Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [52]
A: No.
Q: What’s your understanding of the current term “disconfirming evidence”?
A: I guess that means evidence that disconfirms treasured notions that people have.
Q: What’s the most powerful piece of disconfirming evidence that you’re aware of for the theory that people can repress memories or that they can block out of their awareness a series of traumatic events, store those in their memory, and recover those with some accuracy years later?
A: What’s the strongest thing against that?
Q Yes. What’s the strongest piece of disconfirming evidence?
A: I really can’t think of any good evidence against that…
Q: Have you read any literature on the concept of false memories using hypnosis?
A: No.
Q: Is there research on whether clinicians over a period of years develop more accurate clinical judgment?
A: I don’t know if there is, actually…
Q: Is [there] a technique that you use to distinguish true and false memories?
A: We all, we all as human beings are continuously faced with whether we believe what somebody feeds us or not, and we all make judgments all the time. And there is such a thing as internal consistency, and if people tell you something with internal consistency and with appropriate affect, you tend to believe that the stories are true.10
At the time of this deposition, van der Kolk had not read any of the voluminous research literature on false memories or how hypnosis can create them, nor was he aware of the documented unreliability of “clinical predictions based on interview information.” He had not read any of the research disconfirming his belief that traumatic memories are commonly repressed. Yet he has testified frequently and confidently on behalf of plaintiffs in repressed-memory cases. Like many clinicians, he is confident that he knows when a client is telling the truth, and whether a memory is true or false, based on his clinical experience; the clues are whether the client’s story has “internal consistency” and whether the client recounts the memory with appropriate emotion—that is, whether the client really feels the memory is true. The problem with this reasoning, however, is that, as we saw in the previous chapter, thousands of mentally healthy people believe they were abducted by aliens, telling, with all the appropriate feeling, internally consistent stories of the bizarre experiments they believe they endured. As research psychologist John Kihlstrom has observed, “The weakness of the relationship between accuracy and confidence is one of the best-documented phenomena in the 100-year history of eyewitness memory research,” 11 but van der Kolk was unaware of a finding that just about every undergraduate who has taken psychology 101 would know.
No one is suggesting that U.N. observers disturb the privacy of the therapeutic encounter, or that all therapists should start doing their own research. An understanding of how to think scientifically may not aid therapists in the subjective process of helping a client who is searching for answers to existential questions. But it matters profoundly when therapists claim expertise and certainty in domains in which unverified clinical opinion can ruin lives. The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.
The Problem of the Benevolent Dolphin
Every so often, a heartwarming news story tells of a shipwrecked sailor who was on the verge of drowning in a turbulent sea. Suddenly, a dolphin popped up at his side and, gently but firmly, nudged the swimmer safely to shore. It is tempting to conclude that dolphins must really like human beings,