Disconnection practice in Scientology

Some text I’ve just added to WikiPedia (apart from the first paragraph, ref. 2 and the paragraph that cites it):

Antagonists to the Church of Scientology are declared by the church to be “antisocial personalities“, Potential Trouble Sources (PTS), or Suppressive Persons (SPs). The Church of Scientology teaches that association with such persons impedes one’s progress along the Bridge to Total Freedom.

In a Hubbard Communication Office Bulletin (the official policy of the Church of Scientology), L. Ron Hubbard sets out the doctrine that by being connected to Suppressive Persons, a Scientologist could become a Potential Trouble Source (PTS):^[1]

A Scientologist can become PTS by reason of being connected to someone that is antagonistic to Scientology or its tenets. In order to resolve the PTS condition, he either HANDLES the other person’s antagonism (as covered in the materials on PTS handling) or, as a last resort when all attempts to handle have failed, he disconnects from the person. He is simply exercising his right to communicate or not to communicate with a particular person.

The bulletin goes on to set out the urgency of disconnecting oneself from an SP:

To fail or refuse to disconnect from a suppressive person not only denies the PTS case gain, it is also supportive of the suppressive—in itself a Suppressive Act. And it must be so labeled.

According to Church statements, disconnection is used as a “last resort”, only to be employed if the persons antagonistic to Scientology do not cease their antagonism — even after being provided with “true data” about Scientology, since it is taught that usually only people with false data are antagonistic to the Church. ^[2]

A belief that disconnection was not being used as a last resort led a number of Scientologists to resign from the Church of Scientology in 1984, while keeping their allegiance to the beliefs of Scientology.^[3] A local paper of the Church’s East Grinstead base quotes a joint statement from a group of these former members:^[4]

“Because we are fully aware that Mr Hubbard’s writings encourage the unity of the family we cannot tolerate a misrepresentation or misapplication of them that encourages otherwise.”

Disconnection in Practice

The official New Zealand government report into the Church of Scientology (the Dumbleton-Fowles report) quoted from a number of disconnection letters.^[5] This is from teenage Scientologist Erin O’Donnell to her non-Scientologist aunt:

“I am disconnecting from you from now on. If you try to ring me I will not answer, I will not read any mail you send, and I refuse to have anything to do with you in any way whatsoever. All communication is cut completely.”

In 1966 UK newspaper the Daily Mail quoted a disconnection letter from Scientologist Karen Henslow to her mother^[6]

“Dear Mother,
I am hereby disconnecting from you because you are suppressive to me. You evaluate for me, invalidate me, interrupt me and remove all my gains. And you are destroying me.
“I [unreadable] from this time consider myself disconnected from you and I do not want to see you or hear from you again. From now you don’t exist in my life.
“That’s it. Karen.”

Another investigation by the Daily Mail, in 1984, brought up other claims of disconnection.^[7]

“A boy of 13 has told his father he will never see him again. A woman claims her fiancé was forced to give up plans for marriage and leave her.”

The fiancé concerned claimed that “it was a personal decision” and a Church of Scientology spokesman was quoted as saying “If somebody you are associated with directly makes your life a misery, it may be necessary to drop your contacts with them. It is certainly not our policy to split up relationships.”

Also in 1984, the Mail on Sunday (a UK national paper) quoted Gulliver Smithers, a former Scientologist who had left the group’s base at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead at age 14.^[8]

“Disconnection is part of everyday life at Saint Hill. It goes round by word of mouth when someone is an outcast. He or she is just ignored and shunned. It was what we were brought up to do.”

In 1995, the UK local paper Kent Today quoted Pauline Day, who claimed to have received a disconnection letter from her Scientologist daughter Helen, who had then changed her phone number and dropped all contact.^[9][10] A spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology responded, “This was a decision made independently by Helen and has nothing to do with the church at all.”

Other disconnection letters have been posted online^[11]

(More about Scientology on my Scientology critics’ site)

References

1. L. Ron Hubbard. “PTSness and DISCONNECTION”, Hubbard Communication Office, 1983-09-10.
2. Church of Scientology What is Disconnection? (archive.org copy of website accessed 4/19/06)
3. “Buy-out bid for sect HQ: Factions announce plans to fight ‘disconnections’”, East Grinstead Courier, 1984-02-16.
4. “Sect row over policy: Members Quit in ‘Disconnection’ Protest”, East Grinstead Courier, 1984-02-09.
5. Sir Guy Richardson Powles, E. V. Dumbleton. “The Commission of Inquiry Into the Hubbard Scientology Organisation in New Zealand”, 1969-06-30.
6. “Minister is asked to investigate… The case of the processed woman”, Daily Mail, 1966-08-22.
7. Peter Seymour. “‘We disconnect you’”, Daily Mail, 1984-02-11.
8. “Hubbard Youth: The teenage bullies who reign supreme over a sinister cult”, Mail on Sunday, 1984-07-29.
9. Clare Jardine. “Talk To Me, Plea By Cult Girl’s Mum”, Kent Today, 1995-05-20.
10. “Our Little Boy Lost: Grandparents in Legal Battle for the right to see two-year-old Sam”, Daily Mail, 1995-05-29.
11. Gormez, Michael (2005-04-23). Dear Dad… Scientology disconnect policy at work. Retrieved on 2008-02-26.

Bias and war: Why hawks win

An outstanding piece of writing on biases that came out last year was Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon’s “Why Hawks Win” in Foreign Policy. Rather than look at the evidence or effects for one particular bias, the authors consider the whole spectrum of biases and how they affect a particular decision: of whether or not to go to war.

Kahneman is especially well-placed to do this since with Amos Tversky and other colleagues he set off the whole “Heuristics and Biases research programme” that has spawned thousands of experiments and earned him a Nobel memorial prize in Economics.

Is there a general lesson from bias research about war? According to that authors, yes: “All the biases in our list favor hawks. [...] biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.”

Bias and human conflict

…or “Why can’t we all just get along?”

In a world of economically rational agents, there would be no strikes, civil legal disputes wouldn’t come to court, marital break-up would not be so acrimonious and there probably wouldn’t be any wars. One strand of bias research deals with why there is so much conflict in human life.

A labour dispute, for example, could be resolved on paper by rational agents. The union would threaten to strike, the employer threaten to dock pay, and as each party spells out their position, they would negotiate an equilibrium. They could then sign a contract giving each other some concessions but committing not to take any of the threatened action. There’s a worked numerical example in Dixit and Nalebuff’s Thinking Strategically. Strikes cost the company and the strikers a great deal in lost production and lost pay, so it’s in their rational interest to have the strike “on paper” like this. (Perhaps it would be rational for unions to strike once in a while, just so that their threats are credible).

Irrationality: The Enemy Within

In terms of making a great breadth of research easy to understand with a variety of examples and applications, Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality (Published 1994 by Penguin, reprinted 2007 by Pinter & Martin) is still the best non-technical introduction to the topic of cognitive biases. There are books covering newer research (such as Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of Its Own) but none is as ambitious and accessible as this.

It looks at judgement and decision-making in many contexts, from military tactics to medicine and from job interviews to the paranormal. It relies heavily on scientific research - there are many elegant descriptions of psychological experiments - yet the technical details are kept out of the main text to make it easy for a non-specialist reader, and much of the text deals with real-life instances of bias. 324 footnotes point to the book’s scientific basis.

If it has a flaw, it’s on the philosophical side rather than the psychological side. In order to judge that some behaviour is irrational, you need a clear standard of rationality and an understanding of why that is the best choice. Sutherland is good at succinctly explaining the normative standards, but some of his examples are not as clear-cut as he makes them out.

Given that it’s such a definitive and dense book, I’ve created the following outline to help find topics in the book and to relate its contents to other books in the literature.

50 secrets from the science of persuasion

I recently read “Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion” by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini (Profile books, 2007). Written by a USA/UK team, it summarises a wide range of published scientific experiments, some of which are very recent, and draws out lessons for managers and workers in marketing/sales. It’s similar in its themes to Cialdini’s previous books on persuasion, but definitely aimed at the business community rather than researchers or students.

If I say it’s been dumbed down for managers, I risk irritating any managers who read this… well, I’ve gone and said it anyway.

Below are my one-line summaries of the book’s evidence-based tips. They aren’t meant to substitute for the book itself (which is a recommended read, except for some annoyingly twee aphorisms) but if you already know about persuasion research, this may be a helpful guide.

1. Convey that your product is popular, to benefit from social proof.
2. Make social proof specific: use a comparison group that your target audience will relate to.
3. Avoid inadvertently giving social proof in negative messages.
4. Beware the “magnetic middle”: when reporting on average behaviour, be aware that above-average people may take it as an excuse to lower their performance.
5. Don’t give customers too many similar options or they might not choose at all.

Motivating Other People

Notes from a talk I gave in the ILRT research seminar series, 21 August 2003:

We tend to see the motivation of other people as simply a task of correctly applying the “carrot” and the “stick”. Surprisingly though, cognitive psychology has shown that the “common sense” view of motivation is often counterproductive. The implications are important for managers who want to motivate employees, teachers who want to involve students in learning and innovators who want others to adopt their new ideas. This session will consider various experiments that bear on motivation.

Why there are so many idiots on the road?

You know the experience. You’re in your car, just trundling along when, as you cross the junction… “WHOA! He just came out of nowhere! If I hadn’t braked, that would have been a collision. Why do they let these idiots on the road?”

Some of the research on bias examines driving. In particular, there are experiments on how drivers perceive their own skills in relation to other peoples’.

Accepting the Reality of Denial

The term “Holocaust denial” is, I hope, widely understood. It refers to pretend scholarship that challenges the idea that the Holocaust happened. This has no connection at all with Holocaust scholarship. Whereas real historical scholarship examines multiple, converging lines of evidence to assemble a picture of what happened at a particular time, denial takes a tenuous “what if?” scenario and treats it as proven fact, or at least equal to scientific evidence (a useful introduction to this distinction is the first chapter of Michael Shermer’s The Borderlines of Science).

Holocaust denial exists because there is a demand for it. It’s an economic fact that there are people happy to pay for, or otherwise support, validation of their opinions. The better supported a claim is with real evidence, and the more intensely biased people are against it, the more there will be this need to legitimise a contrasting opinion.

Super-humans are everywhere

Imagine someone who claims to have superhuman powers: He has x-ray vision, enough strength to lift a car and can bend metal with his bare hands, he assures you. When you say that’s unlikely, he takes it as an insult: okay, his powers aren’t at their best right now, but it’s plain to him that he is super-human. You might find his insistence eccentric or amusing, but then you find he’s going on a long drive across the desert without taking tools, a jack or extra supplies. If the car develops a fault, he swaggers, he’ll diagnose it with super-sight, lift up the car with his super-strength, and bend the metal right back into shape.

No longer amused by his confidence, you try to dissuade him. A more reasonable person making the trip would be bold and adventurous, but he just seems blind. If only he would acknowledge who and what he really is, he could still have his fun, and avoid a potential disaster.

Now of course that story was just an analogy. You, I and the people we meet every day never claim to have super-human powers, do we?

Homophobia and hypocrisy

From mentioning breasts earlier in the week, I now turn to penises. In a study that deserves a great deal of publicity, psychologists used a questionnaire to identify a group of men with strongly negative attitudes to homosexuality, and another group of men who were comfortable with it. The men watched various kids of erotic films while a rubber ring around their members, hooked up to a computer, monitored them for arousal.

“Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. [...] Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.”