posted
It is a fairly well known phenomenon, and a lot of times the person who is fooled is a family member who desperately wants it to be true. I don't know if it was deliberate, but I would be willing to give the FC the benefit of the doubt myself. There IS some movement in his arm, and she probably directed her to words she thought he would be saying without meaning to lie of deceive.=
Same sort of observer bias happens all the time when gorillas are taught sign language. They can learn it, but the actual amount of signs they know, and their actual comprehension of those signs, has been widely debated.
The people who teach them claim they have huge vocabularies, but they are often the only ones who can "translate" most of them. It's not that they lie, but they most certainly have significant observer bias. People who know signing but do not work with the animals often cannot make any sense of what they are supposedly saying.....and often the people working with them report communications that show a grasp of grammar and syntax than the creatures do not have themselves.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
I'm sorry, how is it not the first thing you do in a situation like that to send the facilitator out of the room, give the patient a keyword, and then bring the facilitator back in so that the patient can give the keyword back? That should be easy. If it isn't easy, then obviously something may be amiss. How does it take them months to get around to doing that?
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'm sorry, how is it not the first thing you do in a situation like that to send the facilitator out of the room, give the patient a keyword, and then bring the facilitator back in so that the patient can give the keyword back? That should be easy. If it isn't easy, then obviously something may be amiss. How does it take them months to get around to doing that?
Did you read the articles? This is precisely what Laurey did.
quote:When Houben and his family showed up at a 2006 appointment with the unexpected therapist in tow, Laureys performed an unscientific test of his own: with the therapist out of the room, Laureys showed Houben objects. When the therapist came back in to facilitate, Houben was able to name the objects. Laureys was impressed, though his focus remained on the effectiveness of the CRS test.
After this initial positive result, Laurey followed up with more scientific studies of the facilitated communication and concluded it didn't work.
There really isn't enough information in the article to determine why the initial unscientific tests were positive but later more controlled ones were not.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
They might have been tipped off by the fact that the communication device had "ouija" stamped on the bottom.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Speaking of which, this question must also be asked:
quote: "It's like using an Ouija board," said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
(from the Guardian article Javert linked to)
Did Caplan really say "an Ouija board"? Or did the article writer put it that way? Because if Caplan's American, I suspect he said "a Weejee board." I don't know how the Brits pronounce it that would warrant the article "an." "Ooo-ee-jee board," perhaps?
Can anyone enlighten me on this important point?
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