Do professionals show a bias specific to treatment for people who have sexually offended in their interpretation of ambiguous evidence?

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether professionals who work with people who have sexually offended are biased towards accepting ambiguous evidence as supportive of the effectiveness of treatment for these clients. In an online survey, professionals who work with people who have sexually offended (N = 58) were randomly assigned to receive a brief summary of ambiguous correlational evidence about either treatment for sexual offending or treatment for people who have cancer. Participants were then asked to select from causal and alternate interpretations of the evidence, whether they would recommend implementation of the treatment, and the proportion of funding they would allocate to implementation of the treatment. More than half of the participants incorrectly drew causal inferences and recommended implementing the treatment. However, there was limited evidence that this bias was specific to treatment for people who have sexually offended and there was no evidence that this bias was greater for participants who were more involved versus less involved in treatment for people who have sexually offended. Overall, our results most clearly suggest the operation of the pervasive, general critical thinking error of inferring causation from correlation rather than a self-serving or otherwise motivated bias.

PRACTICE IMPACT STATEMENT

The current study raises awareness of a common critical thinking error that can lead to the implementation of ineffective or even harmful practices and policies. We make recommendations to help reduce this error, which would facilitate more effective practice and policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• methodology
• treatment
• bias
• validity

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to our colleagues for participating in our study. Thank you to Anna Fedotova, N. Zoe Hilton, Alicia LaPierre, Sandy Jung, Sacha Maimone, Robert McGrath, and Chloe Pedneault for helpful feedback on the study materials; Chloe Pedneault for programming the online survey; and the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse (ATSA) for permitting us to recruit participants from the ATSA listserv.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).