 |
|
Susan Clancy's Word-List Experiment Replicated; Results Not Consistent with Clancy's Findings
November 2005
In Susan Clancy's skeptical book Abducted: How People Come to Believe they were Kidnapped by Aliens, great emphasis is placed upon a memorization experiment known as the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (or "DRM" for short) paradigm.
This experiment served as Clancy's foundation for both her study of female sexual abuse survivors, and of "experiencers" of alien contact (both, incidentally, conducted under the supervision of Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally).
In the DRM experiment, subjects are presented with lists of 15 thematically related words (like "dream", "night", "bed", etc) and are later tested for the accuracy of their recall. Errors in recall, such as erroneously believing that another thematically related word (such as "sleep") was present on the list, when it was in fact not present, is interpreted by some memory researchers as "the creation of false memories."
Although the experience of reading a word list may have little similarity to the experience of forming memories while living daily life, Clancy believes that "if alien abductees are prone to creating false memories in the lab, there is no reason to believe they wouldn't tend to do so in the real world as well." (see note)
Clancy's experiment was redone by Prof. Christopher French of the Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, several months before the October publication of Clancy's book. Prof. French recently responded to an inquiry that asked if his as yet unpublished study of experiencers in the United Kingdom had replicated Susan Clancy's word list experiment, and if his result had been the same as Clancy's.
He granted permission to share his response of November 19, 2005:
"...our attempt to replicate the Clancy et al. findings with our
experiencers (not all of whom were abductees in the strict
sense) did not reveal any significant differences between our
experiencers and our control group on the DRM task.
"As you're probably aware, I think Susan's views are probably
correct re. such experiences (I wrote a very favourable review
of her book for New Scientist). Having said that, although our
questionnaire measures produced data consistent with her general
approach, the DRM results, as I said, did not."
"Best wishes,
Chris"
(Christopher French)
Because of the importance of the word-list experiment in Clancy's book, Prof. French's failure to replicate her results will no doubt have to be addressed in the next edition of her book. (The current edition of Clancy's book, published in October, makes no mention of French's results, even though preliminary findings had been distributed by French to colleagues and interested parties the first week in June.)
We are hopeful that Clancy may also take the opportunity in the next edition to answer criticism about the DRM paradigm itself. In her book, Clancy avoids responding to the observation that the DRM experiment appears to have little similarity to the experience of forming memories in real life. She mentions such criticism only once, and deflects it by claiming it came from "one of John Mack's acolytes". She quotes an expletive laden sentence, "What the hell does studying lists of words have to do with alien abductions?" (not a sentence that anyone at the John Mack Institute has in fact directed to her in such terms) and then, rather than answering the question, she takes the opportunity to mock the questioner by noting the question should have been phrased as an inquiry about the "ecological validity of the research."
|
|
|
|
