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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Self-Doubt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self-Doubt. Show all posts

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Humility and self-doubt are hallmarks of a good therapist

<p><em>Photo by Kelly Sikema/Unsplash</em></p>Helene Nissen-Lie
aeon.co
Originally posted 5 Feb 20

Here is an excerpt:

However, therapist humility on its own is not sufficient for therapy to be effective. In our latest study, we assessed how much therapists treat themselves in a kind and forgiving manner in their personal lives (ie, report more ‘self-affiliation’) and their perceptions of themselves professionally. We anticipated that therapists’ level of personal self-affiliation would enhance the effect that professional self-doubt has on therapeutic change. Our hypothesis was supported: therapists who reported more self-doubt in their work alleviated client distress more if they also reported being kind to themselves outside of work (in contrast, therapists who scored low on self-doubt and high on self-affiliation contributed to the least change).

We interpreted this finding to imply that a benign self-critical stance in a therapist is beneficial, but that self-care and forgiveness without reflective self-criticism is not. The combination of self-affiliation and professional self-doubt seems to pave the way for an open, self-reflective attitude that allows psychotherapists to respect the complexity of their work, and, when needed, to correct the therapeutic course to help clients more effectively.

What does all this mean? At a time when people tend to think that their value is based on how confident they are and that they must ‘sell themselves’ in every situation, the finding that therapist humility is an underrated virtue and a paradoxical ingredient of expertise might be a relief.

The info is here.

Thursday, May 31, 2018

The Case of Dr. Oz: Ethics, Evidence, and Does Professional Self-Regulation Work?

Jon Tilburt, Megan Allyse, and Frederic Hafferty
AMA Journal of Ethics
February 2017, Volume 19, Number 2: 199-206.

Abstract

Dr. Mehmet Oz is widely known not just as a successful media personality donning the title “America’s Doctor®,” but, we suggest, also as a physician visibly out of step with his profession. A recent, unsuccessful attempt to censure Dr. Oz raises the issue of whether the medical profession can effectively self-regulate at all. It also raises concern that the medical profession’s self-regulation might be selectively activated, perhaps only when the subject of professional censure has achieved a level of public visibility. We argue here that the medical profession must look at itself with a healthy dose of self-doubt about whether it has sufficient knowledge of or handle on the less visible Dr. “Ozes” quietly operating under the profession’s presumptive endorsement.

The information is here.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Stereotype Threat, Epistemic Injustice, and Rationality

Stacey Goguen
Draft, forthcoming (2016) in Brownstein and Saul (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Vol I,
Oxford University Press.

Stereotype threat is most well-known for its ability to hinder performance. However, it actually has a  wide range of effects. For instance, it can also cause stress, anxiety, and self-doubt. These additional effects are as important and as central to the phenomenon as its effects on performance are. As a result, stereotype threat has more far-reaching implications than many philosophers have realized. In particular, the phenomenon has a number of unexplored “epistemic effects.

These are effects on our epistemic lives — i.e., the ways we engage with the world as actual and potential knowers. In this paper I flesh out the implications of a specific epistemic effect: self-doubt. Certain kinds of self-doubt can deeply affect our epistemic lives by exacerbating moments of epistemic injustice and by perniciously interacting with ideals of rationality. In both cases, self-doubt can lead to one questioning one’s own humanity or full personhood. Because stereotype threat can trigger this kind of self-doubt, it can affect various aspects of ourselves besides our ability to perform to our potential. It can also affect our very sense of self. In this paper, I argue that we should adopt a more comprehensive account of stereotype threat that explicitly acknowledges all of the known effects of the phenomenon. Doing so will allow us to better investigate the epistemological implications of stereotype threat, as well as the full extent of its reach into our lives. I focus on fleshing out stereotype threat’s effect of self-doubt, and how this effect can influence the very foundations of our epistemic lives. I do this by arguing that self-doubt from stereotype threat can constitute an epistemic injustice, and that this sort of self-doubt can be exacerbated by stereotypes of irrationality. As a result, self-doubt from stereotype threat can erode our faith in ourselves as full human persons and as rational, reliable knowers.

The full text is here.