Advances in Social and Organizational Psychology

A Tribute to Ralph Rosnow

Donald A. Hantula

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781138004238
• eBook ISBN: 9781135600686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This new volume is a collection of thought-provoking essays on the current state of social and organizational psychology. The topics range from data analysis and interpretation, to research ethics, to theoretical issues, to an examination of psychological epistemology and theory. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, focuses on Ralph Rosnow's greatest contribution to psychology, advancing our knowledge of the methods and ethics of research. This section introduces refinements in research methodology, ethical issues in the conduct of psychological research, and the thorny problems of artifact in behavioral research. Four of the chapters in the next section cover topics in organizational psychology (consumer behavior, rumor in organizational contexts, decision making, and leadership) and three review social psychological topics (science and social issues, smiling, and human values). The final section is a collection of chapters on theory from three eminent scholars. This thought provoking finale raises epistemological questions for future generations to solve.The book is intended for graduate students and scholars in social, organizational, and consumer psychology, and related disciplines such as communication, management, marketing, management information systems, and sociology.

III
Social and Organizational Psychology

9
Meta-Analysis, Moral Panic, Congressional Condemnation, and Science: A Personal Journey

Bruce Rind
Temple University

Meta-analysis offers a strong alternative to traditional methods of reviewing research studies (Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1991). Used properly, it can enhance rational assessment of phenomena by removing or substantially reducing subjective bias based on values and emotion. With this in mind, two colleagues and I made use of meta-analysis in the late 1990s to rationally reevaluate claims made about the nature and consequences of child sexual abuse (CSA), a topic particularly vulnerable to value- and emotion-laden thinking (Jenkins, 1998). Our analyses, published in the summer of 1998 in Psychological Bulletin (Rind, Tromovitch, & Bauserman, 1998), disputed essential and strongly held assumptions about CSA. Despite the intensity and entrenchment of the assumptions we challenged, widely held in the helping professions, reaction to our publication seemed to be quiet. This appearance of calm was abruptly pierced the next spring, when an avalanche of attacks erupted. By the summer of 1999, exactly 1 year after publication, Congress condemned our study, the first time in the history of the United States that a peer-reviewed scientific study had been so treated. Our attempt to bring rational objectivity to a topic dominated by value- and emotion- based thinking in the end was overwhelmed by this very same thinking. In this sense, our story fits in well with the history of philosophy and science, in which challenges to sacred cows of the day have met similar or worse fates more often than could possibly be summarized in this short chapter.

On July 12, 1999, the House of Representatives voted 355–0 to condemn our study—13 congressmen (all Democrats), however, did abstain. Later that month, the Senate concurred unanimously with a 100–0 vote. Despite this “official” proclamation of our study’s invalidity—capping off months of attacks by therapists, child advocates, talk show hosts, journalists, religious organizations, and politicians—the study has, in fact, firmly stood its ground to all serious scrutiny of its scientific merit.

First, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest science organization in the United States and the publisher of the prestigious journal Science, examined the article. The AAAS concluded, after examining all the materials available to them, that they could find no evidence of improper methodology or other questionable practices. Rather than criticizing us, as various religious, therapeutic, political, and media critics had confidently expected, the AAAS rebuked the critics:

[W]e found it deeply disturbing that so many of the comments made by those in the political arena and in the media indicate a lack of understanding of the analysis presented by the authors or misrepresented the article’s findings. All citizens, especially those in a position of public trust, have a responsibility to be accurate about the evidence that informs their public statements. We see little indication of that from the most vocal on this matter, behavior that the Committee finds very distressing. (quoted in McCarty, 1999, pp. 2–3)

Second, in the fall of 2001, my coauthors and I (Rind, Tromovitch, & Bauserman, 2001) refuted dozens of statistically and methodologically unsound criticisms, as well as inappropriate moral attacks, made by two groups of therapists (Dallam et al., 2001; Ondersma et al., 2001) in Psychological Bulletin. One of the groups, Dallam and colleagues, played a key role in facilitating the media and political attacks on our paper by providing these sources with even weaker versions of their unsound criticisms (Dallam, Gleaves, Spiegel, & Kraemer, 1999), which were eventually published in Psychological Bulletin.

Third, the March 2002 issue of the American Psychologist was devoted to our article and the reaction to it. The individual articles as a whole supported our study and offered no criticism of it, but had much criticism of the critics. Lilienfeld (2002), for example, approaching the issue from a philosophy of science framework, documented a pervasive pattern of illogic in the attacks on our study. Baird (2002), a psychologist and one of the members of the House who abstained in the vote, pointed out the flaws in Congress’ judgment of our study, noting that “not more than 10 of the 535 members of the House and Senate had actually read [the article] and that fewer still were qualified to evaluate [it] on scientific merit” (p. 190). He complained that Congress operates on the principle “If a scientific finding does not confirm my policy position, it must not be good science” (p. 190). He called this vote “a low point for the 106th Congress” (p. 190) and added that it was also a low point for the American Psychological Association (APA), which had caved in to political pressures by distancing itself from the study.

The reaction to our study must be viewed as hysterical, particularly when taking into account our study’s proven integrity in the face of perhaps the most intense scrutiny ever paid to a psychology article. In retrospect, however, the reaction is hardly surprising at all. As we were publishing our article in 1998, historian Philip Jenkins at Pennsylvania State University was publishing a book on moral panics involving CSA (Jenkins, 1998). His scholarly treatment of this topic made it apparent that the type of reaction we received fit in well with a pattern of related hyperbole spanning from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, with its greatest concentration occurring in the last 2 decades. Before exploring further the reaction to our article, it is important to review the meta-analysis itself—the social events that inspired it, the methodological weaknesses and biases in the field that further suggested it, and the results of the analysis.

THE BACKGROUND INSPIRING THE META-ANALYSIS

In the mid-1980s, several events occurred that played key roles in eventually inspiring the meta-analysis. First was the story of the McMartin preschool case in California, in which seven staff members were accused by hundreds of children of committing bizarre acts of satanic ritual and sexual abuse (Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). Staff members were accused of such things as dressing up as witches and flying through the air; sexually assaulting the children in hot-air balloons, cemeteries, and secret tunnels under the schoolyard; and forcing children to drink the blood of ritually murdered babies. Some advocates for the children’s accusations claimed that they were literally true; others claimed that the CSAwas true, but that the other alleged events reflected memory distortions caused by the CSA. The liberal 1970s, in which traditional attitudes about sex were relaxed (even in considerations of minors), had been replaced by the Victorian 1890s—Freud’s seduction theory that all adult psychological maladjustment stems from early sexual experiences with older persons had been revived. I watched as this renewed view resulted in the spread of McMartin-style cases all around the United States. For example, at the Little Rascals day care center in Edenton, North Carolina, staffers were accused of molesting children in outer space and on ships at sea surrounded by sharks specially trained to prevent the children from escaping (“Innocence Lost,” 1991). The McMartin case turned into the longest and most expensive criminal trial in U.S. history; similar cases in various states across the country (e.g., Little Rascals in North Carolina) became those states’ most expensive criminal trials (“Innocence Lost: The Verdict,” 1993). It was not difficult to suspect that a social pathology involving sex was upon us, engineered wittingly or unwittingly by certain mental health practitioners and their peculiar theories, by social workers and law-enforcement personnel, and by a sensationalizing media. It seemed clear that a sociological or psychological analysis was in order.

Indication for analysis of basic assumptions about early sex and its consequences was intensified, it seemed to me, by a second wave of panic in the later 1980s. All of a sudden, thousands of adult female children around the country were suing their parents for alleged incest that had supposedly taken place 2, 3, or 4 decades earlier (“Divided Memories,” 1995). What had happened was that various therapists around the country, convinced that Freud was right in claiming that all adult neuroses stem from childhood sexual seduction, interpreted all their patients’ problems as stemming from incest (Crews, 1998). Patients would come in complaining of problems but recalling nothing about sexual seduction. But under the guidance of their therapists and after many sessions, they often began to recall sketchy events, which after many more sessions crystallized into often rather bizarre memories. Freud’s theory had been that sexual seduction is so painful that the mind represses any conscious memory of it in order to cope; however, the memory persists in the unconscious and expresses itself in symptoms, which can only be relieved by bringing the memory back to consciousness.

Freud abandoned the seduction theory in 1897. Women’s advocates and various therapists in the 1980s called him a coward for doing this, claiming that he had abandoned the theory so as to help protect certain individuals or the male establishment from the embarrassment of incest. In the meantime, recovered memory therapists performed their “memory work” on countless thousands of patients, leading to a multitude of civil suits (“Divided Memories,” 1995). In one not unusual case, presented on Frontline’s (1995) “Divided Memories” exposé of the recovered memory movement, a young woman went into therapy simply because she did not know how to relate to her mother. After months of therapy, she developed memories that eventually crystallized into recollections of satanic rituals involving her parents and grandparents. Her therapist diagnosed this patient as having multiple personality disorder with 27 alters (i.e., other personalities). With the therapist’s encouragement, she sued her parents for $20 million, claiming that her mother inserted a broomstick into her vagina, as well as spiders, wires, and vegetables, and that her father had sexually assaulted her with tools from a hardware store. At the deposition, when reminded that she had perfect school attendance and pediatric reports at the time these events were purported to have occurred, the young woman was unfazed by the contradiction, dismissively commenting, “Oh, that doesn’t matter.”

Many people chose to “believe the children,” as the saying went (an organization by this name was formed by parents of McMartin children in 1985, because they were enraged that anyone would doubt any details of the McMartin case), and many people chose to believe the adult children as well in the recovered memory cases (Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). To me, it was more like Alice in Wonderland, except it concerned a true nightmare rather than a fairy tale. Child sexual abuse, which had formerly been viewed by mental health professionals as immoral but not particularly psychologically problematic unless accompanied by aggravating circumstances (Jenkins, 1998), had became the highest form of sacrilege and the most devastating imaginable experience.

The bizarre events discussed previously, occasioned by this new thinking, were defended by advocates, it seemed, through practices and theories more akin to shamanism than science, although the advocates assured the public that their arguments were scientific. These events seemed to be the U.S. version of a certain madness that most Americans would readily recognize occurring in other parts of the world, where women are stoned to death in Nigeria for engaging in nonmarital sex, hacked to death in Kashmir for not wearing their veils, and people go on trial for their lives in Pakistan for blasphemy. Regarding the last of these examples, perhaps the following anecdote can serve to convey the sense of skepticism felt by critics of the day-care abuse cases, recovered memory therapy, and related phenomena. In the mid-1990s, two men and a boy of 14 were put on trial in Pakistan for their lives, accused of blasphemy for writing something un-Islamic on a wall (Bagash, 1995). As they were tried, hordes of people gathered outside the courthouse to demand the defendants’ executions. Prosecution witnesses were not permitted to report in court what the defendants had allegedly written, because that would itself be blasphemy! The defense attorneys were left with attempting to impeach the credibility of the accusing witnesses by demonstrating that they were self-contradicting in matters such as the times of day when they had allegedly witnessed the crime. The defendants were acquitted. One of the trial judges was subsequently assassinated for rendering this verdict. The American version, although not as deadly, was just as bizarre.

While I watched the day care abuse and recovered memory episodes unfolding, I was also preparing to become a research psychologist, studying social psychology at Temple University. In the spring of 1986, I took a methods course, with a focus on meta-analysis, taught by Ralph Rosnow. For the course, I meta-analyzed studies on conformity behavior of the Asch type, in which participants were pressured by the mere presence of others rather than by explicit commands to agree with statements or ideas that they privately knew were false. This theme, as it turned out, was intimately related to events at the day-care centers, where children were interviewed repeatedly by social workers and others who applied so much pressure for confirmation of crimes that eventually reality and fiction became blurred (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). In this meta-analysis on conformity, I found that effect sizes were heterogeneous across all studies, but were homogeneous when examined within three distinct groups defined by the social psychologist Latané (1981), who argued that conformity was a function of the strength, immediacy, and number of the sources affecting the target. Dr. Rosnow was apparently impressed by this presentation, because immediately afterward I was switched from another faculty member to him as my major professor. For me, this led to increased exposure to the finer points of methodology and statistics, which, in combination with skepticism regarding conventional psychologizing on the issue of CSA, resulted in the methodologically and statistically sophisticated critique of this psychologizing a decade later.

STATISTICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS SUGGESTING THE NEED FOR META-ANALYSIS

Valid methodology, accurate statistics, and skepticism were three aspects sorely missing from previous literature reviews on CSA. Emphasis of this problem was the focus of the introduction to our 1998 meta-analysis. As we documented, in the nearly two dozen literature reviews of the psychological correlates or effects of CSA done in the 1980s and 1990s (see Rind et al.,
1998, for a list), the vast majority subscribed to the “CPIE” view—that is, they concluded that CSA causes psychological maladjustment pervasively in the popu...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• I: CONTEXT
• II: METHODS AND ETHICS OF RESEARCH
• III: SOCIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
• IV: THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY