In this video I talk in detail about a major bugbear of mine; a kind of anti-intellectual mindset and attitude that is not interested in how something works, why something works, and instead of understanding what we do, having a dismissive attitude of “as long as it works… who cares how, why etc.”
I find this incredibly frustrating and have encountered much more of it recently and decided to vent a bit about it in this video. Watch the clip and see why I think it is a problem and why I believe the “as long as it works mindset” is a “crocodile dung” mindset….
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Hi Adam,
Happy New Year to you and yours! I found myself engaged in a profound demonstration of confirmation bias listening to you in this clip. Thank you for flying the flag for evidence based practice and for being one who contributes to that evidence base. Once more you have given me pause for thought. A colleague and I are in the early stages of developing a research project, hopefully to be conducted this year. One of the things that troubles me when I think about our research is that whilst we hope to be able to demonstrate that a particular intervention works I don’t think we will be able to say WHY it works. I wonder then if we are just perpetuating the use of crocodile dung? We will not have access to resources or funding to conduct MRIs for our study subjects and I dare say we might have issues in gaining ethical approval to conduct the research if MRIs were a component. I am interested in your view on this dilemma. With thanks and warmest best wishes, Kym Peoples.
Hi Kym,
You have stumbled across something that has often been cited in hypnosis research. How do we know for sure what was creating the effect?
So that is typically why we need the research to be peer reviewed, or for a really thorough literature review to be conducted prior to the experiment, os that your experiment is informed and your hypnothesis makes sense before you begin. Likewise, you’ll then be familiar with the ways in which similar topics and experiments have been covered and undertaken which will give you a good idea about your own methodology and ensure it is considered thoroughly and duly scrutinised before the experiment commences. The challenge is that simply showing something has an effect does not in and of itself prove what was responsible for the effect. We do not always necessarily need to know why something works, especially if you are demonstrating efficacy for the first time and plugging a gap in the existing literature, but the real contribution is discovering what specific mechanism or variable was responsible for the effect/difference between controls and the experimental group.
It’s tough to give you a really thorough response on a blog comment space, but if y ou want to chat about it sometime, get in touch with me. (And let’s have lunch when I come to Australia – we need to get Michael to pull his finger out and get planning!).
Best wishes, Adam.
I had a similar discussion with someone on an NLP course, he said to me in a slightly sneering voice, “so you have to know how it works to use it do you?”, I said, “well no, but it helps a lot, if I know how a car works it helps me to drive it.”
Of course people have used painkillers like opium for centuries without any idea how they work, so it is possible to use something without knowing how it does what it does. It’s just that the NLP field is so dismissive of anything that looks like hard work it struggles to be taken seriously by anyone in the professional field.
Thanks for taking the time to write and share Tom. It is frustrating! My best wishes to you, Adam.