Five Questions for Critical Thinking

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TA B L E
Chapter 1 Introduction to the Science of Psychology
1.5
Some Popular Myths
Ask some friends and relatives what they think about the statements listed in the left-hand column of this table. Most people will
probably agree with at least one of them, even though all of them are false. Perhaps you already knew that, but don’t feel too smug.
by
At one time or another, we all accept something we are told simply because the information seems to come from a reliable source
or because “everyone knows” it is true (Losh et al., 2003).
doing
2
learn
Myth
Fact
Many children are injured each year in the
United States when razor blades, needles,
or poison is put in Halloween candy.
Reported cases are rare, most turn out to be hoaxes, and in the only documented
case of a child dying from poisoned candy, the culprit was the child’s own parent
(Brunvald, 1989).
If your roommate commits suicide during
the school term, you automatically get A’s
in all your classes for that term.
No college or university anywhere has ever had such a rule.
People have been known to burst into
flames and die from fire erupting within
their own bodies.
In rare cases, humans have been consumed by fires that caused little or no damage
to the surrounding area. However, this phenomenon has been duplicated in a
laboratory, and each alleged case of “spontaneous human combustion” has been
traced to an external source of ignition (Benecke, 1999; Nienhuys, 2001).
Most big-city police departments rely on the
advice of psychics to help them solve murders,
kidnappings, and missing persons cases.
Only about 35% of urban police departments ever seek psychics’ advice, and that
advice is virtually never more helpful than other means of investigation (Nickell,
1997; Wiseman, West, & Stemman, 1996).
Murders, suicides, animal bites, and episodes
of mental disorder are more likely to occur
when the moon is full.
Records of crimes, dog bites, and mental hospital admissions do not support this
common belief (Bickis, Kelly, & Byrnes, 1995; Chapman & Morrell, 2000; Rotton &
Kelly, 1985).
You can’t fool a lie detector.
Lie detectors can be helpful in solving crimes, but they are not perfect; their results
can free a guilty person or send an innocent person to jail (see the chapter on
motivation and emotion).
Viewers never see David Letterman
walking to his desk after the opening
monologue because his contract prohibits
him from showing his backside on TV.
When questioned about this story on the air, Letterman denied it and, to prove his
point, lifted his jacket and turned a full circle in front of the cameras and studio
audience (Brunvald, 1989).
Psychics have special abilities to see into
the future.
Even the most famous psychics are almost always wrong, as in these predictions
for the year 2002: “Satan will be discovered working in a homeless shelter, reading
to the blind, and delivering Meals on Wheels,”“The Super Bowl will be cancelled
after the first half because team owners will refuse to cough up an extra $10,000
for each player,” and “A time tunnel will be created to allow people to make a oneway trip back into time.” No psychic’s 2001 predictions included the September 11
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. When psychics do appear to be
correct, it is usually because their forecasts are either vague (“Hillary Clinton will be
much in the headlines with a scandal”) or easy to predict without special powers
(“Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles will marry”) (Emery, 2002).
Five Questions for Critical Thinking
Francine Shapiro, a clinical psychologist in northern California, had an odd experience
while taking a walk one day in 1987. She had been thinking about some distressing
events when she noticed that her emotional reaction to them was fading away. She realized that she had been moving her eyes from side to side, but had these eye movements
caused the emotion-reducing effect? Perhaps, because when she made these same eye
Thinking Critically About Psychology (or Anything Else)
23
movements more deliberately, the effect was even stronger. Was this a fluke, or would
the same thing happen to others? To find out, she tested the eye-movement effect in
friends and colleagues, and then with clients who had suffered childhood sexual abuse,
military combat, rape, or other traumas. She asked the clients to recall these traumas
while keeping their eyes focused on her finger as she moved it back and forth in front
of their faces. They said that their emotional reactions to the memories, like Shapiro’s,
faded. They also reported that trauma-related problems such as nightmares, fears, and
emotional flashbacks decreased dramatically, often after only one session (Shapiro,
1989a). These successful case studies led Shapiro to develop a new treatment called eye
movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR (Shapiro, 1991; Shapiro & Forrest,
2004). Today, Shapiro and 30,000 other therapists in 52 countries are using EMDR to
treat an ever-widening range of anxiety-related problems in children and adults, from
phobias and posttraumatic stress disorder to marital conflicts and skin rashes (Beaulieu,
2003; Edmond & Rubin, 2004; Lawson, 2004; Manfield & Shapiro, 2004; Maxwell, 2003;
Omaha, 2004; Russell, 2006; Silver et al., 2005).
Would the phenomenal growth of EMDR be enough to convince you to spend your
own money on it? If not, what would you want to know about EMDR before deciding? As a cautious person, you would probably ask some of the same questions that
have occurred to many scientists in psychology: Are the effects of EMDR caused by the
treatment itself or by the faith that clients might have in any new and impressive treatment? And are EMDR’s effects faster, stronger, and longer lasting than those of other
treatments?
Questioning what we are told is an important part of a more general critical thinking process that can help us make informed decisions, not only about psychotherapy
options but also about many other things—such as which pain reliever or Internet service to choose, which college to attend, what apartment to rent, which candidate to
vote for, and whether we believe that cell phones can cause cancer or that shark cartilage
can cure it. One way of applying critical thinking to EMDR or any other topic is to ask
the following five questions:
■ What am I being asked to believe or accept?
In this case, you are asked to believe that EMDR reduces or eliminates anxiety-related
problems.
■ Is there evidence available to support the claim?
Shapiro began her EMDR research on herself. When she found the same effects in others, coincidence became an unlikely explanation for the observed changes.
■ Can that evidence be interpreted another way?
The dramatic effects that Shapiro’s friends and clients experienced might have been due
to their motivation to change or to their desire to please her, not to EMDR. And who
knows? They might have eventually improved on their own, without any treatment. In
other words, even the most remarkable evidence cannot be accepted as confirming an
assertion until all reasonable alternative explanations have been ruled out. Doing that
leads to the next step in critical thinking: conducting scientific research.
■ What evidence would help to evaluate the alternatives?
The ideal method for testing the value of EMDR would be to identify three groups of
people who are identical in every way except for the anxiety treatment they receive.
One group receives EMDR. The second group gets an equally motivating but useless
treatment. The third group gets no treatment at all. If the EMDR group improves much
more than the other two, then it is less likely that the changes following EMDR can be
explained entirely by client motivation or the mere passage of time.
■ What conclusions are most reasonable?
The evidence available so far has not yet ruled out alternative explanations for the
effects of EMDR (e.g., Goldstein et al., 2000; Hertlein & Ricci, 2004). And although