The Arizona Skeptic
A Journal Promoting Critical Thinking
Volume 5, Issue 1 July/August 1991
Rosenthal Lecture
By Jim Lippard
On February 17, 1989, the psychology and communications
departments of the University of Arizona co-sponsored a talk by
Harvard social psychology professor Robert Rosenthal. Rosenthal
is known for his decades of research into self-fulfilling
prophecy, experimenter expectancy effects, nonverbal
communication, and sources of artifact in data analysis. (Those
who attended the 1987 CSICOP conference in Pasadena will remember
his panel participation in the session on "Animal Language: Fact
or Illusion?".)
Rosenthal's talk at UA was titled "Covert Communications
in Classrooms, Clinics, and Courtrooms." He began by describing
how he became interested in unintended social influence from
nonverbal cues. He unconsciously influenced the results of his
doctoral dissertation work (at UCLA in the 1950's) on the use of
projection as a defense mechanism. (He did not give details, but
joked that he would do so in the question and answer session if
any audience members were insensitive enough to ask.)
The first early experiment into such unintended cues
involved showing photographs of people to test subjects, who were
asked to rate the individuals pictured for degree of personal
success on a scale of -10 to +10. But the real test subjects were
the experimenters themselves. Half of the experimenters were told
to expect an average ranking of -5, and half were told to expect
+5. The experimenters got the results they expected. Since all of
the subjects had been read the same set of instructions,
nonverbal cues were implicated.
This experimenter expectancy effect has been replicated
many times, and one of the more interesting versions was done at
the University of Manitoba by John Adair and Joyce Epstein. In
their two-stage experiment, the first stage was as described
above. In the second stage, with new subjects, no experimenters
were used. Instead, audio tapes of the experimenters'
instructions from the first stage were used. Subjects were
directed down a hall by signs, which told them to enter a room
and press a button on a tape recorder. The expected result was
that the expectancy effect would be eliminated or reduced. But in
fact, the result was a larger effect. This is evidence that
certain kinds of information (in this case auditory) are more
easily gleaned than others. Rosenthal commented that people are
more accurate at detecting liars by listening only to their
voices rather than watching and listening to them. In our
culture, he said, visual cues swamp the auditory ones (and
apparently the auditory ones are a more reliable indicator of
truth).
In experiments designed to determine what cues caused the
expectancy effect, Rosenthal and colleagues made audio tapes of
high-bias researchers (with a .60 correlation between
experimenter expectation and photo rate). The tapes were of the
experimenters' instructions to their subjects, which contained
sentences like "The scale runs from -10 to +10. -10 means the
person experienced extreme failure. +10 means the person
experienced extreme success. -1 means the person experienced mild
failure. +1 means the person experienced mild success." The
sections of the tape with positive or negative connotations (+10,
+1, success, -10, -1, failure) were examined by psycholinguists
for differential vocal emphasis. A .72 correlation was found
between emphasis and the photo ratings, but only a .24
correlation was found between the experimenter expectancy (the
bias) and the emphasis.
At this point, Rosenthal digressed with a "footnote"
about the practical meaning of a .24 correlation. He noted that
while such a correlation appears small, it can have great
practical significance. He noted that a recent study in which
22,000 doctors took an aspirin tablet every other day to prevent
heart attack was terminated early for ethical reasons. The
aspirin was so obviously helpful that the control subjects were
told to start taking aspirin. The observed correlation in this
experiment between aspirin use and heart attack prevention was
only .037--but this accounted for the extended lives of 4 out of
100 subjects. (A similarly small correlation was obtained in
tests of the drug AZT on AIDS patients.)
Much of Rosenthal's work has initially been greeted with
incredulity. One example he gave was his work with rats labeled
as "maze bright" or "maze dull." At the end of a quarter, rats
which had been (randomly) labeled "maze bright" ended up
performing better in maze tests than those labeled "maze dull."
One of Rosenthal's colleagues thought that this was perhaps
plausible, but would certainly not occur if the rats were more
isolated from their experimenters, as in a Skinner box. So he set
about to do a replication with rats labeled as "Skinner box
bright" and "Skinner box dull." By the end of the quarter, the
rats labeled bright had become so, and those labeled dull had
become so. As an interesting side note, Rosenthal said that this
experiment was conducted in three lab sections, and the leader of
each lab section had a different practice for dealing with
students who came to complain about poor performance by "dull"
rats. One section was led by a student of Rosenthal's, who
responded by saying, "What do you expect from a dull rat?" One
section was led by a clinical counseling student, who responded
by saying, "And how does that make you feel?" And the third
section was led by his colleague, who said, "What do you mean
'dull rat'? There's no such thing as a dull rat, just a dull
experimenter." The surprising result was that all three sections
had the same magnitude of expectancy effect.
Rosenthal noted that the expectancy effect on animals had
really already been mentioned in 1927 by Bertrand Russell, who
stated that animals studied by Americans rush about, while those
studied by Germans sit still and think.
In one of Rosenthal's more controversial experiments,
teachers were told that some students of theirs (chosen at
random) were gifted. The result was that those students claimed
to be gifted performed better in school (correlation .08). In
1985, meta-analyses (not by Rosenthal) of about 150 of these
experiments suggest that the best hypothesis about what happens
when teachers are given high expectations about student
performance involves two orthogonal factors-- affect and effort.
Affect is the teachers' treating students as being gifted, and
effort is the teachers' working them harder (e.g., giving them
more words to learn and more problems to solve).
In an as-yet-unpublished experiment by one of Rosenthal's
students, various expectancy effects were found in elementary
school classrooms. It is known that males perform better at
quantitative and spatial tasks while females perform better at
verbal tasks, but this experiment found that this generalization
is not true in elementary school classrooms where teachers don't
believe it to be true. Videotapes of male and female students and
teachers teaching quantitative and verbal matters were examined
for differential treatment. Among the discoveries were that
teachers are more hostile in teaching cross-sexual materials
(i.e., quantitative to girls and verbal to boys), and that the
effect was less for female teachers and even less for
androgynous-appearing teachers.
Rosenthal next described some further male/female
differences. In observations of psychology experiments, it was
found that experimenters smiled at male subjects 12% of the time,
and at female subjects 70% of the time. When the experimenter and
subject were of the opposite sex, standardized psychology
experiments take longer than if they are of the same sex. (An
audience member pointed out that the same effect may be observed
in bank tellers serving customers.) Rosenthal also noted "channel
discrepancies" between the sexes. Male experimenters were
friendlier to female subjects both in body movement and tone of
voice, while female experimenters were observed to be friendly in
movement but not in tone of voice with female subjects, and not
friendly in movement but friendly in tone of voice with male
subjects. Rosenthal also commented that females telling the truth
and males lying were judged as being physically more attractive
than females lying and males telling the truth.
Rosenthal next turned to expectancy effects in the
courtroom. In an experiment conducted with the help of a Bay area
judge and one of his former students, Peter Blank, five judges
were videotaped giving instructions to juries in 34 trials.
Subjects rated the "judicialness" and wisdom of each, some being
shown videotape and some just audiotape. It turned out that the
ratings of judge's wisdom could be used to accurately postdict
the defendant's past criminal history. When the judge was rated
as wise in terms of visual cues, the defendant was more likely to
have had a past criminal history. When the judge was rated as
less wise in audio, the defendant was also more likely to have
had a past criminal history. In predicting the verdict, the
ratings were not so good. When the judge's tone of voice was
rated as honest, the jury was more likely to have found the
defendant guilty. Rosenthal emphasized that no causal claim was
being made here, but that further research will be looking at it.
Rosenthal reported several other experimental results in
the same vein, and skipped over many others which he didn't have
time to present. His work is obviously of great significance to
parapsychology and other areas of the paranormal. Those
interested in examining his work could begin with some of those
listed below (from his 20 books and 250 articles). For a critical
look, see the book review of T.X. Barber's _Pitfalls in Human
Research_, elsewhere in this newsletter.
Rosenthal, R. (1968) _Pygmalion in the classroom: Teachers' expectations
and pupils' intellectual development_. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
-- (1976) _Experimenter effects in behavioral research_. Irvington.
-- (1984) _Meta-analytic procedures for social research_. Sage.
-- and Rubin, D.B. (1978) Interpersonal expectancy effects: The first
345 studies.
_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ 3:377-386.
Book Review
_Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism_ by Paul Kurtz
1990, Prometheus Books
Reviewed by Bill Green
My reason for reading Dr. Kurtz' _Philosophical Essays in
Pragmatic Naturalism_ is that I am searching for a philosophical
foundation for methods of arguments that have the power to make
me change my current set of advocated/practiced ethics. Being a
skeptic, rational changes to my practiced ethical set come about
for two reasons: accepted changes to my set of goals and
recognition that a subset of my current set of ethics are
inferior to a replacement subset with respect to their ability to
achieve my current goals. (Being human, I don't live up to my
ideal.)
Dr. Kurtz is one of my heroes. He is the current head
philosophical guru of the skeptical and the humanist movements
and a brilliant person. I loved the book as I feel it did outline
the philosophical foundations upon which I could encourage the
scientific evaluation of ethics with respect to their ability to
support the proclaimed "ends" of the advocation group.
Reading the book was a great education for me. Through
serendipity, I had failed to return a paperback book club post
card and received a copy of _The New York Public Library Desk
Reference_. It has several pages of definitions of terms used by
philosophers which was most useful to me in reading Dr. Kurtz's
book as the majority of chapters are essays from various
esoteric professional journals (mostly from the 50's and 60's)
and brimming with terms used by professionals in the field.
The book is divided into three sections:
I. PRAGMATIC NATURALISM "focuses on 'empirical
metaphysics,' a theory of nature drawn based upon natural
sciences and a theory of human nature drawing on behavioral
science."
In this section I was most impressed with Chapter IV,
"Coduction: A Logic of Explanation in the Behavioral and Social
Sciences." Dr. Kurtz's suggestion is that rather than lock
yourself into either the reduction approach (combine all into one
science) or the holistic approach (each must remain separate),
use either or both as seems appropriate.
II. NATURALISTIC ETHICS "defends a modified form of
naturalistic ethics, i.e., the view that ethical problems can be
resolved by empirical methods and value judgments tested by their
consequences in conduct."
This section was a feast for my soul. I loved it. The
following statements I consider beautiful:
A. "Religion stresses the existential dilemma of life
conscious of itself: the soul of man cries in the wilderness of
the universe for certainty, but it can find no compulsive
guarantee for any way of life." (p. 126)
B. "But this is my point--if a person refuses to believe,
there is little you can do. He may reject wholesale your
definition and methodology. If so, you may argue ad infinitum and
you still may not be able to prove to him the facts of nature and
life and that he should believe them." (p. 131)
C. "Any successful solution of the problems of practice
must be in terms of existing structures which sciences do not
control. And it is time philosophers cease requiring of other
philosophers absolute standards to solve practical problems. It
just can't be done." (p. 139)
D. "Whatever contributes to the maintenance and expansion
of life is valuable; ...Culture indicates that some restriction
of life and some point may be essential for life..." (p. 162)
E. "Thus practical ethics in the last analysis cannot be
abstracted from theoretical wisdom or scientific knowledge. True,
Aristotle tells us that ethics is not merely concerned with
knowing good, but with making men good. Yet becoming good depends
upon a knowledge of what the chief good is for man, and this in
turn depends upon a teleological view of the human species." (pp.
174-175)
F. "There are three main factual tests of a 'good' rule:
...[that it] fulfill its purpose or ends and be consistent with
existing long-term desires ... [be] framed in the light of the
available and feasible means...be grounded in the laws of nature
and be consistent with the demands of logic." (p. 183)
G. "If I were to bare my own normative position, the
valuational base from which I operate, I would label it
'humanistic ethics' rather than simply 'naturalistic ethics.'"
(p. 220)
H. "Ethical skepticism tends to liberate us from vain
pretensions. It enables us to moderate and humanize intolerant
doctrines. There is nothing as unprincipled as men of principles.
Get out of their way, since they are all too prone to consume
others in the name of their moral dogmas." (p. 237)
I. "The sad truth is that no person can live without some
moral faith, not even the skeptic. The difference is that the
skeptic is aware of the limits and pitfalls of his cherished
principles and values." (p. 237)
III. NATURALISM VS. PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM
"Part Three contrasts pragmatic naturalism with the schools of
phenomenology and existentialism. Kurtz maintains that the
philosophy of pragmatic naturalism provides the foundations for a
cosmic outlook and an authentic ethical humanism."
I thought he did a real good job showing the shortcomings
of existentialism.
A. "To claim that man has no nature but only an
'existence' is to make inexplicable the facts of science that we
already know about him, and these are considerable." (p. 261)
B. "The ideals of reason and science have not been
effectively refuted, yet they are in constant danger of being
undermined by an Existentialist type of reaction." (p. 264)
I have only one problem with Dr. Kurtz. He has claimed in
_Free Inquiry_ that it should be possible to develop a set of
ethics that would be acceptable to believers and skeptics, and I
am skeptical of the claim as our goals are different. He did not
make any such statements in the book.
The thing that pains me most is that for centuries
scientifically oriented philosophers have advocated using
scientific methods to evaluate our ethics for their ability to
promote our declared ends. However, I have not seen a published
article in a popular scientific journal such as _Nature_,
_Science_, _Scientific American_, etc. that described the results
of such a study or that covered methodology. I would not only
cheer, but financially support (on a modest scale, maybe several
K/year), any organization that produced refereed articles in
popular technical publications that covered either results of
actual ethics evaluations studies or methodologies. I don't think
I will need to make any contributions in the near future.
I highly recommend reading/studying Dr. Kurtz's book.
Book Review
_Pitfalls in Human Research: Ten Pivotal Points_
by Theodore X. Barber
1976, Pergamon Press, 117 pp.
Reviewed by Jim Lippard
I came across this short volume while writing a paper on the
subject of fraud and error in science. While this book was
written primarily to aid experimental psychologists, it is
definitely useful for those with an interest in the paranormal.
Barber looks at ten different pitfalls in human behavioral
research: investigator paradigm effect, investigator experimental
design effect, investigator loose procedure effect, investigator
data analysis effect, investigator fudging effect, experimenter
personal attributes effect, experimenter failure to follow the
procedure effect, experimenter misrecording effect, experimenter
fudging effect, and experimenter unintentional expectancy effect.
The first noteworthy point here is Barber's making a distinction
between the investigator, who designs the experiment and analyzes
its results, and the experimenter, who carries it out. Different
types of pitfalls can arise during the performance of these two
different functions.
The investigator paradigm effect is when an investigator
sees nonexistent events or effects in the data (e.g., N-rays) or
fails to recognize events or patterns in data, due to the
investigator's accepted paradigm or set of general beliefs about
the area of study.
The investigator experimental design effect is when an
investigator fails to take account of certain factors in
experimental design, such as accounting for sex differences,
overly complex experiments, incorrect choice of measurement
scales, and so on.
The investigator loose procedure effect is when the
experimental protocol is imprecisely specified, which can lead to
failure to replicate experimental results.
The investigator data analysis effect occurs when an
investigator misapplies statistical methods, fails to report data
that do not support conclusions, or engages in unreasonable
post-hoc analysis.
The investigator fudging effect is the altering or
fabrication of data, either outright or unconsciously. In
Barber's discussion of this pitfall, he specifically discusses
parapsychology.
The experimenter personal attributes effect is that when
the same experiment is carried out by experimenters who are
different in race, sex, age, prestige, friendliness, and so on,
experiments may produce different results.
The experimenter failure to follow the procedure effect
occurs when the experimenter fails to precisely follow the
investigator's standardized procedures.
The experimenter misrecording effect is when the
experimenter unconsciously misrecords subjects' responses, which
is usually done in the direction of the desired conclusions.
The experimenter fudging effect is fabrication or
alteration of data by the experimenter (similar to the
investigator fudging effect).
Finally, the experimenter unintentional expectancy effect
is the effect popularized by Robert Rosenthal (see "Rosenthal
Lecture" in this newsletter). This is perhaps the most
interesting chapter of the book, because Barber thinks that
Rosenthal has overstated his case and that most effects
attributed to this pitfall are really the result of investigator
data analysis effect, experimenter failure to follow the
procedure effect, experimenter misrecording effect, or
experimenter fudging effect. He reports on numerous studies which
have failed to replicate Rosenthal's findings.
Each section of Barber's book gives examples of the
pitfall under discussion, usually from the psychological
literature, as well as recommendations for avoiding the pitfalls.
The book concludes with some general recommendations for
conducting behavioral research.
Book Review
_They Call It Hypnosis_ by Robert A. Baker
1990, Prometheus Books, 313pp.
Reviewed by Jim Lippard
Robert Baker has written an entertaining and useful book for
those interested in the facts about hypnosis. While he argues for
a particular interpretation of hypnosis (the social-psychological
interpretation favored by researchers such as Spanos, Barber, and
others), he also presents numerous other interpretations which
have been offered. On the question of whether hypnosis is a
special state of consciousness or not, Baker comes down firmly
(and rightly, in my opinion) on the side of the non-state
theorists.
This is a position which contradicts popular culture's
view of hypnosis, which is how Baker begins his book. He gives
examples from literature and the mass media of what hypnosis is,
and then shows how and why they are mistaken. Baker's book then
gives a history of the concept of hypnosis and a summary of
contemporary views. An entire chapter is devoted to hypnosis and
pain.
The book deals with nearly every major issue in hypnotic
behavior, though there were a number of subjects which I thought
could have been dealt with in more detail. For example, Baker
maintains that "hypnotized" individuals will not do anything they
would not ordinarily do. To explain such cases as experiments in
which subjects threw acid at the face of an experimenter (who was
actually shielded by glass), Baker maintains that in such cases
the subject knows that the experimenter is taking responsibility
for his behavior and assumes that nothing will really go wrong
(pp. 49, 154). This explanation, however, doesn't work for cases
such as two legal cases from Germany described in Leo Katz's book
_Bad Acts and Guilty Minds_ (1987, University of Chicago Press,
pp. 128-133). Katz describes cases where unethical hypnotists
induced patients to give them large sums of money, commit crimes,
and attempt murder and suicide. It is perhaps because of cases
like this that the Model Penal Code (MPC) lists "conduct during
hypnosis or resulting from hypnotic suggestion" as behaviors
which are "not voluntary acts." When I asked Baker about these
cases, he found the MPC definition unreasonable and stated that
if the descriptions in Katz's book were correct, the people were
effectively using the hypnosis as an excuse for behavior in which
they would have engaged anyway. (It is worth noting that the
alleged hypnosis-induced murder attempts were stopped by the
subject at the last minute rather than failing for chance
reasons, and that Katz himself (p. 133) warns that the accounts
are questionable for the same reason Baker gave me.) This
explanation, however, does not seem to be subject to scientific
examination.
Another story that appears to lend credence to the idea
that hypnosis can result in loss of voluntary control is found in
Richard Feynman's autobiography, _Surely You're Joking_, Mr.
Feynman (1985, W.W. Norton, pp. 53-55). Feynman describes
volunteering to be hypnotized by a stage hypnotist while a
graduate student at Princeton. He mentions doing things he
"couldn't normally do" (a statement Baker does a good job of
falsifying) and being given the suggestion to walk all the way
around the room rather than returning to his seat directly.
Feynman decided to try to resist the suggestion, without success.
The social- psychological interpretation would state that this is
simply due to social pressures, not to any magical power of
hypnosis.
Baker maintains in his book that there are no differences
in the EEGs of hypnotized versus non-hypnotized individuals,
however David Spiegel of Stanford University, a hypnosis
researcher, maintains otherwise (e.g., Spiegel, Cutcomb, Ren, and
Pribram 1985). (Nicholas Spanos, in his author's response to
commentary by Spiegel citing this research (1986, p. 492), argues
that Spiegel has misinterpreted his data given the nature of the
control subjects used.) It would have been nice to at least have
seen some acknowledgment of disagreement on this subject, but
Spiegel is not even mentioned.
Another peculiarity of Baker's position on hypnosis was
pointed out by Stanford hypnosis researcher Ernest Hilgard at the
session on hypnosis at the 1991 CSICOP conference in Berkeley,
California. Hilgard noted that Baker rejects the usefulness of
hypnotic susceptibility scales ("To my dismay I soon discovered
this sort of screening was of no value ... Neither I nor my
fellow researchers found the tests to be discriminatory. ... we
found that nearly all of our subjects scored almost exactly
alike--near the top--on the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility
Scales, forms A, B, and C," p. 35). Hilgard stated that Baker's
position is contrary to that of not only state theorists, but to
non-state theorists like Nicholas Spanos. (Indeed, Spanos
presented data at the same conference which made use of
differential results on hypnotic susceptibility scales.)
Finally, the book is somewhat marred by a large number of
typographical errors which should have been caught by an editor.
These include not only misspellings (like "Hildgard" for
"Hilgard" on p. 107), but disagreement in number between verb and
subject ("Barber's own personal experiences with pain has led him
to be able to control it," p. 100) and other mistakes. I must
say, however, that despite these minor flaws, this remains one of
the best books on the subject of hypnosis I have read. I
recommend it highly.
References
Spanos, N. (1986) "Hypnotic Behavior: A Social-Psychological
Interpretation of Amnesia, Analgesia, and 'Trance Logic'."
_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ 9:449- 502.
Spiegel, D., Cutcomb, S., Ren, C., and Pribram, K. (1985) "Hypnotic
Hallucination Alters Evoked Potentials," _Journal of Abnormal
Psychology_ 94:249-255.
Editor's Column
By Jim Lippard
With this issue, the editorship of _The Arizona Skeptic_ moves
from Phoenix to Tucson, at least on a provisional basis. I hope
to return to at least a regular quarterly publishing schedule if
not a bimonthly one. I presently have enough material for another
entire newsletter (and more if I reprint articles from other
groups' newsletters), but more material is always needed.
Submissions may still be sent to the Phoenix Skeptics address;
they may also be sent to me more directly in care of the
Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
85721.
A word about the volume and issue numbers. The first
issue of _The Phoenix Skeptics News_ was the July/August 1987
issue. A regular bimonthly publishing schedule was kept up for
ten issues, ending with the January/February 1989 issue (vol. 2,
no. 4). The next two issues, January and February/March 1990,
carried no volume number but should be considered issues 1 and 2
of volume 3. The most recent two issues, July 1990 and December
1990/January 1991, make up volume 4. And so this issue, coming
four years after the first, is now the first issue of volume 5.
CORRECTION: In the article "Dissension in the Ranks of the
Institute for Creation Research" in the February/March 1990 issue
of _The Arizona Skeptic_, I stated that the myth of live
freshwater clams radiocarbon dated in excess of 1600 years is put
forth in Duane Gish's booklet, _Have You Been Brainwashed?_. I
based this claim on my reading of Hugh Young's article, "The Case
of the Living Fossil," which appeared on pp. 10-11 of the March
1988 issue of the _New Zealand Skeptic_. In that article, Young
attributes the claim to an unnamed booklet by Gish which I have
not found. The claim does not appear in _Have You Been
Brainwashed?_, though it does appear on p. 162 of Henry Morris'
_Scientific Creationism_. (Morris does not misrepresent the facts
as does the Jack Chick tract _Big Daddy?_, but he does draw
unwarranted conclusions from them.) I regret the error, and thank
Allan Lang of the Australian Skeptics for discovering it.
Upcoming Meetings
The Phoenix Skeptics will meet at the Jerry's Restaurant on
Rural/Scottsdale Road between McKellips and the river bottom,
with lunch at 12:30, on September 7 (Gary Mechler will speak on
"Why People Believe in the Paranormal"), October 5, November 2,
and December 7 (at which predictions for 1992 will be made).
Meetings are on the first Saturday of each month except where it
conflicts with a holiday.
The Arizona Skeptic is the official publication of the Phoenix
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with the following goals: 1. to subject claims of the paranormal,
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Arizona Skeptic are copyright (c) 1991 by the Phoenix Skeptics
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