For the people in child welfare organizations, for social workers, for doctors, for police, for judges to change their mind about current and future decisions requires them to change their mind about past decisions. The necessary implication is that many of the people they have persecuted in the past were, in fact, innocent. It requires them to admit that they personally have likely caused untold suffering to parents, caretakers, and children.
This is hard for anyone; but if you've lived your life trying to be the hero, feeling good about swooping in and rescuing children from the clutches of evil villains, how can you face the fact that you are the evil villain in so many children's stories?
You might call this the Paradox of Judgment: If you don't say that something is that bad, then lots of people don't think it's a big deal and don't do anything about it. But if you do say that something is really bad, then there develop all these pathologies of denialism around it.
People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.
From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."
"Confirmation bias", where you tend to see what you expect to see, is narrower; but still I think doesn't capture what we're talking about. We're specifically talking about resistance to accepting the idea because accepting it would mean reclassifying actions you yourself had taken from "very good" to "very bad". It's kind of weird that it doesn't have a name -- I'm convinced it plays a pretty big part of human behavior, much more than is commonly acknowledged.
That's exactly it. I'd love to discover scientific literature about this phenomenon, and I'd also be surprised if it doesn't already have a name and an extensive literature. But if that's the case: I think there are research carriers in psychology to make here...
Edit: ChatGPT found "belief perseverance" [1] but, again, that's not exactly what we're talking about, which also relates to a personal sense of morality and "being one of the good guys".
They do a lot of mental gymnastics trying to run from the idea that their main function is to imprison and take away peoples rights, often without due process.
Medical industry is rife with abuse. They routinely kill people out of spite, torture dying people and their families, and want to be shielded from any criticism... so fuck all the patients and look for reasons they're "not righteous", etc, so you can dismiss them.
It's quite interesting (and disturbing) to see how much culture evolves around deflecting blame and victim blaming.
As the warrior poet Maslow put it, "if the only tool you ever have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_avoidance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(Freud)
HN and software engineers have bias to over-focus on the cognitive, but I think the key experience here is emotional distress.
This is why Max Planch (German physicist) has quipped that science advances one funeral at a time.
"Honey, I doubled the salt in the pasta this time, how does it taste?" "Oh, it's really salty". "Ha-HA! I didn't actually add ANY salt!"
(do not actually do this to people you like or who like you)
Here's one among thousands of examples, from a really terrible paper by one such powerful SBS proponent here in France [1] (another of his papers was actually retracted this year [2]).
"Fake news 11: the caretakers’ denial is sincere
Clinicians and defenders can become intoxicated by the denials of parents suffering the agony of having their child in dire condition, and at the same time being grilled for their possible responsibility. The mental mechanisms of self-denial are well-known to psychiatrists. A perpetrator, after a violent burst, and faced with its terrible consequences, can experience a dissociation mechanism similar to witnesses of catastrophes, dissociation being understood as “a break between the memory, the perception, the consciousness and the identity…when faced with unbearable feelings”. Sincere denial easily elicits compassion from the medical staff as well as defenders, a natural response which is enhanced by professional training. Some authors have documented with functional imaging the sincerity of denial in a case of convicted child abuse and concluded that the sincerity of denial is not a criterion for innocence."
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-021-05357-8
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-023-05889-1
Still, there are different types and sources of denial, just as there are different sources of emotional bias. "Self-image maintenance bias" and "self-image maintenance denial" can both be about general ways in which we try to maintain our self image (as strong, talented, attractive, whatever). "Moral self-image maintenance bias" or "moral self-image maintenance denial" can be about ways in which we try to maintain our self-image as good, decent people.
It's much, much harder again to understand something if it makes your life's work ignoble.
Our inability to judge extends to others.
It certainly deserves a better name.
On an ontological level, psychiatry made a huge leap forward in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III. One of the core goals of the DSM-III was to address the concerns raised in the Rosenhan experiment, making diagnostic criteria more robust and reliable. While there are still many controversies and shortcomings - most prominently regarding the over-diagnosis of less severe conditions - we now have a suite of reliable, validated diagnostic instruments for most serious conditions. For the most part, we aren't diagnosing or treating patients based on the gut instinct of an individual practitioner; we're using objective criteria with proven inter-relater reliability, guided by the over-arching principle that, regardless of symptomatology, no-one is mentally ill unless a) they're experiencing distress and/or b) they're causing significant harm to others. There are many shortcomings in how psychiatric medicine is practised today, but the era of locking people up just because they behave strangely is definitively over.
This can go quite far, with some experts stating that the histories reported by parents and caregivers bringing a child to the hospital with some injuries are always falsified. This can surely happen, but a foundational tenet of medicine is to listen to the patient/parents.
I've seen experts concluding to abuse in 100% of their cases, including those where children hah obvious, DNA-proven genetic conditions causing the observed injuries. Fortunately, some judges remain reasonable and act as "gatekeepers" by exculpating parents and caregivers despite affirmative opinions by reputable experts. But many don't.
Norman Guthkelch himself (the first to hypothesize a causal link between shaking and subdural/retinal hemorrhage) wrote in 2012 [1]:
"While controversy is a normal and necessary part of scientific discourse, there has arisen a level of emotion and divisiveness on shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma that has interfered with our commitment to pursue the truth."
A French neuropediatrician wrote a medical book in French a few years ago about this issue. When interrogated by a lawyer in a symposium a couple of years ago, the author of the papers linked in my comment above said: "I haven't read this book because I absolutely can't agree with it, since it's written by one of the leaders of a denialist and revisionist school of thought".
How can you even start a discussion in a context where a Godwin point is reached with the very term they use to call you?
1. These anti-SBS people are evil sophists trying to help child abusers
2. These views of these anti-SBS people irrational; but they're not evil, just misguided and/or misled.
3. The views of these anti-SBS people are wrong, but they are actually reasonable views for someone to hold, given the evidence they have available to hem.
4. The views of these anti-SBS people are correct.
You're never going to jump from 1->4 directly; you need to start with going 1->2.
So if you're serious about it, then I guess I would start with actually trying to get face-time with some people. Look at the various people in this community, and find someone who seems either more reasonable, or more friendly / sociable: someone who is unlikely to turn down an invitation to coffee / lunch, and unlikely to hate a decent person right in front of them. If there's someone who's has a lot of influence, or is in the "core", that's best; but anyone within one or two steps of the "core" could be a good start.
My goals going into the meeting would be:
* Establish a human connection; see them as a person, help them see you as a person
* Make sure they feel heard and understood. Try to understand how they got into the work they're doing now; and not only the evidence they've seen, but also the personal experiences they've had. Try to mostly listen; and if possible repeat back to them what you've heard them say.
* Share your story, and some of the key stories you've seen or heard. If you can, stick to your observations and opinions; i.e., don't say "my nanny was innocent", but rather, "it didn't really seem possible that the nanny did it; it would have been really out of character" (and explain more about the nanny's character).
I'd call it by ear whether to ask "would you want to know if you were wrong" and "how would you know if you were wrong".
Remember the goal for the first meeting is to get them from 1 to 2: That maybe you're way off base and misguided, but that you're not evil. Getting to 3 would be a bonus if it goes well, but don't count on it; and there's no way 4 will happen over the course of lunch.
That's a lot of work, but you seem pretty motivated. Whatever you end up doing, good luck!
It's even harder to understand something if your self-conception as honorable depends on your mistunderstanding?