After-the-fact explanations

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The truth is sometimes counter-intuitive. In fact, it turns out the truth may well be counter-intuitive more often than we suppose ....

I reread about this delightful bit of research tonight: in 1973 Rosenhan and seven research associates each went to separate mental hospital admissions offices to submit a complaint of "hearing voices". They gave false names and employment details, but otherwise described their life and current emotional state truthfully and honestly. Most of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized for a couple of weeks.

Apparently, the interviewer would guess at the outset (following the telling symptom of hearing voices presumably; hearing voices is one of the hallucinations typically associated with paranoid schizophrenia) that they were schizophrenic and then try to read evidence into all their stories. Innocuous statements (and I quote from the source) like "relationship with his wife was characteristically close and warm. Apart from occasional angry exchanges, friction was minimal" was interpreted by the interviewer as follows: "Affective stability is absent. His attempts to control emotionality with his wife and children are punctuated by angry outbursts". Amazing.

And then - wickedly! - when some staff members where Rosenhan was working heard about this research he'd been conducting, he told these members that pseudo-patients were going to seek admission to the hospital in the forthcoming months. After a period of time 193 new patients had been admitted. Asking the previously informed staff members who they thought were the fakes, 41 of the new patients were accused of pretending. Guess what? He'd made it up. None were pseudo-patients!

But before dismissing this as the illusions of people who have spent too many hours with the loony bunch, it appears that our own invulnerability to cognitive illusions is none too certain. Although the article I'm reading is trying to give advice to clinicians (which i am not, for the record), it could apply as well to our everyday certainties in drawing large conclusions from hunch-confirming information. Research to find out whether research statistics or expert intuition is the most reliable, unanimously favours the former.

Postscript

Cognitive illusions can be pervasive. Like a kind of animism. I testify. Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive ...