This uncomfortable mismatch between discipline-derived knowledge and professional behavior sets the stage for some dark humor in Handelsman's piece. My mother particularly enjoyed the following illustration of Daniel Kahneman's work on the prevalence of heuristic shortcuts in human reasoning:
When people make decisions under stressful conditions, Kahneman (2011) argued that they often substitute simpler questions for more difficult ones. For example, those involved in the torture scandal may have asked questions such as "How do I maintain my relationships with DoD?" and "How can psychologists stay involved?" rather than "How do we reconcile our behavior with the ethics of the profession?" and "Should psychologists stay involved?"
A little dark humor makes Handelsman's work that much more teachable, though, so mount that smartphone camera of yours somewhere with duct tape, teach a ten minute lesson to it and then put your pedagogical flair online. You just might win $500 for it.
[1] In fact, had I been assigned to review Handelsman's article, I would have asked him to reference an intellectual provocation by social psychologist Kenneth Gergen called "Social Psychology As History". Gergen claimed that "enlightenment effects"--coming to know about the follies of human nature by systematically studying them in a science-y way--would lead to dramatic changes in human nature as we strove to overcome the follies our science-y investigations revealed.
These changes would then render the scientific discoveries of past generations of psychologists merely contingently rather than eternally and universally relevant. E = MC2 all the time in all cultures, but do most people have an inclination to mindlessly obey their malevolent authorities all the time in all cultures, even after learning by science-y means that people have such an inclination currently?
Judging by the fact that the same people who teach the Milgram experiment to their flabbergasted students every year looked the other way while their entire profession gave an "ethical" assist to the torture of mostly innocent people (sometimes to death) suggests that Gergen was a little too optimistic about the reformability of human nature by scientific education.
Now I don't want to be a pessimistic puddleglum and say that human nature cannot be reformed. I certainly don' t want to say that individuals and communities cannot learn from their mistakes to some significant extent. But knowing the Milgram experiment seems to prepare people best for resisting an authority when that authority specifically asks the participant to deliver shocks of increasing voltage to a middle aged veteran with a heart condition in the adjacent room when he forgets the word pairs you tried to teach him. To grasp our moral obligation to resist malevolent authority in some other context requires a degree of analogical imagination that forty years of referencing Milgram (and a century of getting smarter at IQ tests) still hasn't quite delivered as well as we might hope.
[For more information on the retraction controversy, please see my other article An Old Guard Psychologist Inspires a Chill on Academic Freedom]
(Article changed on August 23, 2017 at 18:32)
(Article changed on August 24, 2017 at 19:46)
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