Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 9:54 am CDT

The methodology of this study is suspect.



Volunteers who knowingly sign up for a study of a drug they know or suspect to be mind-altering are not a representative sample of the range of normal personalities that exist in the general population. They are likely to be risk takers, open to new experiences and impressionable. Curiously, that list includes the variable that is supposed to have significantly changed - in the same direction.



It is also noted that "nearly all" the subjects were actively "spiritual" - whatever that term actually means. Such a high percentage of people who consider themselves "spiritual" does not occur naturally, even in a population as religious as the United States of America. In other industrialized countries a population that was nearly all "spiritual" would be quite abnormal. On this dimension, the U.S. is an aberrant outlier. At the very least, this suggests that the psycho-social environment of life in the United States is a hidden and unacknowledged variable here. Gullibility and openness to subjective change may be a function of the average American environment. The already existing predisposition to this personality triat may have merely been enhanced by the titillating participation in an experiment with a substance that is illegal in that country.



That factor alone indicates that the subjects are more likely than an average person, especially one educated in a more rational environment, to be open to mental suggestion and "openness" to new experiences. The reactions from a bunch of skeptics, or even a sample culled from average residents of Sweden or Japan, would probably be quite different. In other words, there is no guarentee that the results would be repeatable in other cultures or with people with other pre-exisiting personality types.



It was reported that more than half the subjects had "post graduate degrees". These are presumably American level degrees which do not correspond to (the generally higher level of) same-name qualifications in other developed countries. In the U.S. a "postgraduate degree" is not a good indication of intellectual competence or superiority, as evidenced by a recent President with a postgraduate degree from a prestigious American university who consistently demonstrated a level of mental competence that appeared lower than the national average, even for that country. Degrees that are awarded for fact regurgitation rather than independent research, or on the basis of the ability to pay the tutition fees, are not good indicators of critical thinking ability or of a person's resistence to social influence or suggestion.



It is hard to know whether it was the drug or the experimental experience that caused the apparent personality change. There is nothing to indicate that it could not have been caused by the placebo effect of expecting the experience to be salient and mind-altering in some significant way. There is also no way of determining the level of objectivity of a "personality test" that may have relied entirely on self-report and subjective interpretations.



No negative effects were recorded. These are almost always apparent in large scale studies of drugs which are otherwise shown to have a generally useful effect on most people. This is a strong indication that the results are incomplete, invalid or non-representative. There may have been experiemental or reporting bias, a less than optimum sample size or a sample that is non-representative of the normal population (as I have already claimed.)



BTW, the experimenters appear to be psychiatrists (trained in medical science and psychological medicine), not psychologists (trained in behavioral sciences and psychometrics.) If the study were designed and repeated by competent behavioral scientists (rather than mental health practitioners) it would be hoped that the study would be more methodologically sound. The results of well-designed study could be very different.



There is no mention, at least in this article, of the size of the effect. Was it large enough to make a significant difference in the lives of the subjects? Or was it merely an interesting trend? What about the effects on the control group of subjects? Was there a control group? Were there a bunch of subjects with matching original personalities that were given another illegal mind-altering drug that could have been reasonably mistaken for the experimental one by a niave subject? Were the subjects niave?



Meanwhile, no-one has asked how the personalities of the researchers interacted with the personalities of their subjects and whether the experimenters also underwent a "personality change". The phenomena of "false memory recall" is more widely applicable than an impressionable adult falsely believing that they were raped by a family member in their formative years.



The sad thing about such studies is that readers without the statistical or research skills to assess the information will draw unwarranted conclusions about its significance or reliability. Another unfortunate effect is that such studies attract research funding and grant money.