The "Grinch" who stole ESP, faith healing and recovered memory therapy can often be an uncomfortable role to play, but it's a role that Scott Lilienfeld feels is crucial in an era when pop psychology is touting easy magical answers to extremely complex questions about human behavior.
An assistant professor of psychology specializing in the study of psychopathic personality disorder and anxiety disorders, Lilienfeld also is a member of the Georgia Skeptics Society, a local group affiliated with a national skeptics organization.
According to Lilienfeld, the Georgia Skeptics Society is a group of scientists and lay people interested in science whose goal is to promote critical evaluation and thinking about fringe science, or pseudo-scientific claims, that have questionable validity.
"We try to encourage people to explore the facts," Lilienfeld said, "to take the facts and make decisions based on the evidence, rather than the basis of preference or wishful thinking."
The Georgia Skeptics Society has looked at issues such as ESP (extra-sensory perception), the use of recovered memory therapy to bring out supposed memories of child sexual abuse, and lie detection techniques such as the polygraph test. The group also tries to stay in close contact with the media, especially when these types of issues are in the news.
"For example," said Lilienfeld, "Nightline recently had a feature on the CIA using $20 million in taxpayer money to employ psychics for remote viewing purposes. That would be the kind of thing where we might even put out a media alert to try and educate the public about what is known about ESP. We would want people to ask themselves whether it is reasonable for the government to spend this kind of money on the use of psychological capacities that have repeatedly been found not to be demonstrable in the psychological laboratory."
The fairly recent phenomenon of recovered memory therapy, in which adults purportedly recall forgotten or repressed memories of childhood abuse through techniques such as hypnosis, is another topic the Georgia Skeptics Society has examined.
"Therapists are using hypnosis and other highly suggestive techniques to bring out supposed memories of child physical and sexual abuse, even when these people in the conscious or waking state claim to have no recollection of those memories," Lilienfeld explained. "It may be that in a small number of cases, some of these memories are real. We don't know. But we do know that the use of these techniques can very easily produce false recollections of things that never happened. I think the pop psychological view of memory, at least until recently, is that memory works like a tape recorder or camcorder that passively records with remarkable accuracy every event a person experiences in life. We now know that memory does not work that way, that memory is in fact a very active, reconstructive process in which events are shaped (distorted in some cases) in accord with our expectations. That has not yet filtered its way down to the general public or to some psychotherapists."
Although many people view members of the Georgia Skeptics Society as cynics because of their role in questioning phenomena such as recovered memory therapy, Lilienfeld sees himself as a conservative rather than a cynic in terms of scientific beliefs.
"For me, skepticism is simply a proper scientific attitude meaning that you should not accept any claim without evidence," Lilienfeld said. "On the flip side of the coin, it also means that one has to be open to every single claim until one has overwhelming evidence that it's not true." Citing the case of a Rockdale County woman who claims to see apparitions of the Virgin Mary and receive messages from her, Lilienfeld said scientists also must make distinctions between questions that science is equipped to answer and questions it cannot answer. He said that scientists cannot determine whether the woman is actually seeing the Virgin Mary or whether she is having a supernatural experience. But scientists can look at evidence such as photographs taken at the time of the alleged visitations and EEGs that illustrate the woman's brain waves during visitations and make assessments about their relevance and authenticity.
"I think we have to be careful as members of these kinds of groups not just to be debunkers," he said. "We also have to try and instill in people a sense of the wonders of actual science. I think it's somewhat sad that people want and need to turn to things like ESP and faith healing and hypnosis to make the world wonderful. The universe is amazing as it is. There are all kinds of incredibly fascinating questions out there that remain to be answered, such as how the universe was created. These things are mind boggling and awe inspiring. If we could somehow instill in people a better understanding of science and how wonderful the universe really is, they might not have as much of a need to believe in some of these pseudo-scientific concepts. I think that what we can give back is not magic, but a deeper understanding of the wonders of nature as it really is."
--Dan Treadaway