Willpower, Groupthink, and the Disease Model for Everything

Columbine School Shooting, public domain 

When addicts say, "I can quit using any time I want to," people usually laugh at them and accuse them of being "in denial." I, on the other hand, believe they are telling the truth. Since they are admitting they don't want to quit, they aren't denying anything. Of course, the big question is why they don't want to quit. It can't be because the substance is making them feel good. They are generally some of the most miserable and unhappy people around.

So maybe they have some genetic defect that causes a “disease” that impairs their self control? While it is true that genetic tendencies can make someone a bit more or less likely to engage in certain behaviors, the majority of these effects are relatively small. 

If genes were causing the problem, one wonders how 12 Step Programs, which are based on religious conversion techniques that demonize people’s ability to make good choices for themselves and ask people to surrender to group norms and do what they are told, would ever succeed. Last I heard, changing your religion does not lead to major changes in one’s genome. Or its physiological effects.

I suspect the group’s views and where their ideas come from have something to do with the addict’s problems. Before they quit, they are proving the group’s opinions about the evils of willfulness, and after they quit they are proving the group’s belief system once again, but in a different way.

And is it really true that they can’t control their urges? Does an alcoholic actively engaged in drinking and driving usually take a big swig of Jack Daniels just when a cop pulls up in the lane next to them? Well, I suppose some might, but I suspect that such individuals are again going out of their way to prove their group’s idea that their willfulness is creating their problems. But most will keep the bottle hidden. So I guess they can control their urges even while intoxicated with their favorite beverage.

And of course, as I have previously pointed out, animal models of alcoholism are generally poor because scientists can’t seem to find any rats that hide the bottles. And the bottles that people hide are almost always found eventually. Usually  by spouses and family members. Imagine that.

Another point: Non-academic people in the addiction discussion also talk a lot about how co-dependency and enabling spouses and relatives are part of the problem in someone’s addiction (see Al-Anon), but somehow today’s scientists seem to think these other folks have nothing to do with the addict's problems. Really?? In what alternate universe?

I find it impressive how today’s psychology academics seem to go to any extent to avoid looking at dysfunctional family dynamics as a major cause of behavior that is destructive to one’s self or others. For another example, look at speculation about the causes of the recent spike in students committing mass shootings at schools. If the role of the parents is looked at at all, it seems that their only role is giving their kids access to weapons and ignoring danger signs, but not in creating the environment conducive to motivating their children to act that way in the first place.

Now of course having access to assault weapon is a prerequisite for committing these crimes, but what about the literally millions of homes in the United States in which such guns are found? If the presence of guns were the only problem, these shootings would have been going on at the current frequency for the past decades and decades.  For a similar reason, even overt child abuse alone cannot explain the shootings, as the vast majority of abused children do no such things. There has to be other things going on in these families. What, for example, are the parents saying to these kids and to each other, and how are they reacting in general to kids who start to have fantasies of violence? 

One of the Columbine shooters in the above picture literally collected an arsenal of weapons in his house prior to the act. When interviewed by the press, his mother said she didn't know about it. I wonder how the shooter interpreted the fact that his mother apparently pretended to not even notice the obvious.

No one seems to be asking these essential questions. Sad.

Book Review: Breaking Free by Rachel Jeffs

In writing about groupthink, I’ve become aware of how amazingly powerful it is. The best illustration of that is people in cults – they are willing to destroy themselves when the group or its leader demands it. In the worst cults, members separate themselves from all other sources of information like books, media, or the internet that stand any chance of getting them to stop believing whatever their dear leader wants them to believe. Anyone can readily see how insane some of their ideas are, yet they all profess to believe them, well, religiously.

And they'll do almost anything they are told. Would you let a child of yours writhe in pain from a broken bone for a week because your leader didn't want them to be exposed to doctors except as a last resort? In the book reviewed here, that's one of the things that would happen.

In this book, the cult is the Fundamentalist Later Day Saints (FLDS) under Warren Jeffs. It was written by one of Warren Jeff’s older daughters, Rachel, who somehow managed to eventually escape and re-establish some sanity.

FLDS was a polygamous offshoot of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jeffs ended up with 78 wives and 53 children. Some of these wives had been previously married to Jeff’s own father before his father's death. Jeff described himself as God’s “prophet” who spoke directly with the supreme being. Despite demanding a puritanical ideology from his followers, he married girls as young as 14 or maybe even younger, and had them commit lesbian sex acts in front of him. He also molested at least two of his own prepubescent daughters, though he managed to get them to keep it a secret. He had six wives at the time.

Many of the rules he insisted his cult members follow were arbitrary, and were all "directed by God," who nonetheless changed His mind from time to time. Jeffs demanded strict obedience and hard work from everyone. Males often did not get paid for their work. And yet everyone almost always followed his instructions to the letter, no matter how crazy they became. Jeff would then offer them “blessings” from the “Heavenly Father.”

Men and women who hardly knew one another were assigned marriages. The “sister wives” — some of whom actually were real sisters and half-sisters — were supposed to get along and not be jealous of one another. But of course they couldn't help themselves.  Again, when it came to actual behavior, they always did what they were told to do. Husbands would often play one of them off against the others by showing favoritism as to which of them he would spend the night with.

Even though Rachel finally managed to escape and start to think for herself, in the book she still seems to indicate that many times she still fears she that is displeasing God.  In the book, this thought  seemed mixed with the horror of never seeing many of her family members ever again, which I think is the real fear. Her five children are never going to be able to see their father, who is still in the cult, ever again.

You can sense that all along she sort of knew her father couldn’t really be talking to God, yet still told herself he was and that therefore her soul was in danger. She knew all too well what happened to members who left or were thrown out of the group, but often thought the source of her conflicted ideas was her own sinfulness. 

It took her father telling others that God had told him that she had engaged in behavior that she knew she had not done. God, after all, wouldn’t lie like that. But as mentioned, at times she felt that a newly-found desire to leave her church was “the most wicked thing possible.” "Flirting with Damnation" is the title of one of the chapters in the book. At times, her real fear of being cut off almost seems to metamorphize into the religious one.

The cult was based primarily in a town called Short Creek, which straddles the border between Utah and Arizona. They had been pursued by the law there in the distant past for their polygamy, but had returned when the heat was off, so to speak. There was also an offshoot of the cult in British Columbia Canada. Young girls were often trafficked from one of these locations to another, often by their own fathers, so the men could marry them.

The cult had been left alone by the government for about 50 years, but in 2003 the state of Utah started to arrest and prosecute cult members for both underage sex and polygamy. Warren Jeffs knew he would be a target, so he started establishing colonies in which to hide in other states. As he moved around, and especially later after he was arrested and given a life sentence, he started to issue more and more strange instructions from God and “corrections” for certain cult members. From jail. More and more normal activities were said to be forbidden – having fun was almost illegal.

Everyone continued to follow him as he issued “corrections” to those who he deemed “unworthy.” They did so after his corrections became more and more heinous. He would send some members, usually males but sometimes females, away. And their children could never see them again. Rachel had been prevented from attending her own mother’s funeral. He moved people from one of his “refuges” to another, and sometimes punished them by putting them with a kind of solitary confinement, with very little food, for a month or two. There were many more horrible pronouncements I won’t describe here.

The level of willful self-destructiveness of people in a cult such as this is almost beyond comprehension. I finished the book wanting to hear more about how she handled the conflicted feelings she surely had after she left and was separated from everything she knew growing up.

 

The Canceling of the American Psychotherapist

 

In my review of the book, The Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff, I focused on a cultural shift on college campuses that has often led to an environment characterized by political correctness rather than free and open debate between opposing viewpoints. Groups have even turned on their own members for deviating ever so slightly from a “party line.” I discussed how this is one way that groupthink can manifest itself.

A  new book by Lukianoff and Schlot talks about how this situation has apparently gotten much worse, and has spread to other educational institutions and vocational venues such as journalism.

One of the most problematic ideas of groupthink on campuses has to do with the so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) philosophy. Of course, diversity, equality (of opportunity, not of outcome), and inclusiveness are virtuous and wonderful things when applied to individuals with all of their family and historical influences and experiences. Unfortunately, this has now morphed into defining people entirely by their ethnic group. Members of groups are either ALL victims (ALL black people) or ALL oppressors because they may have benefitted in some  way from their “advantages” (ALL white people). 

Apparently except for Jews, who have been just about the most oppressed group for the longest time over history but also somehow counted some of the world's most successful people among their numbers. This obvious rebuttal to “Critical Theory” has been solved by some people by seeing Jews as White colonialists, while by others seeing them as Colored. Whichever is convenient. These people are still trying to figure out how to classify Asian Americans who aren’t white but who are who also more successful on average than other American groups.

This is in fact exactly the opposite of what Martin Luthor King preached! He spoke of judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

But no matter. The primary reason that I am reviewing this book is because this type of thinking has now spread to psychotherapy teaching programs! Your problems all now seem to originate, not from your family or personality or genetics, but from the fact that you are either an oppressor or a victim, according to your group identity, and you need to admit it! As the authors say, “It’s not about your problems. You are the problem.”  

Everything wrong with people is seen through this lens. Therapists are now lecturing patients who have “incorrect” political views. “Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies” has even been endorsed by the American Counseling Association. The American Psychological Association is beginning to follow suit. They endorse, for instance, the idea that the repression of feelings of males typically seen in many cultures (who, say, won’t cry), often modeled by parents, is an example of traditional masculinity invariably being “toxic.”

The authors of the Cancelling book believe that these approaches are counterproductive. They can cause patients to see themselves only as helpless victims, and discourage people who are automatically assumed to be perpetrators from seeking help. How do these therapists reconcile themselves to the fact that, in 2020, 70% of completed suicides were “privileged” white males (according to the American Suicide Foundation).

When I first read the chapter about psychology programs I was a little unsure how common this was, since I hadn't heard about it. But then I saw an advertisement for a book for therapists in the Psychotherapy Networker magazine. It was called Decolonizing Therapy by a PsyD named Jennifer Mullan. I quote from the ad: "Ignoring collective global trauma makes delivering effective therapy impossible; not knowing how to interrogate privilege (as a therapist, client, or both), and shying away from understanding how we may be participating in oppression is irresponsible." 

Well, I do believe a therapist has to understand what each family may have experienced in this regard to understand certain shared intrapsychic conflicts that are seen within a given family - but each family is unique. And hopefully the therapist is not acting out blatantly racist attitudes. To assume all white therapists are doing this is what is irresponsible.

Anyone who disagrees in some graduate programs is in high danger of being “cancelled” by fellow students. One student said the environment was so mean that a student who lost a family member to COVID was afraid to tell anyone lest they be told that they were crying “white tears” and lectured about how people of color were the real victims of the pandemic!

Now of course it is true that many people have been severely traumatized  by racial or group experiences and that such trauma can lead to psychopathology, but that is not the same as saying that other factors might not be equally or even more important.

This is a perfect example of one key feature of Groupthink: either/or or black and white thinking. No context, no subtlety. I recently had a negative personal experience with that type of thinking with psychology interns I used to lecture to. This one didn’t involve oppressors vs. victims, but there was a certain similarity in its misclassification scheme. And it’s something brand new.

I used to lecture them about borderline personality disorder (BPD). The interns came from the University of Tennessee Health Science center and another group of interns from the Memphis VA. Now admittedly I did discuss some of my own, outside-the-mainstream ideas, but I also discussed other current psychotherapy paradigms and theories about the disorder. 

After I retired, I was still invited back every year to give the talk. Then suddenly the person in charge who called me to do this stopped calling. It took me two or three years to find out why, but I finally was able to corner her. First the VA, and then the UT interns said they no longer wanted lectures about doctor’s individual practice experiences (mine was over 35 years), but only from people who did literature reviews or active researchers! 

This same type of thing was happening on my Psychology Today blog. One post I wrote was rejected because, they said, it was an opinion piece not based on research - when most of their posts are NOT research based. They just, for the first time in years, didn't like my opinion. So I stopped posting.

As readers of my blogs know, the literature in both psychotherapy and BPD is weak - and that's being generous. It is characterized by false assumptions, the fact that whole schools of therapy are evaluated but not the individual interventions which comprise them, the ignoring of many obvious impacting factors, and clinically-useless correlations between certain symptoms within one diagnoses or between two of them. People with a lot of clinical experiences in this area are a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than researchers. 

The interns even wanted solely literature-based reviews a about the treatment of transgendered patients, which has barely begun as a subject for any studies at all!

If a therapist is more interested in politics and your ethnic group than in you, drop them ASAP and find another therapist.

Pornography Addiction

Is pornography addiction a real condition? In the book I co-edited, Groupthink in Science, we have a chapter by Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist who has been very active in this debate (and is mentioned prominently in the book I’ll be talking abut). She makes what I consider an extremely good case that this “addiction” model is nonsensical. I agree.

In her book, The Pornography Wars, academic sociologist Dr. Kelsey Burke examines in fine detail both sides of this ongoing debate without clearly taking a position either way. She talks with a variety of academics and members of interest and church groups and gets them to open up considerably about their opinions. Clearly, a lot of the debate is based more on ideology than on science. On both sides! As we all know, sex is a subject that has created a huge disturbance in human culture, what with religion, gender issues, Victorian culture, and the like.

My own view is that sex negativity is still rampant in the United States, despite the fact that most people these days engage in relations prior to marriage. They often feel somewhat guilty about it afterwards. Interestingly, this has put radical feminists and religious fundamentalists on the same side of the pornography debate. What strange bedfellows indeed.

Now, to be extra clear, sex trafficking and being forced to participate in a porn film are issues that are completely legitimate. No one should be forced to do anything like this against their will. But in my mind, those issues are very different than the question of whether pornography per se is bad for anyone, and if so, who and in what way? Or the question of whether watching it compulsively in maladaptive ways is a “disease.”

I believe questions about addictions as true mental diseases should be limited to those substances, such as alcohol and opiates when used to excess, lead to tolerance and serious withdrawal symptoms. Just about anything can be used to excess and create negative consequences for the users and their associates. To me, most so-called “addictions” are nothing more than self-destructive behavior designed to have certain affects on family relationships and romantic partners.

I’d now like to list a few examples of the evidence for what I am saying here from the book in question. Research in this field, the author points out, depends on self-reports by subjects - which is not objective data, and which are highly dependent on the types of questions researchers ask and how they are phrased. There is, for example, a phenomenon called acquiescence, in which subjects’ responses are likely to go along with the values implied in the question - for example asking only about negative consequences but avoiding questions about positive benefits.

Lying about issues with moral implications is widely prevalent. Does anybody really believe that a female brought up in an evangelical religion will admit to secretly enjoying watching porn and having experienced no actual negative consequences from doing so outside of maybe feeling guilty? Additionally, it is obvious that people’s beliefs about porn influence the consequences they experience during and after watching it.

Another issue is correlation versus causation. Is watching porn bad for marriage, or does a bad marriage lead to more porn viewing? An interesting finding: Protestant men are more likely than any other, group, including atheists, to consider themselves addicted to porn. Yet they report watching less porn than the other groups. Several studies show that religious commitment is a better predictor of people believing  they are addicted than actual porn usage.

As I have discussed in several other posts, the fact that the brain’s connections are plastic and change all the time when exposed to environmental influences makes claims that neuroscience has “proved” that a porn “addicted” person has an organic disease incorrect. As Dr. Burke points out, nature and nurture and their interactions are what lead to most brains study results. And the boundaries between these things are “far from tidy.”

Another point: just because someone has a higher libido than someone else does not mean that they are sex addicts - they just want sex more often. Also, home porn may often be a cue for some other reward like masturbation. In a laboratory setting, contingencies like these aren’t in the cards.

Then there is a prominent Protestant theological teaching.  A quote from one of Billy Graham's recently posthumously-published newspaper columns sums it up concisely. He writes, “All people are sinners in need of a Savior.” What this means is clear from his sermons: prohibited but universal individualistic desires such as lust are evidence that we are all evil in the eyes of God and need to renounce our biological nature and follow what God – really the church – tells us to do. Or else. In the words of a woman at a church group’s conference on the harms created by porn addiction, "...after the Garden of Eden we’ve been running from God ever since.”

This also has led to perceptions about men versus women’s sexuality. Religion teaches us that sin was created by a woman’s curiosity when Eve bit into the apple. In the middle ages, women were actually considered the lustier of the two sexes due to the impurity associated with Eve’s curiosity. In the 1800’s during the industrial revolution and mass migration from family farms into cities, this changed into its opposite: women changed from Eve to Mary. Women were thought to want sex, not for itself, but only in order to insure the commitment of marriage. “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” was a question asked by confirmed virgins. Although men were thought to want sex way more than women, they were also perceived as being less in control of their behavior. Masculinity was defined as being in control, so if they “conquered” the natural sinfulness of a porn addiction, this was thought of as an accomplishment.

In my opinion, the function that all this mythology serves is to show the negative effect of allowing yourself to express lust, so the people who are doing without get to feel more justified in giving freer sex up. Said one Christian who had “overcome” a porn “addiction,” quoted in the book, he was “…tired of not being the person that God made me to be.”

Well, what about those radical feminists? They are certainly not primarily evangelical Christians. Nonetheless, they have without realizing it accepted the Christian dogma while trying to frame it as something else. Both Evangelicals and radical feminists believe that men feel entitled to sex and women are both objectified and victimized. The radical feminists seem to implicitly accept the idea that women cannot want and enjoy sex as much as men, despite the fact that they can have multiple orgasms and men cannot.  The general sex negativity towards women's lust prevalent in both sexes  in our “patriarchal” society  was summed up nicely by Elise Loehnen: "Good women want to be seen as sensual, warm and inviting of sex, but not overtly interested."

Because of the prevalence of these gender attitudes and in order to sell more, porn does in fact  frequently show women being objectified by men. The feminists  use this to “prove” their point, ignoring that this occurs because of the cultural groupthink expectations of the audience. And there are plenty of women who somehow enjoy watching porn as much as men do even under these circumstances.

Book Review: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

In 2019, I wrote a review of a book by Amber Scorah titled Leaving the Witness about a woman growing up as a member of a cult-like religion. People in that group were taught to avoid talking to anyone or looking at any source of information that might call into question its belief system. As with most cults, people who broke the rules or questioned orthodoxy were completely shunned by family and friends.

My interest was how people routinely convince themselves of the most outrageous beliefs - ones that could easily be seen as preposterous even if thought about briefly - and hang on to them for dear life in order to avoid an almost unbearable feeling of groundlessness (also called existential groundlessness or anomie). The roots of this are from the biological effects of an evolutionary process called kin selection. In my review I said I thought the author had written the most elegant descriptions of that experience I’d ever read.

Well, Ms. Scorah has met her match in Tara Westover. Furthermore, Westover’s book talks about what happens in a case in which the “cult” consists ONLY of the members of someone’s family of origin. They were ostensibly Mormons, but the vast majority of practitioners of that religion did not subscribe to many of the clearly bizarre ideas of this particular family, especially those of the author’s father.

Westover writes that he may have had bipolar disorder. Of course I have no way of knowing for sure, but the consistency of her descriptions of him argues against this. In true bipolar, the person thinks normally when not in a manic or depressed state, which is usually most of the time. Some of the father’s strange ideas did not seem to be delusions per se but were based on conspiracy theories that are now widely believed. Included were dramatic ideas about the “Illuminati” and an anti-Semitic tirade called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Other of his beliefs were even more far out: the public schools were all agents of Satin, so none of the seven children in the family attended public schools. All doctors were all part of this conspiracy, so no one was taken to a hospital. 

Mother always went along with whatever ideas were expressed by the Father, but when alone with the author, she would sometimes seem to indicate that indeed she knew better.

One of the biggest issues for the author was her relationship with her older brother Shawn, who was sometimes hyper-involved with her but at other times physically abusive to her. If she mentioned this to her parents, they did not seem to believe her, so she quickly learned to keep it to herself –sometimes even by telling herself that maybe she had dreamed it or that she was crazy so what had clearly happened was a figment of her imagination.

Strangely, Westover was able to get into BYU despite a paucity of education by studying for the college entrance exams, through books and other recommended sources from people she knew at her church. Most of this reading presumably would have been highly disapproved of by her father. It took her two tries at the test to get the requisite score, but she somehow kept at it. Her father has always said he thought that women should just get married and run a household, but as I will mention later, some of his behavior was inconsistent with that idea.

Once she got to BYU, a Mormon school, almost none of the students had the same belief system she did. They could hardly believe she had never even been to high school. She did not share anything about her unique family experiences. She frequently told herself she was not qualified to be there. Nonetheless, she was able to persist with the encouragement of some of her advisors who saw how bright she was. And she was bright enough to eventually get into highly competitive and prestigious graduate programs at Cambridge University in England, and at Harvard!

She frequently returned home and usually fell back into old family patterns, but something pushed her leave again and again to continue with her “satanic” education.

At school, the feelings and thoughts produced by her sense of groundlessness almost tore her apart, despite her ongoing successes. The way she experienced groundlessness was brilliantly described in a variety of amazing (and rather horrifying) ways throughout the book. Examples: she writes, “It was not that I had done something wrong, but I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.” 

When she started to experience her clique at Cambridge as a sort of family, she felt damned by those feelings: “No natural sister prefers a stranger to a brother…and what sort of daughter prefers a stranger to her own father? That feeling became a physical part of me.” Later she had the thought, “It seemed like I made a thousand mistakes, driven a thousand knives into the heart of my own family.”

The blow that stopped her from making frequent return home visits was after, in private e-mails, her mother admitted she should have protected her daughter from Shawn. And then her older sister admitted to her that she had been through many of the same things with Shawn that the author had. Even Shawn’s ex-girlfriend confirmed how he was. Surely now her Dad would believe her. Except in his presence, her mother and her sister started lying again, denying that they had said anything of the sort!

So how was the author able to break through the powerful effects of family dynamics and achieve her educational accomplishments? Again, I have no way of knowing for sure, so I'll speculate based on the available descriptions as well as my psychotherapy experience with other families. I could of course be completely wrong..

I suspect that her parents, despite any insistence otherwise, were both secretly highly conflicted about education, family roles, and religion, so she was getting a mixed message. The author does not tell us anything about her grandparents that might clue us in to where this confusion came from originally, but some of the parents' behavior seemed to scream it out. 

Some examples: as mentioned, father preached about traditional gender roles, and his only other daughter followed them. But somehow, when he had been injured and couldn’t run his business as before, he allowed his wife to develop her own business selling alternative medicines that brought in more money than he’d ever made, and he was supportive of her doing this. Also, when Tara started singing in local shows as a teen, he would always come to hear her sing, and appeared to be as proud as punch.

Mother, while not overtly telling the author to get educated, would often subtly push her into getting on with it – as long as Dad was not around. 

But the mind-blowing fact that seems most in line with my speculation is this: of seven siblings in the author’s family, three kids left the “homestead” and four stayed. The three who left got Ph.D.’s, while the four who stayed didn’t even have high school diplomas! The possible acting out of the ambivalence of this family thusly described in one sentence.

Book Review: Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer

 

Michael Shermer is the man behind Skeptic and the Skeptic Society. The group talks about all the crazy stuff people believe in and promotes science and critical thinking. This book was originally published in 1997 and a new edition came out in 2002. As someone who thinks that there are a lot of crazy ideas in the mental health fields, I wanted to see if Shermer had any ideas about the nature of weird beliefs that I had not already come across.

The book looks at some commonly seen unscientific ideas including abduction by aliens, recovered memories, anti-evolution notions, and Holocaust denial. It tears apart the tricks that leading “thinkers” in these movements use whenever they are seen in the media. Shermer has debated many of them, and seems somewhat surprised by how likeable and intelligent these people can be even when they are pushing very hateful myths.

Their methods include focusing solely on opponents’ weak points while avoiding saying anything definitive about their own position. They use quotations by reasonable experts but use them out of context. They take honest debates about one aspect of some phenomenon within a field to dispute the entire field. They focus on what is not known while ignoring things that are, and they emphasize data that does not fit the prevailing wisdom while discounting data that does.

One of their tactics I am familiar with is the use of the fallacy that if scientists were wrong about one part of a complicated theory like evolution, then the whole theory must be wrong. This reminds me of attacks on psychoanalysis. Just because Freud was wrong about the pervasiveness of the Oedipus Complex or penis envy does not mean he was wrong about the existence of intrapsychic conflicts and defense mechanisms. All-or-none thinking is a hallmark of groupthink.

Another tactic is one which I have written about. It occurs when a theory has been misused for foul purposes by a political or social group. If fact, any idea can be misused like that. Such misuse does not negate the validity of the theory. The big one for me is rejection by a majority of evolutionary biologists of the concept of kin selection because it might be used to justify social Darwinism. One of the people that is responsible for this turn of events is noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who is someone frequently quoted in a positive manner by Shermer throughout the book.

And speaking of groupthink, that is something the author alludes to somewhat briefly but does not seem to completely understand. In fact, groupthink maintenance is the best answer to the question posed in the book’s title in a lot of cases. I recall when it hit me that oft-used logical fallacies like begging the question and non sequiturs were not just random weaknesses in critical thinking but had a purpose: enforcing group norms, which are often, in turn, enforced by the use of illogical thoughts. In other words, they have a biological purpose.

Instead, Shermer focuses on somewhat more selfish reasons for why folks push a weird point of view. The thoughts are comforting (like believing in a specific type of afterlife), or the idea helps advance some political agenda like racist policies, or to sell books and become famous. He also discusses our ubiquitous tendency to look for data that fits our beliefs while discounting data that does not (confirmation bias). People are very good at “seeing what they are looking for.” People of high intelligence may even be better at that than those lower on that Totem Pole because they can devise reasonable-sounding justifications for their beliefs.

Another issue I had is that the author seems to think that in many of these cases the people who spout nonsense really believe what they are saying, rather than saying them because of an ulterior motive of some sort. He opines, for example, that some of these people believe in, say, alien abduction because they also mistakenly believed that hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations they experienced in which they saw an alien in their room. These hallucinations are actually a normal phenomenon that occasionally occur as people are drifting off to sleep or awakening from a deep sleep. Most of them only last a couple of minutes and, despite what the author says, feel somewhat dreamlike when the person comes to – at least those I’ve experienced did. 

To think that very smart people who don’t know about this phenomenon wouldn’t question their own sanity rather than believe that what they saw was real seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. As he points out, a lot of these people are quite bright, so they have to know that a lot of what they are advancing is b.s.

Despite these limitations, the book is a fun and interesting read. The history of fad-like belief systems is informative. He has a lot of amusing stories about arguing about these nutty ideas with their champions on talk shows like Phil Donahue.

Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Tells us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

 

One of the big problems in both psychiatric and psychological research that I have written about extensively is the tendency of researchers to think that their subjects are usually being truthful, especially when it come to things like family dysfunction, marital maladjustment and child abuse. 

Most people who know that people often are not truthful about these matters think it’s mostly a matter of personal shame and embarrassment, whereas I think that, while that is sometimes the case, the lies are more often about protecting the reputation of their families of origin.

 

We of course have very little truly objective research data in these fields because:

1. We can’t read minds.

2. People are good actors, leading to falsehoods in the observations of the researchers.

3. People not only lie to others, but lie to themselves as well. This is a part of the  willful  blindness characteristic of groupthink, which we need in order to maintain group cohesion with our kin and ethnic groups. Logic evolved not to reach the truth, but to justify group norms, as Gregg Henriques has pointed out.

 

The author of this book states, “People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that last book. They call in sick when they’re not…They say they’re happy when they’re in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men…People lie to their friends. They lie to their kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors…They lie to themselves. And they damn sure lie to surveys.”  

 

Stephens-Davidowitz’s book discusses one way we can get around this. We now have "big data" which can monitor not only the internet sites we visit but the questions we have in our own minds. People have little incentive to lie in the context of a Google search because no one they know will be aware of what they are doing when they do, say, a search for lesbian sex on Pornhub. The author refers to the internet as “digital truth serum.”

 

He talks about how this data helps us spot patterns of human thinking and behavior as well as predict how one variable will affect another. This data contains many surprises. For example, if you check into what follows most often when you type in “it’s normal to want to kill…” the most common inquiry is “my family.” 

Human sexual behavior, predictably, is a big area for surprises. Among the top searches on Pornhub by women is sex featuring violence against women, with such searches as “extreme brutal gangbang.” On Google, there are twice as many complaints by women than by men about a lack of sex in their relationship.

 

Some human activities that are thought by most people to be productive may actually backfire. When president Obama gave a speech about tolerance, searches for “kill Muslims” actually tripled during the speech.

 

One of my favorite facts was that after the release of particularly violent but popular movies (incorporating data from FBI hourly crime data, box office numbers, and a measure of violence in the particular movies), violent acts actually declined that weekend, rather than rise as conventional wisdom might suggest.

 

Now of course even with big data there are some questions which cannot be clarified, and the author gives us a wonderful discussion of some of the hazards in using it to draw conclusions.

 

Another of my frequently blogged about topics is the illogical assumptions made about studies in which one variable seems to correlate with another, like high schoolers who smoke pot getting poor grades. We all should know that correlation is not causation, but you’d never know that from looking at studies, in spite of all the hedging and disclaimers. 

I learned that there are actually names for some of the fallacies I've been writing about. “Reverse causation” is when variable A is correlated with variable B, leading to the idea that A causes B when in fact, B causes A. “Omitted variable bias” is when a third, ignored factor is something else that leads to increases in both A and B. Maybe kids from difficult homes have a tendency to both use drugs and get bad grades.

 

A big one in the genetics vs. environment debate is something called “dimensionality.” The human genome differs in literally millions of ways. If you test for a lot of different genes, some will correlate with the trait in question, but it’s just by chance. This is similar to flipping 500 coins and finding one that turns up heads 15 times in a row, and assuming the reason that it’s some sort of special coin. When such studies are repeated, the usual result is that the correlation disappears.

 

This book is funny and well written. I highly recommend it.

Psychotherapists Ignore Powerful Groupthink Forces

 

One thing that is a major theme in this blog is that many if not most therapists seem to think that most people’s problems are “all in their heads” and have nothing to do with the ongoing reinforcement of problematic behaviors through interaction with kin and ethnic group members. Groupthink is clearly one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful psychological force in everyday life. 

 

To see this clearly, think about what is going on in the USA today that is a constant focus in the press, talk shows, podcasts, and other media venues: the polarization of political life. Just look at the almost cult-like behavior on both sides, from the QAnon conspiracy theories on the right to the habitually offended community of social justice warriors on the left. Free speech, supposedly a cornerstone of the United States ethos, is attacked relentlessly by both sides without any irony or sense of awareness of the inherent contradictory nature of some of their viewpoints.

 

Yet so many therapists just ignore groupthink. The only exception is those who believe in family systems therapy, which was big in the 80's and 90's but has since fallen out of favor, particularly with psychologists. The problem with many family systems therapists, however, is the opposite: they seemed to have lost the individual. Although many people do not do it, they  are perfectly capable of employing critical thinking and coming up with their own thoughts, and behaving according to their idiosyncratic desires, if they are brave enough to do so. 

The current state of affairs would be amazing if it weren’t so sad. 

 

When I first started looking for clues about what was really going on in the lives of my patients when they were free associating in the psychoanalytic sense (back then, most psychiatrists still did psychotherapy and were analysts), I began to focus in on such things as logical fallacies. I, like most people, just thought those were common, somewhat accidental errors of thinking. I would start to express confusion about what the patient was actually meaning to say, and eventually happened upon information patients had not before volunteered. This lead me to start asking questions that my psychoanalytic supervisors never taught me to ask, like “what does your mother think about this?” – and I meant in the present, not when the patient was a kid.

 

What I didn’t know then was that the use of logical fallacies is one of the hallmarks of groupthink, so when I questioned them I was really finding a way to get at what they really thought, not what they were supposed to think. As my colleague Gregg Henriques points out, logic evolved not to get to the truth, but to justify group norms.

 

The more I got into it, the more I realized there were a whole lot of other “markers” that told me when I was hearing family groupthink and not the patients’ true thoughts and feelings. The following is a list of them, and there may certainly be other ones:

 

·       Logical fallacies

·       Defense mechanisms (as listed by psychoanalysts)

·       Irrational, self-scaring thoughts (as listed by cognitive therapists)>

·       Willful blindness (the refusal to even look at data which may challenge the group’s “wisdom”).

·       Plot holes (like when you are seeing  a movie and you get the feeling that such characters would never have said something like they did in the script, or that one of characters seems to know something they should have no way of knowing).

·       Ambiguous language (in which a sentence can mean two completely different or even opposite meanings, or a word has several different definitions and I couldn’t be certain which one the patient was using). This phenomenon is very familiar to people who work crossword puzzles.

·       Going off on tangents without returning to a main point or issue.

·       Circular reasoning

·       Spouting proverbs or maxims to justify behavior, such as “the grass is always greener…”  Often a marker for a family myth.

·       Mixed messages such as those exhibited by the infamous, so-called “help-rejecting complainer.”

It is interesting that when I bring up the ideas about group processes at professional meetings or in my books, no one actually disagrees or even argues with me. Instead, they just change the subject - or ignore the issue entirely.

Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin

 

A startling and fascinating new book and an equally mesmerizing new Netflix documentary look at organizations which are designed to destroy people’s self actualization and their true selves in favor of a particularly monstrous form of groupthink. As the author of Stolen says, attendees were supposed to become like bees in a hive. Both of these groups twisted religion and psychotherapy to the point that they are almost unrecognizable.

One, the one described in the book, was even worse than the other, if that’s even possible, because it attacked and destroyed children: so called “schools” for “troubled” kids. At least the one described in the documentary was aimed at adults who were willing participants.

This post will be about the book, while the doc will be described in the next one. Stolen, was written by a woman who, when she was 15 years old, was a star high school athlete in two sports and an A student—but was nonetheless labeled as a disturbed troublemaker by her highly critical and often absent father and a hyper-religious mother who spent a lot of her time reading the Bible. Gilpin doesn’t describe any physical or sexual abuse in her home, but strongly implies that her parents, particularly her Dad, were verbally abusive and highly invalidating. Her Mom would support her privately but then always side with the Dad when the family was together.

She had started running away when she was only five, and later began partying with high school friends to avoid being home. She was also admittedly very angry and at times returned the father's verbal abuse, and she did dabble in alcohol and pot a few times. But the book doesn’t really describe in detail why she was so angry, although she did accuse her parents of never believing her. Oddly, the parents entirely discounted their own parenting as a factor in her behavior and never seem to wonder what made her like she was. At one point during her stay at the school, her father wrote a letter that said, “I’m glad that you’ve been able to accept that you’re ultimately to blame for your own anger.”

She was suddenly taken away by strangers in the middle of the night and sent to a “therapeutic” boarding school run by an organization called CEBU, which was anything but therapeutic. For the first three months, the teens were made to hike over and over again to a bunch of different campsites in the middle of the woods and were subject to physical abuse, such as being made to keep marching even after the group was attacked by a hive of bees and had multiple stings. They weren’t allowed to shower and were given crap to eat. They were monitored constantly and communication between the victims was highly restricted.

They were then transferred to a high school which had various exercises that were designed after something we Californians were aware of in the sixties and seventies called the Synanon Games, a twisted version of AA. More on Synanon at the end of the post.

During these games the teens were subject to vicious verbal attacks from the people running the school, and also forced to attack one another in the same way. For the high crime of having engaged in a sex act, for example, the girls were called sluts and whores who were desperately seeking attention (because they were starved of it at home perhaps?). With the boys, however, the prevailing attitude was “boys will be boys.” 

Gilpin was still a virgin at the time, but was immediately told she was a liar when she said that. She was accused of being a drug addict and an alcoholic despite her limited behavior in this regard. If a student denied being an addict, they were immediately accused of being “in denial.”

If she told the truth, it never seemed to be bad enough for the counselors, so she began to just make stuff up. Clearly she wasn’t the only one of the teens who felt they had to do that. If the teens rebelled, they were punished severely. Once when she threw up she was forced to eat her own vomit. They were threatened with being transferred to an even worse facility, masquerading as a hospital, if they did not fall in line.

Clearly the program was an exercise in degradation designed to stamp out any semblance of individuality. Gilpin said that the more self hating she seemed, the more she was praised for “doing good work.” In reality, both her parents and the school were victim blaming, scapegoating her for her own abuse at their hands. One of her friends there later committed suicide.

Interestingly, even after she “graduated,” she did not tell her parents exactly what took place at the school. At least she did not write about doing so. She described herself as letting her anger with them take over, doing nothing but shouting at them about how f’d up they were for sending her to such an awful place. IMO, in doing this, she was actually providing her parents with justification for their having sent her there in the first place. Protecting them to an extent, just as I suspect she was doing by not describing in more detail in the book the way they had been treating her that made her want to run away so badly.

Synanon was initially a drug rehabilitation program founded by Charles E. Dederich in 1958 in Santa Monica, California. By the early 1960s, Synanon became an alternative community - later labeled a cult - centered on group truth-telling sessions that came to be known as the Synanon Game, a form of attack therapy. 

Attack therapy involves highly confrontational interaction between the patient and a therapist, or between the patient and fellow patients during group therapy, in which the patient may be verbally abused, denounced, or humiliated by the therapist or other members of the group. Attack therapy "attempts to tear down the patient's defenses by extreme verbal or physical measures."

Synanon ultimately became the Church of Synanon in the 1970s. Synanon disbanded in 1991 due to members being convicted of criminal activities (including attempted murder) and retroactive loss of its tax-free status with the Internal Revenue Service due to financial misdeeds, destruction of evidence, and terrorism. It has been called one of the “most dangerous and violent cults America had ever seen." Mel Wasserman, influenced by his Synanon experience, founded the CEDU's schools which used the confrontation model of Synanon. 

The CEDU model was widely influential on the development of parent-choice, private-pay residential programs. People originally inspired by their CEDU experience developed or strongly influenced a significant number of the schools in the therapeutic boarding school industry.