Prisoners of Belief.
“Do you ever have a nightmare that instead of liberating people, Facilitated Communication might end up enslaving them?”
“Yeah, that worries me.” — Doug Biklen; An excerpt from “Prisoners of Silence”
In 1993, Frontline aired the documentary Prisoners of Silence, which took an in-depth look at the world of individuals suffering from extreme and severe mental disabilities including retardation, downs syndrome, and autism. The subjects of the documentary were unable to speak, point, or communicate by any traditional means.
Enter, Facilitated Communication. Hailed as a revolutionary new method for working with children who possess developmental disabilities, Facilitated Communication quickly gained momentum largely with the help of a man named Doug Biklen. Originally developed in Australia to assist individuals with physical limitations like cerebral palsy to communicate, Facilitated Communication was adopted for use in communication with the mentally retarded, severly autistic, and even those in a vegetative state. Doug Biklen quickly became one FC’s largest American proponents; he believed in its power and its ability to liberate those who are prisoners in their own minds and their own bodies. Large universities began developing schools to teach and certify individuals in the practice. To this day, variants of Facilitated Communication are taught at such prestigious universities as Syracuse University.
In a nutshell, Facilitated Communication works as follows. An individual with autism or other learning disability is placed in front of a special keyboard. The facilitator sits by her side and merely holds the individual’s hand and arm above the keyboard such that the pointer finger drapes downward toward the keys. The idea is that the facilitator merely allows and aids the movement of the individual as he or she “types” on the keyboard. The words that are typed are then sent to a printer so the facilitator can read the results.
Facilitated Communication was praised as a miracle. Prisoners of silence were prisoners no longer. Trained facilitators were giving voices to the voiceless, and they were surprised at how articulate individuals with mental handicaps could be using this miraculous new form of communication. For hours, they would sit with their patients at the keyboard and type out words and sentences. They could communicate with their teachers, their nurses, and their doctors. They could even tell somebody when they felt hungry, or tired, or sad.
But that’s not all…
It took very little time at all before the subjects using facilitated communication began describing to their facilitators instances of sexual abuse, violence, and even murder. Grisly written pictures were painted of crime scenes as well as vivid and frequent sexual assaults. In many cases, investigations were launched by the local police. Parents and relatives were brought in for questioning regarding the accusations made through Facilitated Communication. Families were torn apart and even happy marriages ended in divorce. To this day, there are occurences of accusations being made through Facilitated Communication.
After the dust from these investigations settled, though, and the pile of evidence pertaining to the various accusations was still missing in action, people began to question this revolutionary new method for communicating with the mentally disabled. Scientists interested in studying Facilitated Communication devised single- and double-blind tests to determine the efficacy of this new technique.
The most damning of these studies involved experimenters setting up a dividing wall between the facilitator and the patient. An image of a simple object was placed on either side of the wall; one for the facilitator to see, and one for the patient to see. Neither patient nor facilitator could see the picture that the other was looking at. What the experimenters neglected to tell the test subjects was that each person on either side of the divider was seeing a different image. When instructed, the facilitator would merely “facilitate” the patient’s typing. Time and time again, the patient, never having seen it, typed the name of the object on the facilitator’s side of the wall.
Many different tests of this nature were conducted under controlled single- and double-blind conditions. Time and time and time again, the results were eye-opening, as summarized in American Psychologist by John W. Jacobson, James A. Mulick, and Allen A. Schwartz:
“Controlled research using single- and double-blind procedures in laboratory and natural settings with a range of clinical populations, with which FC is used, has determined that not only are the people with disabilities unable to respond accurately to label or describe stimuli unseen by their assistants, but that the responses are controlled by the assistants.”
The question remains, though: How could the facilitator be unaware of his or her influence over the patient’s arm?
It turns out that the physical movements of an individual can be influenced by suggestions or expectations without the individual being aware of it. First observed in 1852 by William Benjamin Carpenter in his experiments with dowsing, the ideomotor effect was proposed as a third class of unconscious behavior (in addition to excitomotor and sensorimotor). In addition to explaining facilitated communication and dowsing, the ideomotor effect is responsible for the behavior of Ouija boards as well as automatic writing — ideas to which people, like Doug Biklen feared, have become slaves. Scientific tests conducted by American psychologist William James, French chemist Michael Chevreul, English scientist Michael Faraday, and American psychologist Ray Hyman have shown that the phenomena frequently attributed to “mysterious energies” — spiritual, paranormal, or otherwise supernatural forces — are actually products of the ideomotor effect.
Once the results of the studies done on Facilitated Communication were released, you would think the practice would be abandoned and eventually go the way of cold fusion. Unfortunately, Doug Biklen doubled down on confirmation bias and selective perception, dug in his heels, and continued preaching the miracles of Facilitated Communication. To this day, Syracuse University still has an entire program and even an Institute devoted to teaching this technique.
In cases like Facilitated Communication, belief is a double-edged sword. When we allow our cognitive biases (selective perception, confirmation bias, wishful thinking) to overrule our better judgment, rationality, and actual, quantifiable evidence, and cleave to our ideas for the comfort they provide, we construct ideological prisons around ourselves. Only with honest, objective skepticism, critical thinking, and a willingness to seek evidence and truth at all costs — whether or not we like the implications — can we begin to dispense with belief altogether and unlock our inner prisons with knowledge.
