Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 480than phenomena that had a crisp and well-defined existence before being studied.Every experimentalist knows the insidious dangers of the inherentand inescapable bias with which a curious scientist faces the phenomenato be studied. We usually know what we hope to discover (for we usuallyknow what our pet theory predicts), and unless we take great pains toprevent it, that hope may fool our eyes and ears, or lead us to lay downa subtle trail of hints to our subjects about what we expect from themwithout us or our subjects realizing it. Laundering these "demand characteristics" out of experiments and using "double-blind" techniques of experimentation(where neither the subject nor the experimenter knows, at the time, which condition-testor control-is in effect) takes care and effort, and requires a highly artificial andconstrained environment. Clinicians-psychoanalysts and doctors-exploring the strangeand often tragic afflictions of their patients simply cannot and must not try to conducttheir dealings with their patients under such strict laboratory conditions. Thus it is verylikely that much of what has been honestly and conscientiously reported by clinicians isdue not just to wishful thinking, but to wishful seeing and hearing, and to the Clever Hanseffect. Clever Hans was a horse who astonished people in turn-of-the-century. Berlin withhis apparent ability to do arithmetic. Asked for the sum of four and seven, for instance,Hans would stamp a hoof eleven times and stopwith no apparent coaching from hismaster, and with success over a wide variety of problems. After exhaustive testing,skeptical observers determined that Hans was being cued to stop stamping by a virtuallyimperceptible (and quite possibly entirely innocent and unintended) intake of breath byhis trainer when Hans arrived at the correct number. The Clever Hans effect has beenproven to occur in many psychological experiments with human beings (a faint smile onthe experimenter's face tells the subjects they're on the right track, for instance, thoughthey don't realize why they think so, and the experimenter doesn't realize he's smiling).Clinical marvels such as Eve and Sybil, then, 6ught to be studied under laboratoryconditions before we embark on serious efforts to accommodate our theories to them, butin general that has not proven to be in the best interests of the patients. There was,however, at least one striking study of Eve's dissociated personality, a partially "blind"study of her-their?-verbal associations, by a method that revealed three very different"semantic differentials" for Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane (the apparently fused personat the close of therapy). This is reported in C. E. Osgood, G. J. Suci, and P. H.Tannenbaum's The Measurement of Meaning (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,1957). A recent report of a