Article archive / July 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 3, No. 11. Source pages: 2.
I was sitting in the audience of the psychology board’s recent public meeting, waiting for my chance to ask brilliant, courageous questions when a group of applied behavioral analysts marched in, scowling, with storm clouds hanging over their heads. They sat down in one long row and glared. I immediately liked them.
Forgetting my plans to become a famous journalist I watched as the behavior analysts confronted the board members about the proposed legislation to place them under psychology.
As in almost any group conflict, it was difficult to get at the underlying issues. Right off the bat some of the board members became defensive and started talking down to the behavior analysts, causing the discussion to fly afoul, because we know this is an easy way to irritate people.
After a time, some of the audience began to interject questions and a little more listening occurred. Then one of the group, a parent client he told us, sat up straight and said to the room that the problem was not that the analysts didn’t want to be regulated, but that they didn’t want to be regulated by psychology. And that in short, they didn’t trust the psychology board.
Heads nodded and the rest of the audience could hear the hum of agreement in the analysts. Here it was, the harbinger of death, the writing on the wall, the bite of the vampire. Trust.
Without trust there is only one way to resolve a conflict: pure, unadulterated power. The power can be overt or secret, but it is win-lose power. This sort of conflict style absorbs tremendous resources and creates poor outcomes, because it causes greater errors in judgment and problem-solving.
If the LSBEP’s bill was to go forward, it was going to be a shotgun wedding. The bride was not having any of it. But somehow, the board’s effort continued, those in charge having missed Falstaff’s memo. So now there is a huge, 17 person commission, sans facilitator, similar to the working group in 2010, that is going to solve the problems in the psychology community for us.
Hundreds of laws are passed in a win-lose process every year. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling was win-lose, a huge and complex issue falling on the vote of a single individual. No top manager, worth his salt, would ever allow his team to arrive at a major decision in such a way. He’d understand that a 5-4 split is full of error and cries out for more of a consensus where the facts are able to convince individuals of the truth, or as close to it as we human beings are able to come.
In their article “Solving Social Problems Like a Psychologist,” Stanford’s Walton and Dweck write that psychology has a “long history of informing important social problems,” but that “we’ve lost our way in recent years.”
Attention to psychological processes and a rigorous methodology are our strengths they say, and we can “identify the processes that underlie a social problem with greater precision and causal understanding than perhaps is possible in other disciplines.”
You wouldn’t know it by watching us. Does it embarrass anyone else that we keep being sent to the play therapy room to learn how to get along?
As far as laws, even sausage shouldn’t be made this way.
Psychologists have the knowledge to help ourselves and others do better. We know about premature decisions, insufficient information, fuzzy problem definitions, lack of creativity, distortions, and so on. We understand the impact of trust on group problem- solving. We know our research paints a dismal view of human social reasoning, but we understand this and have tools to help.
When John Adams wrote the Massachusetts’ state constitution he put in a warning. “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; …”
He knew that freedom was a necessary but not sufficient condition. We must also have and apply knowledge, wisdom and virtue, if we are to support the principles of liberty and help to ensure the positive outcomes of our free society.
Freedom without wisdom, knowledge, and virtue … simply isn’t enough.
We can do better.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.