Yes, he did. And others have, in a variety of domains. Given the
actuarial data and then asked to "individualize" the prediction (or
diagnosis), the therapists or physicians make it worse. I do not intend
to minimize the importance of experience, but neither should we forget
that we are all human and are all subject to illusion and bias.
Minimizing the importance of the data is the most serious disservice we
can do to our students. After all, the data are what make us different
from charlatans and hucksters.
m
--
Marc Carter
Baker University Department of Psychology
Assistant Professor, Itinerant Scientist,
Inveterate Skeptic, Former Surfer.
---
The test of our progress is not whether we add more
to the abundance of those who have much;
it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
----- Franklin Roosevelt
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Brandon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 2:28 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
Subject: RE: APA President-elect
>I'm going to quote from Stanovich (_How to Think Straight about
>Psychology_, 7th ed., p 167):
>
>"In a variety of clinical domains, when a clinician is given
>information about a client and asked to predict the client's behavior,
>and when the same information is quantified and processed by a
>statistical equation that has been developed based on actuarial
>relationships that research has uncovered, invariably the equation
wins."
I believe that Paul Meehl further demonstrated that when clinicians
tried to 'improve' the actuarial predictions they actually made them
worse!
>So, yes, a clinician can make clinical judgments about an individual
>tailored to that individual, when he or she does this, over the long
>haul the clinician is going to err more than be correct. Using the
>aggregate data means that you must accept some error in particular
>cases in order to reduce overall error. There is a *lot* of research
on this.
>
>The problem with second-guessing the data is that we do not know *how*
>we should deviate from the actuarial predictions. We might have a
>clinical "sense," we might rely on our clinical "experience," but those
>judgments are as fraught with bias as any human judgment. It's only by
>(somewhat slavishly) adhering to the data that we can be even
>reasonably sure we know what we're doing.
>
>Otherwise, it seems to me, we might as well forgo the expense and time
>of going to school.
>
>m
>
>--
>Marc Carter
--
"No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain
people." -H. L. Mencken
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Dept Minnesota State University *
* 23 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001 ph 507-389-6217 *
* http://www.mnsu.edu/dept/psych/welcome.html *
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