House of Eratosthenes

From third to fifth grades, I remember some experiences in which my classes did some exercises in voting. From that, we learned fundamental principles in democracy. We learned what happens when you take more than one vote about the same thing, and we learned how a vote can be split. We learned how, and why, people settle things in groups. I remember that by the time I started middle school, these things were all crystal-clear to me.

The years have done unkind things to this sense of clarity. I’m suffering, now, from a “one more time, why was this thought to be a good idea again?” kind of a thing, with regard to settling things in groups. As a species of thinking creatures, we seem to lack the ability to hold this activity aloft as some of our finest decision-making work.

The American Psychological Association is doing a great job of showing what I’m talking about. Last year, the APA enacted a policy about the work of professional psychologists assisting in military interrogations, clarifying the boundary of what is to be permitted in such a practice. This didn’t go over well with much of the membership, who apparently look upon assistance to one’s own country in wartime as something disfavorable.

The unrest stems from an APA policy, issued last year, that says that while psychologists should not get involved in torture or other degrading treatment, it is ethical for them to act as consultants to interrogation and information-gathering for national security purposes.

That stand troubles some members of the organization in light of the reported abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

“The issue is being couched as psychologists helping out with national security at the same time that psychologists are opposed to the issue of torture,” said Chicago psychologist William Gorman, an APA member who signed the petition and works with refugee survivors of torture. “That stance in the present context appears to me incongruous.”

News reports have said that mental health specialists who are helping U.S. military interrogators have helped create coercive techniques, including sleep deprivation and playing on detainees’ phobias, to extract information.

The American Medical Association last month adopted what many view as a stronger stand against physician involvement in prisoner interrogation, echoing a position held by the American Psychiatric Association, whose members are medical doctors. The U.S. military has indicated it will therefore favor using psychologists, who are not medical doctors and are not bound by the other groups’ policies.

The Physicians for Human Rights, a Cambridge, Massachusetts.-based advocacy group, issued a statement Wednesday urging APA leaders to “explicitly prohibit psychologists from participating in interrogations.”
:
Some professionals, including [APA member Steven] Reisner, a faculty member at Columbia University’s International Trauma Studies program and at New York University’s medical school, want the 150,000-member organization to rewrite the group’s ethics code to bar psychologists from any involvement in detainee interrogation.

Problem: There’s no call for a group, be it a decision-making panel or a far-flung association of professionals, to make moral decisions. Moral decisions are personal by nature, and anyway, groups bollix them up all the time. They always have.

Second problem: The group setting is being used to establish a moral equivalency between the kind of thing that went on at Abu Ghraib, and sleep deprivation. The “bridge” between these two extremes is the semantic term, “torture.” It’s no secret to anyone who has been paying attention that the name “Abu Ghraib” has been highly politicized, and it appears we’re in danger of losing track of what exactly happened there. Hint: It wasn’t just sleep deprivation.

Third problem: It’s a perversion of science. Suppose I’m an APA member. If the APA revises the policy on assistance to the military during interrogations, and the new policy sharply contradicts my personal moral outlook on it, as a thinking psychological scientist-type guy I should have the confidence that the group has handed down a decision that is worthwhile. If I don’t have this confidence, the group has demeaned itself by forcing me to conclude “I know this is right, but the group has voted it wrong, so they’re all messed up” — or, “I know this is wrong, but the group has voted it right, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.” The point is, it’s not human nature to surrender moral decision-making to a group. It’s human nature to expect everyone else in the group to do it, but for ourselves, we never do it. And so, the group is going to wrestle with weighty moral implications, over which it has no real authority because nobody’s going to really surrender their moral cognitions to the group. In so doing, it will not only reveal, but highlight, what everyone already knows to be true: Decisions will be made not based on rational arguments, but based on which faction within the group screams the loudest. Well, that isn’t how you decide what’s right and what’s wrong.

And last but not least, the fourth problem is that there are consequences for making the wrong decision, and they’re not confined to the ethereal realm of the merely theoretical. If we interrogate someone and fail to extract something, people might die. Is the APA doing something to take that into account as they vote on what’s right and what’s wrong? I see nothing in the CNN article to indicate such a thing. Allowing evil to happen, by inaction, would in itself be morally questionable to say the very least, right?

Did you ever read David Reisman’s book, “The Lonely Crowd”? It was required reading when I was in sociology classes. It examined in some detail why the whole of a group of people is different from and greater than the sum of the parts. Groups have a life of their own with which the members may even disagree, individually. Odd; seemingly impossible and illogical; but true.
- aup | 07/31/2006 @ 07:06
I’ve participated in exercises like that, too. I’ve even been able to fill out a timesheet from doing so, on occasion. I’ve seen it work, where the group out-performs the individual, but I’ve come to doubt even that.

The trouble with such exercises is, the dysfunctional group never enters into the equation. A functional group, chaired by an instructor who makes his living from presenting the same problem to a group environment over and over again, is compared to a roomful of individuals, each of whom have seen the problem for the first time. And, of course, many of them may be dysfunctional as individuals, or at least, approaching the problem with a set of skills that are best applied elsewhere.

The group labors under no such handicap, of course, since the group is able to draw on all the relevant skills “donated” by those in attendance. Which I guess is the point of the exercise. It works great for puzzles — my whole point is, figuring out if it’s “right” or “wrong” to waterboard a terrorist, is not a puzzle! It’s like voting on whether or not you should eat meat on a Friday, or whether God is a woman.
- mkfreeberg | 07/31/2006 @ 08:43
You mean you don’t know whether God is a man or a woman??!!
- aup | 07/31/2006 @ 22:02
[…] People we like to call “scientists,” or whom we insist on embracing the belief that they have something to do with what we call “science,” are voting in groups on what to allow and what not to allow. I have a rather eccentric, and lonely, idea of what a “scientist” is, and this isn’t it. I’ve got all these useful things sitting around me as I type this that I got because of science. A flatscreen computer monitor, a coffeemaker that grinds my beans fresh at a pre-selected time-of-day, a hot plate that keeps the coffee cup hot and fresh as I type away. These things were not developed because groups of people voted on what worked and what did not work. These things came about because somewhere, an individual fiddled around with something until it became something else, and started doing something. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/04/2007 @ 09:40

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