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CAROL TAVRIS and ELLIOT ARONSON
father was accused of molesting his rhree-year-old daughter. The expens reviewed cranscriprs, watched interviews of the child and videotapes of parent-child exchanges, and reviewed clinical findings. They had identical information, but some were convinced the abuse had occurred while others were just as convinced it had never hap pened. The researchers (hen recruited 129 other mental-hea1th spe cialists and asked them to assess the evidence in this case, estimate the likelihood that the little girl had been molested by her father, and make a recommendation regarding custody. Again, the results ranged from certainty that the child had been molested to cenainry that she had nor. Some wamed to forbid the father [Q see his daugh ter ever again; others wanted to give him full custody. Those experts who were prone to believe that sexual abuse is rampant in families were quick to interpret ambiguous evidence in ways that supponed that belief; those who were skeptical did not. For the unskeptical ex perts, the researchers said, "believing is seeing."24 Other studies of the unreliability of clinical predictions, and there are hundreds of them, are dissonance-creating news to the mental health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that meir expert assessments are extremely accurate.21 When we said that science is :l form of :lrrogance control, th:lt's what we mean. o
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"Believing is seeing" was the principle that created every one of the day-care scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. JUSt as in the McMartin case, each began with an accusation from a disturbed parent or the whimsical comments of a child, which provoked an investigation, which provoked panic. At the Wee Care Nursery School in New Jer sey, for example, a four-year-old child was having his temperature taken rectally at his doctor's office when he said, "That's what my teacher [KeUy Michaels] does to me at school."26 The child's mother notified the state's child protection agency. The agency brought the child to a prosecutor's office and gave him an anatomical doll to play