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Social inclusion A special issue addresses how we can help those who are left behind
Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society
forum 2 news 10 book reviews 44 society 50
aiming for excellence 36 ‘them and us’ in mental health services 40 careers: a view from the outside 68 looking back: 163 ways to lose your job 86
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The British Psychological Society Contact The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR tel 0116 254 9568 fax 0116 227 1314
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Associate Editors Articles Vaughan Bell, Kate Cavanagh, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Amina Memon, Wendy Morgan, Tom Stafford, Miles Thomas, Monica Whitty, Barry Winter Conferences Sandie Cleland, Sarah Haywood International Nigel Foreman, Asifa Majid Interviews Nigel Hunt, Lance Workman History of Psychology Julie Perks
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forum 2 ensuring course standards; dying at work; community psychology; statutory regulation; clinical training; psychology in Argentina; your boss and stress; and more news 10 childhood conduct; sleep-related automatism; prize-winning brains; reports from the Society’s student lectures and therapy in the NHS events; and much more media presenting science stories on Australian radio, with John Bradshaw
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Aiming for excellence as an applied psychologist Narinder Kapur and Barbara A. Wilson outline 15 ‘pillars’ to support you
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‘Them and us’ in mental health services Christina Richards looks behind the dichotomy and calls for change
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january 2010
THE ISSUE Stuart Milk, nephew of gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk, once said: ‘We are less when we don’t include everyone.’ Mark Hayward, writing in this special issue, calls on psychologists to ‘work beyond the consulting room to play an active role in building bridges between the marginalised members of a given community and the key stakeholders who can create opportunities for inclusion’. Social inclusion also involves breaking down the ‘them and us’ dichotomy, and considering what it means to be a good person and professional: the topics of our other articles in this packed new year issue. Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor) BANKSY
book reviews 44 children and teenagers with Asperger’s; attachment disorder; paranormal belief; prosocial behaviour; and philosophy of psychology society President’s column; Award for Distinguished Contributions to Professional Psychology; DOP flashmob; ethnic diversity and the workforce; and more
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careers a view from the outside on recurring themes in our ‘Careers’ features; counselling psychology and ballroom dancing; featured job and all the other latest vacancies; and how to advertise
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looking back 86 a peculiarly influential and controversial 1920s employment test, from Thomas Edison, by Paul Collins; plus an account of how it felt to resist Milgram one on one …with Clive Fletcher
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Social inclusion Mark Hayward, Elizabeth Holford and Peter Kinderman introduce a special issue 20 Fabian Davis talks to Naomi Eisenstadt 22 Geoff Shepherd on demand and availability of mental health services in prison 24 Catherine Sholl, Juan Korkie and Dave Harper challenge teenagers’ ideas about mental health 26 David Carew, Richard Birkin and David Booth on the government’s employment policies 28 Fabian Davis on sustaining the ‘magic’ – the secret ingredient that enables people to ‘bounce’ back as active citizens 32
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Psychological therapies in the NHS Jon Sutton and Christian Jarrett report from a two-day event organised by a coalition of organisations intent on improving access to mental health services
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his event was, in part, a celebration of the progress made by members of conference organisers, the New Savoy Partnership, in moving psychological therapy up the government agenda. But the balloons were occasionally deflated by comments from the floor suggesting there is some way to go: ‘Mental health remains a minnow’; ‘the UK is still spending £400 million a year on anti-depressant medication’. It was left to the inspiration behind the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, Lord Richard Layard, to issue a rousing challenge: ‘the government commit to the provision of cancer treatment within two weeks of referral: why can’t we strive for the same for mental health?’ According to Jeremy Clarke, Chair of the New Savoy Partnership, what gets decided at this annual event has a real impetus in IAPT and other programmes. However, he also cautioned that we can only really lobby government when there is a cohesive professional community. Some delegates referred to anxiety and critique emerging around IAPT, and Professor Glenys Parry (University of Sheffield) opened her evaluation of the IAPT pilot sites with an admission that ‘anything we say is going to drop into a discourse which is socially constructed and quite polarised’. However, she reported that the majority of service users are positive about what they are getting, and the IAPT demo sites are faring well. Choice and autonomy emerge as important from a service-user perspective, as does the handling of the ‘step up’ from low- to high-intensity treatment. Parry finished with practical advice for the national ‘roll out’ of IAPT: the importance of partnership working and management skill, the balance between driving it forward in ‘ridiculous’ timescales and getting it right the first time; and that old chestnut, the need for appropriate accommodation and IT systems! Overall,
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she said, IAPT needs a discrete identity, structure and profile: some way of retaining that pioneering spirit and energy that surrounds a new initiative. That energy was evident in abundance from Professor Cary Cooper (Lancaster University) as he showcased the impressive ‘Foresight’ evidence on mental capital and well-being (see www.foresight.gov.uk, and News, December 2008). The programme has involved 400 scientists and 80 state-ofthe-art science reviews, and its policy of suggesting evidence-based interventions and then fully costing them is proving to be influential with the UK government and beyond. With research findings and apposite quotes from Joseph Heller’s novel Something Happened Cooper illustrated the importance of well-being at work and how to improve it. He called for the right to request flexible working for all employees, and said that employers should run regular well-being audits and publish the results in their annual reports. Offering evidence that government is listening was Secretary of State for Health Andy Burnham, who reiterated his commitment to mental health. It had become the pace-setter for the rest of the NHS, he said, with IAPT at the vanguard ushering in a new era. ‘There can be no pulling back from what you’ve achieved,’ he told the audience, ‘not even in more difficult times. That has happened to mental health services in the past, and I don’t want to see that happen on my watch.’ Burnham also recognised that IAPT initially prioritised CBT, but said that now was the time to move towards a fully formed IAPT model, with additional non-CBT practitioners in place by the end of 2010. Ending with a personal tale of pit closures in Easington, Burnham highlighted the catastrophic and enduring effects of help not being there when needed. Speakers on the panel agreed, with Lord Victor Adebowale saying that unless IAPT can be rolled out we will
create another underclass. ‘We have to get the services out there,’ he said, ‘and we have to get them understood by the people not in this room.’ Sue Baker from Time for Change agreed, saying that however good the services are, the general public know very little about what causes mental illness and what they should do about it. Talking of the general public, Professor Peter Fonagy (University College London) asked what their response would be if there was a group of surgeons who, on average, made people worse? He was responding to a fascinating and provocative talk by Professor Mike Lambert (Brigham Young University), which provided some sobering outcome measures on psychotherapy – 5–10 per cent of adults and 14–25 per cent of children actually deteriorate, and with some therapists this figure is as high as 50 per cent (see also ‘When therapy causes harm’, at www.bps.org.uk/harm). Even more worryingly, Lambert’s research suggests that practitioners are fairly hopeless at predicting this treatment failure, and rely too much on their overly optimistic clinical intuition. Lambert argued for the development of change-sensitive, automated methods providing instant feedback to clinicians and patients on how treatment is progressing. His algorithms, checking for mental health ‘vital signs’ in relation to functioning prior to treatment and expected response of similar clients, predicted 85 per cent of those clients who had negative outcomes. Outcomes management and feedback in therapy were also advocated by the other speakers in this final symposium of the first day. Professor Wolfgang Lutz (University of Trier) found that patients like the idea of evaluating psychotherapeutic outcomes; therapists are less keen! Professor Dave Richards, National Informatics Adviser for IAPT and a self-professed enthusiast for data, said that we need to balance persuasion with compulsion, and utility with burden. Intelligent and automated patientmanagement systems are required. Some IAPT services are struggling with existing data systems and not collecting data on recovery at all, he said. Top of the agenda on day two were the plans for rolling out an IAPT-style approach to children. Delegates were served a mixture of rationale, facts, ambitions, obstacles and ongoing efforts. The rationale, the indefatigable Layard explained, is that prevention and early intervention is key to improving the wellbeing of the nation. The facts, he continued, holding aloft The Good
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Childhood Inquiry, which he co-authored earlier this year, are that 10 per cent of kids have significant psychological and emotional problems and yet only a quarter are receiving the care they need. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have only two thirds of the staff required, Layard added, and many of the staff who are in place, whilst they practise good intentions and handholding, have a lack of training. So what to do? Layard has outlined plans for an ambitious training programme, to equip an additional 200 people a year in an evidenced-based approach (Layard pointed to www.casel.org for hundreds of evaluated treatments for kids). He wants lessons to be learned from IAPT, which means integrated CAMHS teams, following a hub-and-spoke model. Layard and his colleagues also want teachers to be trained to improve their ability to detect and prevent the development of emotional problems. There are also proposals for Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education – known more colloquially as well-being lessons – to be made into a PGCE (teacher training) specialist subject. Will any of these things happen? Advanced funding from the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review had been promised but has since been cancelled. So funding is a problem, but Layard said political interest remains buoyant – ‘The times are on our side,’ he said. ‘There has never been more concern about the feelings and well-being of young children, and the idea that this is key to a healthier society.’ He also said that the General Election could be ‘a chance to press parties to make IAPT part of their election manifesto’. Other speakers outlined current efforts to improve CAMHS. Miranda Wolpert’s UCL team have produced a leaflet for children called ‘Choosing what’s best for you’ (http://bit.ly/695pcT), and as Director of the CAMHS Outcome Research Consortium she is gathering outcome data from services around the country. Wolpert urged practitioners to be reflective in their work, and she echoed a message from the previous day, warning that therapists need to realise that they may inadvertently cause harm if they pursue the wrong approach. ‘We need to think – How do I know that a different approach may not have worked better? How will I know if I’ve done well?’ Rita Harris, CAMHS Director at
Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, described progress she and her colleagues have made developing a mental health website based on interviews with children and surveys of what they understand about CAMHS. Children have also sat on the project’s steering committee and helped create the characters that feature on the site. The creative process has thrown up some novel insights – for example, children mentioned issues such as their parents arguing, and moving in and out of friendships, which aren’t currently featured in some school wellbeing programmes. There were some notes of concern and voices of dissent. Nancy Rowland, Director of Research, Policy and Professional Practice at the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, acknowledged that IAPT had been a success in many ways but that it had also had unintended negative effects on large parts of the existing workforce. ‘Child IAPTs should make full use of the existing workforce,’ Rowland said. She also highlighted that England remains the only country in the UK without a policy for counselling in schools. When the discussion was opened to the audience, the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy chair elect Andrew Samuels said he and others had concerns about the application of a mental health agenda to educational settings. He mentioned worries about ‘extreme conformism’, ‘emotional literacy by numbers,’ and described some of the teaching of well-being in schools as ‘draconian and conformist’. Meanwhile a member of the Association of Family Therapists raised concerns about the focus on individual therapy: ‘Most kids who do well, do so because of their family,’ he said. The second day’s other major focus was on improving psychological services for older people, including those with dementia. The effervescent Sube Banerjee, of the Institute of Psychiatry and joint lead of the UK government’s National Dementia Strategy for England (http://bit.ly/7JKsDh), began proceedings by outlining the scale of the problem. Six per cent of older people have dementia, rising to 30 per cent among people aged over 95, so ‘it’s common’, Banerjee said, ‘but it’s not a natural part of ageing’. Banerjee’s key message was that early
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psychological intervention can make a world of difference. Currently a lot of money is spent late in the illness, for example on care homes, with far less spent on prevention, detection and treatment. Yet ‘early intervention in dementia improves later quality of life,’ he said. Banerjee also argued, with the help of a ‘gigantically exciting’ slide, that it is possible to have severe dementia and to have a good quality of life. ‘A big part of this is psychology and not drugs,’ he said. Sandra Evans, a consultant psychiatrist with the East London Foundation NHS Trust, spoke of how little take up of psychological services there is by older people. Efforts are being made to improve the situation, including publication of the IAPT older people’s practice guide, the launch of National Dementia Strategy described above, and the government’s new 10-year strategy for mental health, New Horizons. Evans said there is a need to raise awareness of the treatability of old-age depression, to recruit IAPT workers from older groups and to conduct more research on evidence-based approaches. She ended by quoting Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.’ Among the final afternoon’s mix of workshops and symposiums was a discussion of ‘ways of using research which help clinicians, patients and commissioners’. Several speakers criticised the over-dependence of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) on randomly controlled trials (RCTs). Robert Elliott of the University of Strathclyde, for example, said that we need a more pluralistic approach using multiple lines of evidence. He said that different kinds of research serve different roles for different people – RCTs are used by trialist scientists to test causal models, whereas systematic case studies better inform practitioners and qualitative research is more useful for service users. Roz Shaffran at the University of Reading ended the session by sharing her passion for using new research findings in her own clinical practice. She gave the example of a 2006 study by Adam Radomsky and colleagues that showed repeated checking by healthy participants of oven hobs and taps led them to be less confident in whether they’d left the gas or taps on or off (see http://bit.ly/5M24CR). The idea that repeated checking can lead to memory distrust has obvious psychoeducational implications for working with people with OCD. ‘Awareness of research gives you more tricks to use in therapy,’ Shaffran said.
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SPECIAL ISSUE
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Davis sets the broader context as he interviews Naomi Eisenstadt, former Director of the government’s Social Exclusion Task Force. Naomi speaks beyond the impact of mental health problems as she candidly describes the way that government initiatives to improve the health of the nation in the last 10 years Mark Hayward, Elizabeth Holford and Peter Kinderman introduce the special may have actually disadvantaged the issue, which addresses how we can help those who are being left behind people who had least sense of inclusion to start with. What can applied psychologists do to bridge the gap – be less ‘precious’ Is there such a thing as society? n 1988 Margaret Thatcher said: ‘There and roll up their sleeves on the front-line Do we have a collective is no such thing as society’. In contrast, of services? responsibility towards people who psychologists believe that human Concern for the most excluded people may be excluded from the social beings are quintessentially social animals. is articulated further as Geoff Shepherd settings/circles where we feel We all need to play a full and active role explores the shocking discrepancy between valued? Articles within this special in society. All around us is visible the scale of demand for mental health edition explore social exclusion evidence of people’s wish for inclusion – services in prisons and their availability. from a range of perspectives, with the young people who join gangs or carry Most prisoners experience a lifetime of an emphasis on the needs of people knives to impress, the late Jade Goody’s social exclusion, and Geoff wonders what who experience mental health determination to ‘count’, the explosion psychologists can realistically do to prevent problems. Authors speak of our further exclusion for prisoners upon release. of Facebook. collective responsibility to enable The third and fourth articles focus So how important is inclusion to inclusion across the range of upon places where discriminatory attitudes you – within your family, community, domains/roles in which can cause and perpetuate exclusion. workplace? How much value do you place psychologists find themselves. School is a place where young people may upon your identity as a family member, either experience exclusion for the first a friend, a neighbour, a team mate, time, or encounter the a colleague, a citizen? irresistible social What resources psychological forces enable you to actively “how important is inclusion that can lead them to engage with and to you – within your family, discriminate. Catherine develop theses roles – community, workplace?” Sholl and colleagues money, education, describe a successful work, physical health, How included are you within your family, intervention that utilises the mental health? community, workplace, etc? contact hypothesis to raise awareness If your resources were diminished for of mental health issues within an east any reason – for example through mental How would you feel if you were London secondary school. Workplaces health problems or unemployment – and consciously or unwittingly excluded can both exclude and perpetuate exclusion you were not able to engage with some of from valued social roles within these through their harmful environments, these roles and identities, how would your domains? practices and cultures, but they can also, perception of yourself change? What can you do to facilitate the social with the right policies and practices, be Furthermore, how would you feel if inclusion of others? the key to inclusion and fulfilment. David consciously or unwittingly, individuals and Carew and colleagues from the society acted to exclude you from some of Department of Work and Pensions explore the places and roles that once defined you? some of the dilemmas and the initiatives The links between mental health Mental Health and Social Exclusion – developed by the present government – problems, discrimination and social report from the government's Social Exclusion Unit – http://bit.ly/3QTORB before the credit crunch hit. exclusion are well established. And the National Social Inclusion Programme – In the final article Fabian Davis importance of valued social roles in www.socialinclusion.org.uk/home/ looks back on his career as an applied promoting recovery is becoming better index.php psychologist and searches for the ‘magic’ understood. What seems newsworthy is Capabilities for Inclusive Practice – ingredients that can facilitate the ‘bounce’ the growing realisation that facilitating the http://bit.ly/cqoUA that marks the end of an individual’s passive inclusion of people with mental health BPS Discussion Paper – Socially Inclusive acceptance of ‘second class’ status and problems within neighbourhoods, Practice – http://bit.ly/3wWcQ9 acquisition of the will and means to recover. workplaces and communities is no longer Berry, C., Hayward, M. & Porter, A. (2008). Evaluating socially inclusive So, whatever your role within the sole province of clinicians; as practice: Part 1 – A tool for mental education, the workplace, mental health educationalists, colleagues, community health services. Journal of Mental services or the applied psychology members, friends and neighbours we Health Training, Education and workforce, social inclusion seems to be each have a role to play. Practice, 3, 31–41. Available from your business. Want to do more? Then This special edition explores these http://bit.ly/LvacL join the BPS Social Inclusion Group (see multiple perspectives on mental health Social Exclusion Task Force – (www.bps.org.uk/socinc) as it seeks to and social inclusion by considering the http://bit.ly/eumYC facilitate inclusion in relation to roles played by the government, young BPS Social Inclusion Group – www.bps.org.uk/socinc employment, children and families and people, employers, prison workers and prisoners. psychologists. In the first article Fabian
Social inclusion
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As applied psychologists, we need to use our knowledge and skills to promote the mental health of communities. This will involve us working beyond the consulting room to play an active role in building bridges between the marginalised members of a given community and the key stakeholders who can create opportunities for inclusion within that community.
I Dr Mark Hayward
is a Clinical Psychologist with the University of Surrey & Sussex Partnership NHSFT m.hayward@surrey.ac.uk
Social inclusion is about belonging. It means contributing and accepting. For me, this is achieved through flexible employment, having a loyal immediate family, being part of the Catholic church, being a governor of the local mental health trust and taking part in cycling, an amateur choir and campaigning. I Elizabeth Holford
is a member of the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology’s Service User and Carer Liaison Committee
Psychology, as the study of human thought, emotion and behaviour, continually emphasises the connectedness of each individual to the wider society - we are social animals. For me, then, support for fundamental human rights (the agreed basic rules of human societies) and social inclusion (the active facilitation of participation in those human societies) are necessary and legitimate goals for professional psychologists. I Professor Peter Kinderman
is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool
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LOOKING BACK
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163 ways to lose your job Paul Collins on Thomas Edison and the ‘brainmeter’ craze
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n 20 May 1921 excited crowds milled around Boston’s railway station hoping to catch a glimpse of Albert Einstein, who was making his first visit to America’s most famously learned city. After an impromptu tour, the physicist was whisked off to breakfast with the city’s mayor and the governor of Massachusetts. Afterwards, as the diners relaxed over cigars, reporters lobbed the celebrated genius a question more fit for a teenager: ‘What is the speed of sound?’ Einstein was stumped. He didn’t know off-hand, he admitted. ‘EINSTEIN SEES BOSTON; FAILS EDISON TEST,’ crowed the next day’s headlines – and Thomas Edison claimed his most prominent victim yet in a ‘brainmeter’ craze that revolutionised public attitudes towards aptitude tests. Early in 1921 New Yorkers who answered an anonymous job ad in The New York Times received a curious reply: they were to go to Newark, New Jersey, take an early-morning bus on the West Orange line to Thomas A. Edison Industries, and ask at the front desk for a Mr Stevenson. No letter of introduction
or resumé was required. Applicants who followed the mysterious instructions found themselves ushered inside a laboratory and subjected to a barrage of 163 seemingly random questions: Is Australia larger in area than Greenland? Of what wood are kerosene barrels made? What is copra? Those looking up in bewilderment might have noticed Thomas Edison himself overseeing his latest invention: the country’s most peculiarly influential and controversial employment test. If Edison’s recruitment strategy was novel, mental testing was not. Fifty years earlier, the English eugenicist Francis Galton explored ways of testing mental ability, which he believed followed a Gaussian bell curve, with most scorers falling near the average, tapering off on either side. Testing received a further boost in the US after the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disgruntled jobseeker, which prompted the Civil Service Reform Act and the introduction of competitive exams for many federal jobs. Yet the most prominent early mental tests were for measuring not ability, but disability. The Binet test of 1905 was first used in France to identify children with special needs, though it was soon coopted for measuring children of all abilities. During the First World War, the US army introduced its Alpha test to check the abilities of its literate recruits. Of the 1.7 million recruits tested, the top two scorers proved to be a former lumberjack and a professor at Yale. But it was Edison’s test that captured the public’s attention. ‘Men who have been to college I find to be amazingly ignorant,’ Edison proclaimed to The New York Times in May 1921. Though he hadn't been to college himself, Edison was a great believer in its potential, and he professed bitter Thomas Edison – whose inventions included a peculiarly disappointment in his job influential and controversial employment test candidates. ‘They don’t seem to
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know anything,’ he grumbled. The homeschooled inventor revealed that as well as testing prospective employees, he had also subjected those already working for him to the 163-question test he had concocted himself. Employees who failed – ‘XYZ men’ in Edison’s parlance, versus Grade-A men – were given a week’s pay and sacked. Public reaction was swift: ‘Was any man ever kinder to his aged mother because he knew what copra is?’ demanded The New York Times. ‘Let him burn his questionnaire...[and] spare himself the mortification of someday seeing some of his XYZ’s command the plaudits of the world.’ Professors and students took umbrage at the implication that colleges should be filling heads with trivia. One fumed that it was ‘not a Tom Edison test, but a Tom Foolery test’, while a professor at New York University opined that ‘a touching faith in higher education and a profound misunderstanding of its aims are often displayed by men who have succeeded without college training’. After the complete test was leaked to newspapers, the questions spread across the country in a national craze. ‘If You Cannot Answer These You’re Ignorant, Edison Says,’ declared one Pennsylvania newspaper, while police in Massachusetts picked up a deranged young man claiming that he was on the run from assassins who were after his book of Edison test answers, ‘valued at $1,000,000’. Journalists gleefully sprang Edison questions on politicians, professors and captains of industry. New York’s governor failed; so did the mayor of New York City, its police commissioner and, rather alarmingly, its superintendent of schools. One particularly enterprising reporter tracked down Edison's son Theodore, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also failed. ‘Dad would find me amazingly ignorant,’ the younger Edison admitted. His father faced a media circus: the Fox movie studio ran mock Edison tests of biblical trivia to advertise its ‘superscreen spectacle’ The Queen of Sheba, while ads for Vogue magazine assured women readers ‘Never mind the Edison questions! All you need to know is how to be becomingly dressed’. Others were more seriously interested in its value: within days, the Eastman Kodak company announced a similar test for its employees, and the elite Groton School in Massachusetts extended its use to applicants. Yet Edison insisted his test sprang from his belief that an employee's
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reliability was linked in part to a good memory and attention to detail. ‘Of course I don’t care whether a man knows the capital of Nevada, or the source of mahogany,’ he explained. ‘But if he ever knew any of these things and doesn't know them now, I do very much care about that.’ Edison could point to his results as proof that he had isolated a specific mental ability, rather than a bell curve. Of 718 men who took the test, only 57 scored more than 70 per cent – the pass mark – and 32 of those scored more than 90 per cent. Rather than a well-populated middle ground, those tested appeared split between A-men who could answer the questions, and XYZs who believed Bengal was the capital of Maine, that tides caused the phases of the moon, and the ‘candidate [who] reasoned that if the active principle of coffee is caffeine, that of tea ought in all fairness to be taffeine’. Many testing experts found the Edison test crude and wrong-headed. ‘It would be more sensible in testing a man’s intelligence to ask how he would go about finding the answers to such questions,’ pointed out Harvard psychologist A.A. Roback. And yet the attendant publicity was a fillip for the budding testing industry. The state of New Jersey soon awarded a top civil service job solely on the results of a threehour questionnaire; the winner, as it happened, was a former Edison A-man. The administrator of the New Jersey test, Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham, went on to play a leading role in the introduction of what has became every American high schooler’s bête noire: the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Like the Edison test, the SAT stripped knowledge from context or process: only right and wrong answers mattered. How one reached them didn’t count. And like Edison, the College Board sought to measure aptitude rather than any elusive quality that might be labelled intelligence. Critics argued that the test’s potential for cultural bias made it suspect, and it hardly helped that Brigham had previously used the results of the army’s Alpha test to push for anti-immigrant legislation – although he later renounced the notion of inferior nationalities. Brigham’s SAT went on to be a permanent feature of American higher education. Edison himself joined in the reinvention of his test for college applicants. In 1929, now 83, he announced a nationwide search for his intellectual ‘successor’ – beginning with a competition for a scholarship to MIT. Forty-nine finalists came to Edison’s
factory for an ice-cream social, a day out at Coney Island, and a day-long final exam conducted by the inventor himself, and marked by an all-star panel, including Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and George Eastman. The winner was Wilber Huston from Seattle. After recovering from the shock of being dubbed ‘America’s brightest boy’, Huston went on to become mission director for the launch of NASA’s Nimbus and Landsat satellites – proving that Edison could at least pick a rocket scientist out of a crowd. And though both the test and its creator soon passed into history, the fashion for mass short-answer testing that they popularised remained. The Edison test’s most famous flunker
never did see its point, though. When he was caught out by reporters in Boston in 1921, Albert Einstein replied patiently that he didn’t bother carrying information like the speed of sound around in his head. Why go to the trouble, he told them, when he could just look it up in a book? Printed with permission from New Scientist Magazine, issue 9 August 2008. Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
I Paul Collins is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Portland State University pcollins@pdx.edu
Flabbergasted – but not a shocker! We have all heard about those that obeyed in Milgram’s famous study – the majority of ‘teachers’ who were prepared to administer the full range of ‘shocks’. But what about those who didn’t? A fascinating account from one of them, Joseph Dimow, was published in the 2004 issue of Jewish Currents (see www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm – thanks to www.mindhacks.com for the tip). Dimow talks of the suspicions he had over the true nature of the experiment, the possible reasons for his resistance, and the significance of the findings. Dimow writes of how his suspicions were aroused by ‘the way the straws had been handled, by the idea that they would risk shocking a stranger, and by the fact that he, the professor, had been in the area with me the whole time and had never gone to observe the learner’. On receiving reassurances from Milgram and the ‘learner’, Dimow began the experiment and gave several shocks. ‘With each, the learner’s cry of pain became louder – and then he asked to stop, and I refused to go any further. The professor became very authoritative. He said that I was costing them valuable time, it was essential for me to continue, I was ruining the experiment. He asserted that he was in charge, not me. He reminded me that I had been paid and insisted that I continue. I refused, offered to give him back the five dollars, and told him that I believed the experiment to be really about how far I would go, that the learner was an accomplice, and that I was determined not to continue.’ According to Dimow, ‘the most disturbing part of the entire experience’ was when Milgram brought in the learner. ‘I was flabbergasted. His face was covered in tears and he looked haggard. He offered his hand and thanked me for stopping the experiment, saying that the shocks hadn’t really hurt but anticipating them had been dreadful. I was confused as to whether he was in earnest or acting. I left unsure, and waited outside for the learner so I could discuss it with him. After about a half hour he had not appeared, and I was convinced that he was an actor and that my suspicions about the experiment had been correct. The report that I received confirmed that the experiment was designed to see how far subjects would go in obeying orders to administer pain to others. It had arisen out of the desire to understand the widespread obedience to horrendous and brutal orders in Nazi Germany. The report also confirmed that the professor and learner were indeed actors, although not professionals – and I have always thought that they deserved Academy Awards anyway.’ Dimow attributes his resistance to his upbringing ‘in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society’, his years of service in the army, and a ‘position during the late 1940s as a staff member of the Communist Party… In the early 1950s, I was harassed and tailed by the FBI, and in 1954… I was arrested and tried under the Smith Act on charges of “conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence”. We were convicted, as expected, and I was about to go to jail when the conviction was overturned on appeal. I believe these experiences also enabled me to stand up to an authoritative “professor”.’ Jon Sutton
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