Article archive / September 1, 2014
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 13. Source pages: 2.
Who knows if the recent appointment of Dr. Joe Comaty to the psychology board was due to behind-the-scenes politics of LAMP or the board’s piling-on the first-ranked candidate. All the fuss and bother surrounding the election could have been just a distraction for us in the peanut gallery, while stealthy LAMP did its usual thing.
But even if the outcome was predetermined, it doesn’t excuse the board’s behavior.
Dr. Comaty had every right to pepper the Governor’s Office with complaints and accusations; he had every right to plop down in the front row at the Ethics Board; and he had every right to confuse the distinctions between dual roles, conflict of interest, ethics and efficiency.
The psychology board, on the other hand, had no such rights. They should have sat unobtrusively on the sidelines while the democratic process played out.
But the situation does provide us with some insights about how the board solves problems and manages its group dynamics. Their trip over to the Ethics Administration was an impressive, albeit embarrassing, example of the Einsellung Effect.
The Einsellung Effect is the name for the common human tendency to ignore new information that doesn’t fit with our initial idea. There is a long list of related cognitive biases: Kahneman’s WYSIATI, the availability heuristic, focusing and framing effects, illusion of validity, confirmation bias, and so on.
The Einsellung Effect explains why physicians ignore new information after they’ve made a diagnosis, why government agencies overlook new facts that contradicts their current programs, and why even scientists, whose job it is to remain open to new data, adhere so strongly to their favorite theory that they can’t see information that is right in front of their eyes.
The Effect works on us unconsciously. By studying eye movements, we’ve found that even chess masters will fixate on a familiar solution, their eyes returning to it repeatedly, even when a better solution is present and should be obvious.
When in the grip of the Einsellung Effect, International Masters, who generally perform at five standard deviations above the mean, drop to the level of Class A players, National Masters drop to Class B, average players drop well below average, and so on. The Effect causes a loss of three standard deviations in performance.
If we translate this to teams, using a standard IQ type scale, we can predict a team that performs at 130 can drop to 85, or a team at 115 drops to 70. Pretty soon, even rehab can’t help.
Of course there are other individual and group dynamics that impact outcomes, such as Need for (premature) Closure, Need for Power, over- confidence, defensiveness, etc. Characteristics such as openness and self-awareness become critical also, since they act as antidotes to some of the biases. And then there is motivation.
It’s a little hard to know for sure which cognitive biases were in operation for the board without knowing what they were thinking––and they are fairly stubborn when it comes to explaining themselves. But it seems a good guess that they accepted Joe Comaty’s “direct conflict of interests” frame, because they took the issue to where people take conflict of interest questions, suggesting they were pretty confident of their frame because no one goes to the state Ethics board to brainstorm with them.
The psychology board defined the problem incorrectly then went looking for confirmation, which made them look silly. The Ethics members were puzzled to see the question brought before them. (By golly, there really is such a thing as a stupid question.)
The Einsellung Effect, along with other cognitive biases and power issues, helps account for some of the more regressive decisions we’ve seen. Act 251 taking the top spot and Opinion #12 running a close second.
A litmus test for the psychology board to prove it is performing well would be when it decides that Opinion #12 just might not be right after all — that all the other states in the US might actually have it right, and we’re the ones who have it wrong. The probability of correcting that is near zero, what with Dr. Comaty back on the board and LAMP having written itself into the two latest psychology bills.
Regardless, it would be nice if the psychology board worked on its group processes using science whenever possible. Like Eduardo Salas says, ”There’s a science for that.” Luckily, it’s ours.
One approach they might borrow from the cognitive psychologists is to place mirrors in front of themselves during meetings, an experimental method that has been shown to increase both self-awareness and moral behavior. Since their new meeting room has no windows, this could be a real win-win.
Then we can do the same with the legislature, and maybe even Congress.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.