted to submit to as many publishers as they like simultaneously. Perhaps if we changed the system so journals competed with one another for the works of researchers rather than the researchers competing with one another for space in a journal, then our science would move forward.
I suggest a two-tier solution, not unlike the book review piece of Amazon.com. If we are willing to confer a doctorate on a person, then that person is permitted to publish into the database and then individual scientists (and yes, perhaps even committees) can post their reviews of the research. Under this system, only problematic research will be flagged and perhaps even pulled. But everything else that is acceptable (i.e., that meets minimum essential requirements and that does not violate any one of a list of criterial problems) will be available. As it stands right now, there are winners and losers in publishing and this need not be the case. It does not serve science. It only serves logistical constraints and perhaps some gatekeeping or lilly-guilding function. After all, it is convenient in helping selection committees decide among job applicants. If someone has published 12 times, clearly that person has no problem "fitting in," whereas someone else with the same number of years opportunity may have only published 3 times.
I cannot defend the current system. What is published may be acceptable, but there is a lot of research -- good research -- on the outside looking in and there is a lot of potential research that is never conceived or executed because it does not perfectly fit the mold. Now I never said you will not find a diversity of TOPICS literature, only a diversity in METHODS, PRESENTATIONS, and IDEAS. That being said, there are still some subjects that are grossly under-represented due to the fact they do not lend themselves as readily to the institutional norms. Unfortunately, many of these phenomena are what people think of when they think 'psychology.'
I just know I'll be raked over the coals for this one, as my adversaries will seek to exploit my position on peer review, lifting a soundbite from this essay and hoisting it on a flag. But it is difficult to deny that original ideas and less-than-popular research interests make it difficult for an author to appeal to the lowest common denominator of an editorial review committee. Why not create an online database of publications? A PhD is necessary and sufficient for publication. Action against an author/publication is withheld pending complaints about methodological flaws that (a) cannot be construed as liberties with strategic benefits, and/or (b) that cast doubt on the validity of conclusions as written. In even many egregious cases, a work can be salvaged by throwing a disclaimer in the discussion section qualifying or stipulating conclusions. The matter could always be referred to a committee for a hearing.
I mean, what is really the harm? This is not pharmaceutical research or evaluation of space shuttle components. Such research does not belong in Psychology. By pretending there is something at stake, we are denying ourselves a rare opportunity to attack our subject. We have a potential to bring together the best of science and humanities in one discipline. But as long as this false or inflated prestige surrounding publications and publication standards facilitates admission, appointment, and tenure review decisions, Psychology will continue to defy the technology that enables us to make all our research available.
TERRITORY: Cosmetic Fiefdoms
The arbitrary division of Psychology into fiefdoms (e.g., Social, Developmental, Cognitive) is also bad for the health of Psychology. Holistic research cannot survive if applicants to graduate schools cannot earn admission because their interests are too large to be a prototypical leaf on this or that branch. By replacing such a structure with a division of labor grounded in a natural bifurcation of Exploratory Research, Confirmatory Research, Theory, and Clinical, we capitalize on the strengths of our members. While it would be ideal to require members to demonstrate proficiency in each of these areas, this is not only unrealistic, but it risks replacement of one rigid system with another and would ultimately result in some standardized test. (This is not to say such a test would not be an immense improvement over the current scales of the Graduate Record Examination, but I cannot imagine a means of testing a person's predisposition to think. This is not as much a test of proficiency as of attitudes and aims).
Money, money, money, money: Grant Appeal
Let's replace the current policy of encouraging applicants to procure external sources of funding with a policy favoring those armed only with their wits and curiosities. Grants are hardly appropriate (hey, I have found a use for that term) for psychology. We do not need funding for truly psychologistic research. Granted (not pun intended), there is some psychological research of value that required funding, but the field would be much better off if we discouraged rather than rewarded this form of prostitution. Since most fundable research is not psychologistic, those who perform psychologistic research are at a marked disadvantage for tenure. Over time, the face of psychology departments is transformed by granting agencies. We hardly know enough about personality today to notice its disappearance. Meanwhile, the Human Factors branch is emerging in universities across the country at the rate of Starbucks to tell us how to build a better spatula.
Rule-Bound Field
The Matrix character Thomas "Neo" Andersen wanted to show us a world without rules or boundaries. Similarly, I'd like to show you a less proscriptive Psychology. The denizens of the psychological community identify the essential characteristics of science with adherence to 'rules.' This results in a scientific paradigm that constrains independent thinking and that hijacks science in the service of skepticism at the expense of its service to exploration. Is it any wonder industrial-organizational psychologists can defend Gallup's hiring practices by claiming the loss of our freedom and individuality is a small price to pay for validity (see Psychologists Party to Dishonest Hiring Practices at Gallup)? Is it any wonder we sanction all research into anything that smacks of the paranormal (e.g., prospective dreaming) so that we would appear more credible in our efforts to protect the public against people who claim to communicate with the dead? Is it any wonder that most psychological researchers characterize the truth as 'what remains after everything else has been refuted'? (Would we really know when to stop chipping away at that block of marble?)
Well, I deem it my mission to liberate psychological researchers from their self-imposed prisons and thereby rescue the human psyche from the field of Psychology. Take the psychology professor as an instructor fond of using item analysis to Q.A. an exam and build a utopian evaluation tool. Some of the
items they would discard are not even wildly discriminating. In other
words, they do not just throw out extremely negative coefficients, but
also coefficients which are mildly negative, and some even discard items
with mildly POSITIVE coefficients in search of that perfect exam and that
perfect bell curve. Sometimes I think they were conditioned to see beauty
in that normal bell curve shape. Now this practice in and of itself is
not that consequential. That is why it has escaped everyone’s notice.
But it is symptomatic of some of their more consequential choices –
and of a consequential PATTERN of behaviors which – taken collectively
–introduces a credentialism that favors careerists and discriminates
at more advanced levels of education against the true scholars. They really
are creating a race of administrative savants. And what you
really end up doing is narrowing the range of skills tapped -- or narrowing
the range of tapped skills that are reported – such that you end
up with this yardstick that measures JUST ONE THING. And if you are not
in the top x percent of this ONE skill or quality or attitude – your odds of
making it are very small. We really don’t pay much attention to the
fact – and I imagine this flaw dogs every field to a certain extent
– that there are people who aspire to be members of the field who
are bright and creative – probably brighter and more creative than
most in the field – who never really get the chance to make it in.
They are weeded out at some point without a fair hearing. I think the
half of the public that DOES see this ACCEPTS it as the work of that chance
component that is part of life. I am here to put quite a different face
on that chance element – to tell you that it really ISN’T chance
at all – but the work of something very systematic you may not see. A "prison for your mind."
fireflySun.com Report List
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