In recent
months, I have come across the use of the term “pseudoscience” several times in
advocacy for and against the parental alienation belief system. One blog post
declared (but did not provide a rationale for the view) that parental
alienation (PA) beliefs are pseudoscience. A little earlier, William Bernet, a
well-known proponent of PA, declared in a journal article that critics of PA
are pseudoscientists. The PA proponents Linda Gottlieb and Steven Miller have taken
Bernet’s position in print and in testimony.
This conflict
has quickly descended to the mutual finger-pointing, tit-for-tat, “I know you
are but what am I?” level. “Pseudoscience” is not just an insulting term; it
has a real meaning, which I will talk about here.
I would
suggest, as a definition of pseudoscience, the following: pseudoscience is the
claim that certain ideas have been supported by empirical data collected and
analyzed by methods approved by members of the most closely related scientific
discipline—when no such data collection and analysis have actually occurred.
Please note that I do not say there has been no data collection at all (though
that can happen), but simply that the methods used are not the ones agreed upon
by members of the appropriate discipline.
To
elaborate on this definition, I am going to discuss some hallmarks of
pseudoscience as considered in the 2019 Cambridge University Press book Pseudoscience
in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, edited by Stephen Hupp. The introductory
chapter of this book (by Hupp, Mercer, Thyer, and Pignotti) notes a few common
characteristics of pseudoscience:
1. 1 It
involves exploited expertise, where someone who is a genuine expert in one
field provides testimony in an area where he or she lacks training. For
example, Steven Miller, a prominent figure in parental alienation discussion,
is in fact an emergency medicine physician. Warren Farrell, who has testified
about his observations of children in PA cases, is a political scientist who
has written about fathers’ rights.
2. 2 There
is no research support (as in the claims made by Craig Childress and Dorcy
Pruter) , but the promoters of the treatment have financial interests in the
treatment.
3. 3 There
is inflated research support; “exaggerated claims are made on the basis of
poorly designed or conducted research or research published in journals with
very low scientific standards”. This is the case with the well-known research
reports of Richard Warshak or of Amy Baker, reports which present
weakly-designed and implemented research as if it met high standards.
4. 4 An
important mechanism of the treatment is implausible based on current scientific
knowledge, as is the case with PA claims about brainwashing.
5 Pseudoscience
often includes references to established biological or physical concepts that
are irrelevant to claims made and appear to have no purpose but obfuscation and
a “veneer” of science. Reports about PA methods supposedly associated with polyvagal
theory would be included here, although polyvagal theory itself is very much
open to similar criticism.
Proponents
of the PA belief system claim, pseudoscientifically, that they have empirical
research evidence for their concepts, even though they have in no case complied
with the evidence base standards set in medicine and in psychology over at
least 20 years now. In addition, as I have just shown, their claims share
hallmarks of pseudoscience. It is for them to correct these failings if they do
not wish to be called pseudoscientists. Incidentally, addressing a topic other
than PA, the developmental psychologist Lawrence Steinberg recently discussed
the pitfalls of claims of cause and effect in outcome studies with
nonrandomized or other correlational designs – highly relevant to PA issues
(nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/Instagram-facebook-mental-health-study.html).
What,
then, about the statement that opponents of PA are pseudoscientists? This is
absurd on the face of it, because opponents have done only a very few empirical
investigations of matters associated with PA, and none of PA itself or of the proprietary PA interventions. PA opponents
on the whole do not offer claims of scientific evidence, so what they do offer
is not pseudoscience. Instead, PA opponents have offered commentaries and critiques
of PA claims that are designed to show weaknesses of PA concepts and of PA
outcome research. If PA proponents paid attention to these critiques and made serious
efforts to develop acceptable empirical work on this topic, there would be
benefits for children and parents. Such benefits, however, do not seem to be a
major goal of PA advocates.
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