Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [59]
6
Psyched Up, Psyched Out
Can Science Determine if
Sports Psychology Works?
QUESTION: HOW MANY PSYCHOLOGISTS does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Only one—but the lightbulb has to really want to change. In this lighthearted joke there is much insight into the efficaciousness of psychological techniques to modify human thought and behavior, because on a fundamental level the willingness of the subject to participate in the modifying sets the stage for everything else that follows.
Although I was trained as an experimental psychologist, I did not become interested in understanding the range and power of psychological techniques to enhance athletic performance until 1981 when I began preparations to compete in the first annual three-thousand-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle race called Race Across America (see figure 6.1). Being an experimental psychologist and curious fellow, I thought it reasonable to try any and all techniques I could find to prepare my mind for the pain and pressures of what Outside magazine called “the world’s toughest race.”
In addition to riding five hundred miles a week and subjecting my body to such “treatments” as chiropractic, Rolfing, mud baths, colonies, megavitamin therapy, iridology, food allergy tests, and electrical stimulation, I listened to motivation tapes, to specially designed music tapes, and even to subliminal tapes (although being subliminal there isn’t much to hear). I meditated. I chanted. I attended seminars from an Oregon-based healing guru named Jack Schwarz who taught us “voluntary controls of internal states.” I contacted an old associate of mine with whom I went to graduate school, Gina Kuras, who was now a practicing hypnotherapist. Gina taught me self-hypnosis, from which I would learn to control pain, overcome motivational lows, maintain psychological highs, and stay focused. I got so good at going deep into a hypnotic trance that when ABC’s Wide World of Sports came to my home to film a session, Gina had a fright when she could not immediately bring me back to consciousness.
Figure 6.1. Really psyched. The author climbing Loveland Pass, twelve thousand feet up in the Colorado Rockies, on day three of the three-thousand-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America.
Anecdotes Do Not Make a Science
Did all this vintage 1980s New Age fiddle-faddle work? One answer to this question comes from one of the apostles of the motivation movement, Mark Victor Hansen (now famous for his Chicken Soup for the Soul book series), whom I met in 1980. “This stuff works when you work it,” he would chant. On one level Mark is right. As with the lightbulb, to change you have to want to change and then make it happen yourself. Like ever-popular fad diets, it matters less which one you are on and more that you are doing something—anything—about your weight. To that end, diets are really a form of behavioral, not caloric, modification. The point is to be vigilant and focused, thinking about the problem and trying different solutions.
But a deeper and more important question is this: Can we say scientifically that something works? That question is far more complicated because so many of these self-help techniques are based on anecdotal evidence, and as my social science colleague Frank Sulloway likes to point out: “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”
Anecdotes are useful for helping focus research on certain problems to be solved, but the reason they do not make a science is because, without controlled comparisons, there is no way to know if the effect that was observed was due to chance or to the technique. Did you win the race because of the meditation, or was it because you had a deep sleep, or a good meal, or new equipment, or better