The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Some of the notable cases in which scientific jury selection has been used include the trial of Angela Davis, the Wounded Knee trials, the trials of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Vietnam veterans against the manufacturers of Agent Orange, Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s assassin), Attorney General John Mitchell, and the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson. Many of these and other front-page trials ended with verdicts favorable to the side employing jury selection experts.88

  In many such trials, scientific jury selection has reduced the unknowns by adding to the selection process predictions based on particular jurors’ feelings about giant corporations, leftists, widows, blacks, competitive marketing, the police, homosexuals, paraplegic accident victims, and so on and on.

  The basic premise of scientific jury selection is thus in direct conflict with the principle that a defendant is to be judged by a fairly and representatively assembled group. As one jury researcher candidly put it, “Anybody who tells you that jury research is designed to pick a fair jury is out of his bird. Lawyers want to pick a jury that favors their side— they’d be foolish if they didn’t—and jury research gives them a rational way of going about it.”89 In choosing jurors on the basis of their predictable behavior, scientific jury selection undermines the ethical foundation of jury trial.

  Beyond the Fringe

  As a drowning man will catch at a straw, so people in troubled times will seize on mystical beliefs in the hope of salvation. This may account for the vast popularity in recent decades of New Age (and post–New Age) mystical beliefs, practices, and nostrums said to endow their believers and users with mental health, spiritual power, peace, understanding, and joy. To name but a few: pyramid power, crystal power, aromatherapy, past lives therapy, memory recovery, messages from extraterrestrials, channeling, out-of-body experiences, rebirthing, reparenting, Scientology, thought field therapy, and repressed memory therapy.

  We heard of a few such oddities in the chapter on psychotherapies and will pass them by now, noting only that almost all are lacking in any scientific validation; they offer anecdotal and case history evidence but have had no randomized controlled studies and no replication studies by double-blind impartial evaluators. A massive recent review by a team of thirty-seven respected academics considers almost all of them unproven, unevaluated, unscientific, and, in some cases, potentially harmful in a number of ways.90

  But enough of that. Our attention now is focused on unorthodox theories and practices that are alleged to enlarge human psychic powers, a potent appeal that has enabled some of these systems, if one can call them that, to far outstrip the popularity of mainstream scientific psychology. The question we ask here is whether these offbeat forms of psychology are “outliers”—instances of real science at its outmost borders—or, like mesmerism and phrenology, forms of pseudoscience that delude the credulous and the uninformed.

  An enormous literature has been generated by both believers and nonbelievers, but we can take a shortcut: You will recall from an earlier chapter that in 1988 and 1991 the National Research Council (of the National Academy of Sciences) appointed a Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance to advise the Army of any psychological techniques that could extend human capabilities.91 Let us look at the committee’s findings on five particularly popular techniques or theories, adding notes on any later studies that add anything significant to those findings.

  Subliminal self-help: Annual sales of subliminal self-help tapes, available by mail order and on racks in supermarkets and bookstores, now exceed $50 million. Their producers claim that by using them one can reduce pain, break the smoking habit, control eating, build self-esteem, counter depression, overcome impotence, and achieve other worthy goals.

  Unlike subliminal advertising, the messages in the tapes are presented not in microsecond doses but at normal spoken speed, although they are hidden by music, the susurrus of the surf, or other covering sounds. A tape said to build self-confidence may contain, imperceptible beneath such sounds, the repeated message “I believe in myself more and more each day.” The claim is that hidden messages are subconsciously perceived and powerfully affect the user’s feelings, thoughts, and behavior.

  The most conclusive study reviewed by the committee was a double-blind experiment in which volunteers were tested for memory and self-esteem, then for five weeks used commercially produced subliminal self-help tapes either for memory improvement or self-esteem enhancement, and later were retested. What they did not know was that only half of them got the tapes they thought they were getting; of the other half, those who were told they got self-esteem tapes actually got memory-improvement tapes and vice versa.

  The results achieved with all these groups showed that the tapes “had no appreciable effect, positive or negative, on any measure of either self-esteem or memory, but many of the subjects believed otherwise.” Another research team that did similar work said less discreetly that subliminal self-help audio tapes are “fraudulent” and “complete scams.”92

  Later studies of these and other kinds of subliminal self-help items, and legal actions against them, have been equally damning. Several companies have marketed gadgets that deliver flashing lights and sounds through modified eyeglasses and headphones; typically, the Relaxman Synchroenergizer was claimed to improve digestion and sexual function and control pain, habits, and addictions. Because such flashing lights can trigger epileptic seizures in susceptible individuals, including some with no prior history of seizures—and did so—in 1993 the FDA initiated a seizure of the manufacturer’s entire supply, which a judge subsequently ordered destroyed.93

  The FDA also stopped the marketing of the InnerQuest Brain Wave Synchronizer, which was said to provide diet control, stress relief, pain relief, and increased mental capacity; the FDA also ordered Zygon International, Inc., to make refunds to users of its Learning Machine (and to develop proof of claims for it) from which people were supposed to learn foreign languages overnight, quadruple their reading speed, expand their psychic powers, build self-esteem, and replace bad habits with good ones.94

  But the latest news on this matter is depressing: A scan of the Web in late 2006 found only a handful of articles or book chapters repeating or amplifying the National Research Council committee’s findings about subliminal self-help devices but over thirty thousand entries promoting and offering such devices for sale.

  Learning during sleep: From 1916 to the 1970s a number of psychologists tried softly playing to people, while they were sleeping, material to be learned, on the theory that it would be heard at an unconscious level and effortlessly absorbed. The committee reported that the early research was inconclusive, since there was no hard evidence that the subjects were truly asleep. But later research, which included EEG recordings of alpha-wave brain activity to verify that the sleepers were soundly asleep, yielded only negative results; no learning took place.

  Still, some evidence existed that learning might take place during the lighter stages of sleep. One researcher, some years ago, treated a group of nail biters by playing, three hundred times a night while they were asleep, for fifty-four nights, a recording of the message “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” Forty percent of the group stopped biting their nails. A possible explanation: Since most people’s sleep ranges through different levels in the course of a night, learning had taken place during periods of lighter sleep. The NRC committee’s conclusions:

  The committee finds no evidence to suggest that learning occurs during verified sleep (confirmed as such by electrical recordings of brain activity). However, waking perception and interpretation of verbal material could well be altered by presenting that material during the lighter stages of sleep. We conclude that the existence and degree of learning and recall of materials presented during sleep should be examined again.

  As it has been, again and again, sometimes with positive and sometimes negative results. The reason for this inconsistency has been clarified in a major new work, Memory
: The Key to Consciousness, by psychologists Richard F. Thompson and Stephen A. Madigan:

  An important qualification in many of these studies is that no measures were taken of whether the person was actually asleep or instead had been wakened to some degree by the taped message. One recent experiment on learning during sleep eliminated these problems by monitoring the electrical activity of the brain while word lists were read repeatedly to sleeping subjects, and making sure that the subjects remained in REM sleep. The results of the experiment were clear: There was no evidence for any kind of memory formation for events that occurred during sleep, in tests of either implicit or explicit memory.95

  But, of course, as with all beyond-the-fringe psychological gimmickry, plenty of sleep-learning applications are for sale on the Net. To which one can only say: Let the sleeper beware.

  Neurolinguistic programming: This system of procedures, originally developed by two reputable psychotherapists, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, is marketed by a large number of individuals and firms in many countries as training in a set of valuable skills. The trainers do a lively business teaching it for a fee at NLP workshops, seminars, and institutes.

  The aim of NLP, as expressed by its proponents and teachers, is often as opaque as pea soup: It provides, they say, “a general philosophy and approach (together with tools and methodologies) that will assist a person seeking change to find a path through an unfamiliar landscape to a goal which he or she desires but lacks a means to reach.”96 In reality, its appeal is practical and, in some eyes, Machiavellian.

  The use of NLP is said to increase one’s influence and effectiveness in dealing with other people. Its core concept is that people, in their mental and physical activities, use particular sensory systems—visual, auditory, tactile, and so on—to represent to themselves the material they are dealing with. According to NLP theory, they are most strongly influenced by materials presented in whatever representational system they prefer or are using at the moment. The person trained in NLP relies on clues like eye movements, posture and respiration rate, and language. With this information he or she practices “mimesis” (mimicking the other person’s posture, respiration rate, and choice of metaphors), and “anchoring” (a form of conditioning to elicit a specific response) and thereby enlarges his or her influence over the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions. The technique has great appeal, for obvious reasons, to executives, managers, and salespersons.

  The committee, however, found no scientifically acceptable evaluations of the effectiveness of NLP, since, as it said, “the proprietors, purveyors, and practitioners of NLP are not experimentalists and are not interested in conducting such studies.” The evidence of the few halfway credible studies that exist “is either neutral or negative…Overall, there is little or no empirical evidence to date to support either NLP assumptions or NLP effectiveness.”

  Quite possibly, the committee added, some aspects of NLP do have some merit; maintaining eye contact with another person and paying close attention to his or her choice of topics and metaphors may well make for better communication. But the committee found that these possibly effective aspects of NLP are neither peculiar to it nor related to NLP theory.

  Since then, a vast mass of literature about NLP has piled up, almost none of which meets the minimal requirements for scientific validity and most of which is either hard sell or passionate sermonizing. This is not to say that NLP doesn’t work. A good summation was recently offered by Dr. Robert T. Carroll, a philosopher at Sacramento City College:

  While I do not doubt that many people benefit from NLP training sessions, there seem to be several false or questionable assumptions upon which NLP is based. Their beliefs about the unconscious mind, hypnosis, and the ability to influence people by appealing directly to the subconscious mind are unsubstantiated… NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuro-science… NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim “NLP works”?… Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices. Unfortunately, such a measurement may reveal only how well the trainers teach their clients to persuade others to enroll in more training sessions.97

  Biofeedback: This is the use of electronic and other monitoring equipment to provide an individual with information about his or her biological functions, the goal being to train the person to exert voluntary control over processes that are normally involuntary. Among those activities are heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature (particularly of the extremities), and alpha-wave activity.

  Typically, a trainee with hypertension will watch a continuous blood pressure readout and in some unspecified way come to associate certain unconscious processes with any observed drop in pressure. After a while, without knowing how he does it, the trainee can voluntarily lower his blood pressure. Similarly, subjects watching monitors of right-brain and left-brain activity learn to increase one and decrease the other, the result being an improvement of such cognitive abilities as mentally solving arithmetic problems. Trainees who learn to reduce tension in specific muscle groups have been able to improve their musical skills, sprinting performance, and hand-eye tracking.

  Impressive as this sounds, the committee found that there were serious limitations to the gains achieved through biofeedback. Subjects could not decrease their heart rate under conditions of stress; only two of ten studies on muscle relaxation showed evidence of it and none showed much benefit in stressful situations; control of alpha-wave activity improved performance only on simple cognitive tasks; and body temperature control, potentially valuable in preventing frostbite, did not work except when the subject was in a resting state.

  As with other fringe/alternative treatments, biofeedback has a huge literature, much of it unsubstantiated claims, some of it reasonably solid research. A credible up-to-date overall appraisal comes from the Blum Patient and Family Learning Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital:

  Biofeedback training as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction enjoyed a brief surge of popularity following its inception in the late 1960s, but exaggerated claims based on poor-quality studies led to a reaction against it, and biofeedback largely slipped out of the public view during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, however, properly designed studies were performed, and biofeedback began to regain respect.

  Currently, incomplete but encouraging evidence suggests that biofeedback may indeed offer at least modest benefits for a variety of medical conditions, including hypertension, anxiety, Raynaud’s syndrome, low-back pain, insomnia, fecal incontinence in children, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraine and tension headaches. Biofeedback does not appear to be effective for asthma.98

  Parapsychology: For many decades a number of committed parapsychologists—some are physicists, psychologists, and members of other scientific disciplines, many others laypersons—have been conducting experiments in such “psychic” phenomena as extrasensory perception (ESP), clairvoyance (seeing things that are out of sight), psychokinesis (the ability to move objects or influence machinery by mental power), telepathy, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and channeling. The American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1885, has a substantial endowment fund, publishes a newsletter and a journal, and regularly holds lectures, symposia, and meetings. A Gallup poll in 2005 found that four out of ten Americans believe in ESP, nearly a third in telepathy, and over a quarter in clairvoyance.99

  Nearly all parapsychological phenomena, if real, would have practical value (and indeed police and others sometimes pay psychics to try to locate missing persons). The National Research Council committee therefore visited parapsychology laboratories to witness demonstrations and experiments, discussed parapsychological experiments with a number of parapsychologists, and reviewed studies by both believers and skeptics.100 Of this mass of material, the two most positive findings were these:

  —Of the vast number
of reports of remote viewing achieved by telepathy, only nine were scientific studies, but eight of the nine had serious flaws (the “senders” had unintentionally provided the “receivers” with clues in between trials), and the ninth had a different but equally serious flaw. A later and more rigorous study did produce some results, but below the level of statistical significance.

  —Of 332 reports of psychokinetic influence over random number generators, 188 had some claim to scientific status; of these, 58 reported statistically significant results. The two most careful and extensive of these experiments used random number generators that turned out either 0’s or 1’s, averaging 50 percent of each over the long term. Subjects who tried to influence the machines by psychokinesis were able to produce 50.5 percent of 1’s in one laboratory and 50.02 percent in the other, that is, one extra 1 per hundred trials in one laboratory, two extra 1’s in every twenty-five hundred trials in the other laboratory. In view of the large number of trials, these results are statistically significant but they indicate “an extremely weak effect.”

  That being the most impressive evidence of parapsychological phenomena, the committee’s conclusion was categorical:

  The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.

  In the committee’s view, the best scientific evidence does not justify the conclusion that ESP—that is, gathering information about objects or thoughts without the intervention of known sensory mechanisms— exists.

  Nor does scientific evidence offer support for the existence of psychokinesis—that is, the influence of thoughts upon objects without the intervention of known physical processes.101