Epistemology 101: Why Does Evidence Fail to Excite?

If you enjoy thoughtful consideration of timely issues, if you like being challenged to dive into topics that normally are not a big focus in behavior analysis, then I recommend you check out the FrontlineBehSci blog. This blog usually approaches issues in “behavioral science” as portions of Psychology think about them, so if you want only to be told about behavior analysis in Behaviorese, don’t bother. But the blog is well written and taps into scholarship from all over the place, making it a great tool to expand your relational networks.

For reinforcer sampling purposes, I call your attention to the recent post “Psychedelics and felt truth,” which in broad strokes examines the troubling contemporary trend for people to eschew what used to count as logic and evidence, and instead operate from what might be called gut feelings — subjective impressions that come from places outside of science and reason (including but not limited to religion, spirituality, the occult, social media, etc.). The consequences of this — conspiracy theories, claims about “fake news,” cultish extremists groups — are everywhere. And these days we see public opinion, politics, and public policy all meandering down paths that, at best, have uncertain grounding in reality, and at worst may be harmful (in the latter case, consider the shift of U.S. health policy away from mandated vaccinations for preventable diseases and, indeed, even from germ theory itself).

Behavior analysts are quite familiar with this sort of “intuitivism,” because it underpins the whole “vaccines cause autism” flap and is central to the appeal of fad treatments that distract consumers from effective behavioral interventions.

The Frontline BehSci post takes as its point of departure the recent surge in public enthusiasm for psychedelic drugs as a conduit to mental health benefits and personal insight. Whether and how the drugs might provide such things is something still under investigation, so from an evidentiary standpoint there’s some magical thinking behind the enthusiasm. What the FrontlineBehSci post considers is why people would go all in on something for which the supporting evidence is, at best, sketchy.

I don’t want to steal the post’s thunder too much, because reading it will give you perspective drawn from history, philosophy (without being too dull or overbearing!), and social science, but I will offer two kernels to guide your read.

#1: Some background on psychedelics. Though this isn’t addressed in the blog, the story of psychedelics swirls around the recently-deceased Roland Griffiths, who was my postdoctoral fellowship supervisor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Roland had a behavioral background and for decades was a buttoned-down psychopharmacology traditionalist of the highest repute. Near the end of his career, however, he began investigating possible therapeutic effects of psychedelics, and his professional standing lent much credibility to a pursuit that had for decades languished on the fringes of psychopharmacology. Roland came to believe that therapeutic effects were real and they depended on psychedelic experience being embedded in a spiritual context. But not everyone agreed. Some critics think that Roland’s obsession with spirituality led to some potentially fatal problems in his studies that, if verified, would erode the emerging research support for therapeutic benefits. One of the critics is Matthew Johnson, who also has a behavioral background and was once Roland’s protegé. It’s a wild and wooly tale, which you can read about in a thorough New York Times article, among other places.

I share this here because if the critics are right then, in a cosmic twist, the public’s gut-level subjectiveness that the Frontline BehSci post hopes to explain has been encouraged by similar subjectiveness on the part of the researcher whose work helped to fuel mainstream attention to psychedelics. Whew. That sentence hurts my head.

#2: History repeats. The post notes that the present era is not the first time we’ve seen a groundswell of “intuitivism.” You’ll read about an earlier such era that suggests people become inclined to disregard objective evidence when the societal institutions they once relied on cease to be supportive and reliable. Speaking loosely, when the society gets turbulent, when the objective world stops making sense, it kind of follows that you’d look for meaning elsewhere. Anyway, the breakdown of things that once stabilized society sure certainly reminds of the present era.

And that leads to my primary emphasis: If you check out the post, and I hope you will, take it as an invitation to shine a behavioral light on the problem it addresses. We behavior analysts have often decried the illogical things people believe about their own well being, and more generally the fact that effectiveness evidence seems to have little oomph when it comes to persuading people to adopt interventions. But to my knowledge we’ve not undertaken much of a functional analysis of why their thinking gets so batshit crazy in the first place (what is the function of “intuitivism”?). Relational Frame Theory has provided an account of some rudiments of reasoning (e.g., here) but that’s too little. We need a fully developed behavioral account of what it means to be persuaded by evidence, and of course also of the factors that can bring behavior under the control of other things. Maybe the FrontlineBehSci post will inspire you to start on one.

---

THEME MUSIC