Psychologists Conventional Wisdom Holds That a Hostage

Psychologists Conventional wisdom holds that a hostage negotiation team should include a police psychologist but that the psychologist should not actually be the team member who conducts negotiations with the alleged hostage-taker. Two articles take opposing sides on this issue. Hatcher et al. (1998) upholds this conventional wisdom, and argues for the value of a psychologist on the negotiation team, provided the psychologist does not serve as the one who conducts the negotiation.

Ebert (1986) takes the opposing view, and argues against the conventional wisdom that the psychologist should not conduct the negotations. On consideration of the arguments presented, it is fairly easy to see why the conventional wisdom was established, and to see that Ebert's case for an expanded role is relatively specious. Ebert claims that "most arguments against using psychologists as negotiators appear absurd when the characteristics of good negotiators as outlined by experts are examined" claiming that "the desirable qualifications parallel those of a good psychologist" (581).

These qualifications range over a series of different lists compiled in previous studies of hostage negotiation tactics, and they range from "sincerely want[ing] to help" and "be willing to listen to anything on the subject's mind" -- both of which admittedly sound like part of a standard psychologist's technique -- but also most of them emphasize the ability to remain calm in stressful situations (which is not necessarily a skill that psychologists can be counted upon to possess) and also to have "common sense" and an ability to "elicit information easily from people" or "gather data," to use comparable but different phrasings of the same idea from different lists (582).

It is here that we might wish to examine Ebert's claims a little more skeptically. To take the latter point first: can we rely on a psychologist for "common sense"? It is here that we might cast a skeptical eye on the history of psychology in the latter 20th century. For much of the century, psychology was under the spell of Freud: there was never any scientific basis to Freudian theory, it just sounded plausible to professional psychologists.

The American psychological establishment was pretty solidly Freudian throughout the 1950s and 1960s, for example, but these Freudian ideas have been blamed for some of the more significant blunders of professional psychologists in the legal system in ensuing decades -- the most notable example here would be the "recovered memory" and "Satanic ritual abuse" type trials of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the McMartin pre-school case, or any other case in which psychologists claimed to have elicited "repressed" memory of crimes on the part of patients under hypnosis, when it was later demonstrated that these memories were, in fact, essentially constructed by the psychologist.

Other salient examples of psychologists essentially manufacturing the.