Article archive / October 2021
Originally published: . Volume 12, No. 10. Source pages: 2.
“Power corrupts“ is the shorthand version of Lord Acton’s famous quote. Within these two little words is a world of wisdom. A succinct warning about human nature––our own and that of others.
A historian and moralist, Lord Acton expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Creighton in 1887. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
That power corrupts is a truism because it's true. It explains unexplainable behavior, such as horrible crimes against humanity. It also warns us of the challenges of law enforcement.
Lord Acton said it very eloquently but Zimbardo proved it in his Prison Guard experiment. All you have to do is give someone power and they go sort of nutty.
There may be some few people who are immune to the dark side of power but that is a dangerous hypothesis. The wise position is to expect that we are all corrupted by power.
Consequently, the only way to correct for this fundamental human problem regarding the corrupting influence of power is to install organizational structures that correct the tendency. Everybody knows that.
Oh wait, everybody doesn’t know that. None of this seems to have dawned on those in charge of the complaint cops at our state psychology board. They have had years, essentially, to clean up their mess that they started in 2014, and they keep doing the same wrong things, over and over.
Space and time permit me only a few of the most obvious problems that our board either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to correct.
1.) Base rate blindness. The base rate for actual mistakes is very low in psychology which drives up the danger of false positives. Additionally, a low base rate means that it may be very difficult to impact the outcome measures no matter what you do. It's impossible to solve a problem that doesn't exist on a practical level.
2.) Misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest. No one misses the obvious financial conflicts of interest that are structured in to the complaints committee. There are also non-financial incentives, such as identity or job security.
3.) They don’t seem to understand job match. The job of an investigator is to understand whether a psychologist made a psychological services mistake. You can’t hire an attorney or a private investigator or any other non-psychologist to figure out the practice of psychology.
4.) No checks and balances, violations of due process. They don’t seem to have any true oversight or psychological firewalls, such as separation between the "investigation" and the "arrest." This lays open the process for contamination by confirmation bias, and other types of similar errors.
5.) Lack of transparency and system defensiveness. The board thinks they're transparent but they are not. They are defensive.
6.) No outcome research to guide the public safety efforts program. It doesn’t seem to matter to the board that nothing has changed over the last 20 years in regard to disciplinary actions. They have no theory, no strategy, and no valid measurements to guide their efforts.
7.) Unintended consequences that reduce overall public well-being and safety. One example of this is having a painful and costly complaints program helps to drive psychologists away from working in the court system, the highest source of complaints. We report in this issue that a Judge is begging for psychologists. Another unintended consequence is how a punitive, secretive and inconsistent law enforcement program helps to suppress information––information that would help true problem-solving.
I could go on and on about this especially after talking to a few of the victims of our complaint cops.
A well-designed program, taking into account base rates, Intervening variables, and measures of public well-being and safety, would work much better than the current program which probably has the main result of instilling fear in psychologists, suppressing valid information, and wasting money.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.