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Dr. Sven van de Wetering was the head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal.
Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University.
His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” We have been conducting an ongoing series on the epistemological and philosophical foundations of psychology with the current sessions here, here, here, and here.
Here we explore blind spots of everyone, epistemologies of psychology, public policy, and social science.
Talking to van de Wetering, the blinds spots in the academic world were the focus of the first question, but, in fact, the focus, immediately, expanded into the more general. Van de Wetering argued everyone has blind spots. Those can create trouble for the wide smattering of us, at a variety of levels.
For example, he directed attention to being enamoured with logic and evidence – odd statement. But unpacking it, he means the ignorance as to the reasoning processes of non-academics. That is, the blind spot of knowledge about the public’s blind spots.
To focus too much on logic and evidence for one’s own tribe while ignoring the modes of reasoning of another tribe, it creates a problem in the bridging of the knowledge gap between academics and the public, so this amounts to a blind spot of academics about the blind spots of the public.
“Where we tend to ignore the criteria by which people outside academia judge the truth of propositions, criteria like emotional resonance, I believe logic and evidence are usually much more useful criteria for truth than emotional resonance (though there are exceptions, and we are not vigilant about those),” van de Wetering explained, “However, the fact of the matter: we try to use those criteria and much of the rest of the world does not lead to some fairly spectacular breakdowns in communication. A lot of us seem to think that coming across as condescending assholes is an acceptable price to pay for improving our odds of being right.”
These are profound insights and important to keep in mind, especially when working to massage the channels of communication. Van de Wetering sees miscommunication as an important or non-trivial matter, as we see these consequences in the politics of America now.
Van de Wetering opined, “Another blind spot adversely affecting not only our communication but also our odds of getting things right is our assumption that universal or nearly universal generalizations are useful epistemological devices in almost all domains. This is probably more of an issue for the sciences and social sciences than it is for the humanities.”
One manifestation, van de Wetering notes, is in psychological sciences with the first-year undergraduate population in Western nations as the samples used in the research. These are, hardly, representative of the human global population. Inevitably, with more extensive research, these samples are shown to represent a slice of the human population and not the total one.
“People from this population have been described as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) to highlight the inappropriateness of generalizing from studies done on this population,” van de Wetering explained.
When I asked about learning more about the implicit ways of knowing how the natural world operates via psychology, van de Wetering described how this can teach a person to be more a part of the WEIRD category, social grouping. This is, in a manner of speaking, a social consequence of university education in Western nations in psychology.
“On the positive side, it does give them some valuable tools for assessing the validity of evidence, especially evidence for generalizations; on the negative side, it also puts them on the wrong side of the communications barrier I was talking about earlier,” van de Wetering stated, “If they absorb these lessons well, I hope it also gives them a certain amount of intellectual humility, but I am not sure how often that part of the lesson takes.”
This does build into another part of the conversation, which was around the public policy becoming better informed by the science. Immediately, van de Wetering quoted Bismarck talking about laws being like sausages. You do not want to see how they’re made.
He sees the inclusion of more scientific knowledge into public policy as an improvement of the situation from before. However, van de Wetering remarked that the distortion of science will eventually occur with the “political horse trading.”
“So, by the time it becomes law, it may be almost useless. Radically changing the political process is not easy to do and, therefore, the best that is achievable is to hope for science to exert some influence over policies at every stage of their development, not at the beginning,” van de Wetering said.
The likelihood of politicians listening to the constituency is an important factor in the development of a change to the policies in a science-based and evidence-based format. One way to do it; easy, the incorporation of a robust public science education system.
Van de Wetering, on the building of a rich scientific education system and the use of this to change the public policy in a direction connected to the real world, lamented, “…so that the politicians’ constituents do not quietly accept policy modifications that go against what is thought to be best on a purely scientific basis. This is probably a pipe dream. Science is hard. Our culture does not seem to be good at motivating people to do hard things that do not have immediate payoffs.”
We reached the end of the session on the ways in which federal and provincial public policy within the nation does not reflect the best psychological science. Van de Wetering spoke less from professional expertise and more from parental knowledge. That is, someone who is the father of a child on the autism spectrum tied to an intellectual disability.
“…I am horrified to discover that the level of support for such children drops very dramatically after they turn 19. This is not totally contrary to science, which does say that getting it right in childhood does greatly reduce problems in adulthood,” van de Wetering opined, “But the degree of decline in support needs is much less than the policy seems to imply. I do not think this massive drop off in funding is due to a misunderstanding of the science.”
He remarked on the cultural view of children with intellectual disabilities as cute, where this becomes a basis for easy funding in a political sense. He was speaking quite directly on the matter. But with the adult population with intellectual disabilities, the intellectual disabilities become “substantially less cute.” These can, by the vice of non-cuteness, become ignored, politically.
He concluded, “The other provincial policy that drives me crazy is the relative degree of funding for education and for health. Education has been underfunded in this province for so long that we do not even know what normal funding looks like. And yet, failure to invest in education is going to have far more adverse effects on our future than failure to invest in health, which is, as far as I can tell, not happening to nearly the same degree.”
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Image Credit: Sven van de Wetering.