Research vs. Experience

[joreth]

I got into an argument recently (I know, shocking, right?) where I found myself sounding suspiciously like those wooagers I am usually arguing against. It has been plaguing me for some time, and I feel the need to delve into it more thoroughly.

The argument was over research vs. experience. On my website, I have a graphic based on the Triangle Theory of Love that I use to try and explain how I see my relationships. The theory goes that "love" can be broken down into 3 elements, which can combine to make 7 total classifications for different types of love. I'm told that this theory is largely discredited in psych circles, but I'm not told how or why. The problem is that this theory does, actually, describe how I experience my relationships fairly accurately. Most of the research and theories I have seen have a tendency to categorize things on a binary scale. This Triangle Theory was the first, and so far only, time I have seen someone try to explain the concept of love as a collection of multiple traits.

For example, some will try to say that love can be broken down into romantic love and familial love, and then they will try to define romantic and familial. Except that I have relationships that have elements of both, and are missing elements of each, and have other elements that aren't listed at all. But with this Triangle, it feels more representative of that nebulous sort of way that I experience my relationships. I can draw an X anywhere on the Triangle, closer to this point, further from that one, and that is a description of my love for a specific person at that moment in time. I can move that X around the Triangle over time as my love changes. And, since there are different kinds of love that are represented on that Triangle, I do not get the impression that one type of love is preferred over others - that I am justified in finding value in different kinds of love and not rejecting something as not being "real love" because it doesn't fit onto a binary scale.

When I put this Triangle on my website, I did so to give a graphic representation of a personal experience, but I also cited where it came from since I didn't make it up. I was not discussing research or the validity of the claims. I made only one statement on my website that referred to how other people experience love, and that was that I believe our society values the One True Love over other types of love. I have yet to see any credible research that refutes that claim.

So, the argument started because someone with letters after his name suggested that I remove the graphic from my website because the theory was "largely discredited". It was pointed out by someone else that I was trying to describe a personal experience, so therefore the graphic was accurate. The lettered person then proceeded to suggest that I needed lessons in how to tell the difference between good research and bad research, that he could instruct me, and that I was tarnishing all of the poly community by supporting this theory.

That did not go over well.

I defended my position that, as a description of my personal experience, that graphic was accurate and the research he linked to was actually not relevant at all (he linked to a study of monogamous people where love was defined as 2 different types, and the conclusion was that most people wanted that all-encompassing romantic love). I concluded my rant with "any research that claims that my experiences didn't happen can go fuck itself."

And that statement is what is bothering me.

I often find myself arguing with people about personal experience, and how our perception is flawed and can't be trusted to be accurate representations of the world. Specific arguments that come to mind are: the one where tacit and I tried to explain to a person who was convinced she could predict the future through her dreams that her personal experience doesn't make it true because she cannot account for things like confirmation bias and post hoc ergo prompter hoc and she has no grasp of statistics; or the arguments with people convinced they have some disease that was made up by hucksters trying to swindle them out of money but who believe him because "science" hasn't found an acceptable answer to their symptoms.

In both of these cases, the other side of the argument feels as though their personal experience is being dismissed. I believe that is due to communication errors. The rationalists and skeptics that I have ever heard talk about these sorts of things do not actually say that what these people feel isn't real. What they say is that the explanation they are giving for these experiences is false.

Let's take psychosomatic illnesses, for example. When you try to tell someone that what they have is psychosomatic, they will often respond with "don't try to tell me it's all in my head, I feel this pain!" I have no doubt that they do, and neither do the doctors who try to explain that they don't have whatever wacky, made-up illness they think they do. The experience is true, it's the explanation that isn't.

When a person dreams that her second cousin is going to get pregnant, and the next day the second cousin calls up to say that she's pregnant, I absolutely believe that the events transpired as described (well, OK, I don't "absolutely" believe it - I know enough about the fallibility of memory to know that it's not only possible, but probable, that things didn't happen exactly as reported, but I'm willing to accept the description of events at face value). I believe that she did, in fact, have that experience. It is the explanation of those events that I do not believe - that it was a supernatural, telepathic, future-telling event. In this particular case, when more details were dragged out, that second cousin actually had a very long history of promiscuity (and by promiscuity, I mean unsafe, unprotected sex with large numbers of people, often one-night stands or random hookups). This is what we call a high-probability hit. Based on the facts, it was actually fairly likely that this second cousin would get pregnant, and the dreamer happened to have been worrying about it a lot right up until the dream in question, including earlier that day.

So, I found myself sounding like these people that I usually argue against: the research itself must be faulty because my experiences don't match; how dare you tell me that what I experience isn't real; fuck the research, I know what I feel. And that rankles. A lot. I really don't think that I was able to explain what I meant because I used "fuck" too many times and got the thread shut down. I wasn't making any claims about what research is good or bad, I wasn't talking about trends or other people, and I wasn't giving any sort of explanation for my experiences. I was only describing what love feels like to me. I'm not even sure how something like a theory describing how people experience love can be "discredited" when there are people who say they do, in fact, experience love that way. Maybe you can't say it's how "most" people experience love, but I don't see how it can be claimed that a description of certain types of love is not true when there are people who do actually feel love according to that description.

So, my basic point in that argument, that I don't think I adequately conveyed, is that "research" has not yet been able to tell me that I experienced something, especially when I stand here and tell you that it is not how I experienced it. Research can offer explanations on the how and why I experienced something, but it can't tell me that I didn't experience it.

If I feel afraid, science can tell me that what is making me feel afraid is not real - it's a manifestation of my imagination or it's my inability to tell reality from fantasy, or that it's "all in my head", or even that it's an illusion created by skilled artists. Science may even be able to tell me the physical processes that create the fear, such as too much of this hormone or a missing fold in the brain, or a flaw in the human eye that falls for optical illusions. But what it can't tell me is that I am not feeling afraid. I may have no valid reason to feel afraid, i.e. what I'm afraid of may not exist in reality (like, say, evil dolls hiding under my bed that teleport in every night from another dimension), but it can't tell me that my fear is not real. That's what tacit and I mean when we say a feeling is real, but not valid - that the person is feeling something is real - they really are feeling it, but the reason for feeling that way may not exist in reality, making it not "valid". People get hung up on that word "valid" and think it means the same thing as "real", but it doesn't. Anyway, that's a tangent.

I think that's the difference between what I was saying and what the wooagers say. On my website, I am discussing a feeling - the feeling of love and what it's like to experience love from my perspective. I used a graphic that I found to illustrate what I'm feeling because it was the closest 2D representation of what I was trying to explain. "Research" or "science" cannot tell me that I don't feel what I feel. It can, however, explain where a feeling comes from.

The wooagers make a claim about a feeling they are having, and then extrapolate that feeling to justify the explanation. I feel hurt, therefore you hurt me. I had a dream, therefore psychic powers are real. I feel sick, therefore I have this disease. What I am saying is "I feel love". Period. No therefores, no justifications of external phenomena, just a description of what I feel. I don't know why I feel that way and I'm not making any claims to explain the why or the how. I'm also not claiming that anyone else feels any particular way. But I will defend that I feel that way, and that it is not the role or the ability of research and science to tell me that I do not feel what I feel or that I do feel what I don't feel.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works. It can explain the hows and the whys, even if we haven't figured out all the hows and whys yet. But people cannot use science or research to tell someone what they feel in contradiction to their subjective experience. We can only offer suggestions as to why they feel that way. I feel "love" as a feeling that is comprised of several different elements, and the varying balance of those elements is what defines the different types, or categories, of love that I feel. And any research that tries to tell me that I don't feel what I feel can go fuck itself.

Comments

[terriaminute.livejournal.com]

The fellow with the letters after his name must be dreadful at his profession, to think it's a good idea to tell a person no, you can't say this works for you, it's discredited. It's a feeling. Or rather, a whole range/clump/array of feelings under a common name. NOTHING is discredited amongst nearly seven billion of us. If you make a graph for any part of it, it will be descriptive for someone, in part or in whole.

Right there, HE is discredited. In such a nebulous field, to make such a statement is simply short-sighted. PARTICULARLY since you used it as a personal reference, and said so. PARTICULARLY since you had looked at the research, and nothing else fit as well. What an ass.

[joreth]

Yeah, I was quite vocal in what an ass I thought he was :-) hence the thread shut-down. One of these days, I'll learn how to express those thoughts using "nice" words - because, apparently, it's OK to be condescending and insult people as long as you don't say things like "fuck".

[terriaminute.livejournal.com]

Actually, that is correct. It's harder to call someone on his bullshit than it is to say "no cussing." The former is a judgement call, the latter is pretty clear to everyone.

It's a matter of getting your points across without getting shut out of the discussion altogether. If your intent is to stay, language rules are important to keep in mind. If you want to fire all torpedoes and to hell with the consequences, often the result is you blow yourself out of the water. :) What is the result you are looking for? That's the question to keep in mind.

I would be willing to bet very good money that this fellow would have been completely hopeless to attempt to educate. But others might have benefited from your attempt to set him straight. Worth the dain bramage? Well... that's debatable!

[joreth]

The result I was looking for was to show him how insulting he was being. Considering everyone who weighed in said some variation of "what she said" and "yay Joreth!", I'm not concerned about how others benefited or not. It seems as though others did benefit for having someone say for them what they either couldn't say or didn't know how to say. And that's almost always the position I'm taking in these flame wars.

My first response was quite lengthy and reasoned. He had no response to any point I made, he merely responded with "you need lessons in how science works, I can teach you offlist", and it was only after THAT that I got pissy, which then made me feel as though I started to sound like those wooagers I'm usually against.

As I said on Twitter, if the rules actually state no cussing, I can abide by that. But very few rules ever state no cussing. Sometimes they state to be "civil", which is a judgement call, and condescending and insulting without cussing usually sneaks by, but an expletive "fuck" without actually calling someone a name gets the thread shut down.

IMO, that's contrary to the rules of "be civil" or polite or whatever vague, subjective word people use to tell grown ups to behave.

[terriaminute.livejournal.com]

Someone had to call him out. I just... I can't imagine being that condescending to anyone, as he was to you. I wonder if he expected you to thank him for his generous offer to teach you his version of bullshit disguised as science? And I wonder if he pulls that nonsense with males?

If I sounded like you weren't justified in cussing, I didn't intend to. I'm pretty sure he'd have made me cuss, too. Ignoring a person's reply while offering to "help" with his superior intellect? - oh yeah. Torpedoes.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd like to see evidence that it has been widely discredited. I am personally suspicious. It was taught to me when I was studying psych, and the evidence I can find on the web now is that many people still use it, but that some people consider it a poor model, because they feel some of the elements (either commitment or passion, depending on the person objecting) would be better handled as a separate axis rather than as part of a model about love. This seems more like someone exaggerating their position about a disagreement within the field, although I could be wrong.

The thing is, it's a model. You can argue that it isn't the best-fit model for love in existence. But nobody is saying that it is perfect. Love is a hard thing to describe, but what we do in science is take reality and build models. If this is the best model you have to hand, then it can be helpful to use it. Even an imperfect model can be a useful tool. We use imperfect models all the time, sometimes even when we know of the existence of a better model (such as using Newtonian physics because it is simpler and we don't need the more complex model to get a sufficiently good result).

If you're using a model to describe and explain, rather than stating it is a perfect description of reality, then I don't see how the notion of "discredited" works. You discredit things presented as a perfect analogue to reality or sometimes you replace a model with a better one.

But I am curious what evidence there is that it is discredited. I find it odd that a web search found the theory mentioned on what appear to be reputable sites about psychology and other sites that tend to have accurate information, and yet none of them mention it being discredited.

[joreth]

That's exactly what I was getting at! I wish the word "model" had occurred to me in the argument, I might have made more sense. I don't even understand how a model of feelings can be "discredited". About something empirical, like phrenology as a model of how the brain works - sure, I totally get how that can be discredited. But as long as even one person says "this is a representation of how I feel", the word "discredited" doesn't even make sense in that context.

As you said, it could be a poor model, or it could be a model that doesn't apply to many people.

The person in question did not offer any evidence for his use of the word "discredited", he only linked to some other research that had no applicability to the situation at hand, i.e. monogamous couples & binary options, as an example of "good" research. I have my own doubts about that particular study being any good, but that wasn't the issue.

I've seen people have negative reactions to this Triangle and what it suggests or represents, but I, also, haven't found anything suggesting that it's no longer in use, just that some people disagree with it. I'm fine with that and I see no reason why that should change my own use of the model, until something better comes along or I make my own.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Actually, it could be discredited, because it was based on emperical research. I looked into its history. The model is backed by research that shows higher scores on the different axes it presents correlated with more actions that represent a relationship. That is, people who self-reported a lot of commitment, passion, and intimacy in their relationships were also more likely to have actions that showed that they had a close relationship with the person. And there was also some other previous measure that had been used to measure relationship closeness that when this model was invented showed that it correlated with as well.

So, if you could find that people who self-report a lot of intimacy, passion, and commitment with someone actually seem to usually have a more distant relationship with the person and tend to be closer by deed with people they report far lower scores with, then you could discredit the model.

I see no evidence that anyone has done this though. If he only linked to unrelated research, and not to any research that was about the flaws in this model, then I have no idea why he thinks this is discredited. I can find no evidence that it is discredited.

I just checked my old social psychology textbook, and while it is certainly possible the field has changed since I went to college, it describes this model, but it in no way states any discrediting of it. It just isn't the only model presented. For example, right after that it presents a model based on love styles. Which divides love into eros, ludos, storge, pragma, mania,a agape. It is probably useful when discussing a particular situation of love to describe it in multiple ways, possibly focusing on the model that best suits the aspect you are trying to describe, since the two models do not conflict with each other, so much as they describe different elements about love.

[joreth]

I vaguely remember all those Greek love style names as well from my own psych days, and I have a fuzzy memory of them not conflicting either. It's almost as if you could take one of the combos from the Triangle & give it one of the Greek names (not a perfect match). But the only people I ever hear refer to those anymore are pagan polys. Unfortunately, I sold back all my old textbooks to buy the next year's text books, so I have none of my old resources anymore.

All the current research that I've read used regular English names, and chose 2, maybe 3, different types of love to study, and that simply does not match how I feel for the various people in my life. Things that they do are: don't define "love" or "romantic love" at all, leaving me to ask "well, does it count when X?"; choose only 2 types of love and define them in such a way that I can't answer the questions because my relationships do not fit in either/or; choose 2 types of love and 2 types of relationship styles where I don't fit into a category because the relationship style doesn't correlate with the definition of love given (i.e. attaching live-in status with strength of feelings); conflating sex with love and/or using the terms interchangeably; assuming monogamy as a default even when not specifically studying monogamy; specifically studying monogamous people. I'm sure there are more, but those are the problems I run into most often.

Whenever someone brings some new relationship study to my attention, it seems as though my reaction to it is always "if they had asked ME, I bet their findings would be different" or "I wonder how this would be different if they had studied the poly community instead". Which means that I think these researchers are all asking the wrong questions and not defining things like love in a way that matches how they're used in practice. Like that so-called "divorce gene" study (which is not what the researchers called it at all, that's what the media called it). When they found that people who had some extra of a particular type of gene had a tendency to have either lower or higher of relationship satisfaction and a pattern of either shorter or longer relationships and/or fewer or higher relationship partners in their past (I can't remember if it's having too many copies of the gene or too few), I wondered how poly people would test.

That particular gene has been known for some time to be associated with autism, specifically with their difficulty in connecting to other people. The ones who had lower satisfaction, shorter relationships, and more partners were being touted as the result of people not being able to connect to their partners. But I bet money that if they tested poly people, the results would differ. I bet that they would find one of two things: either polys would also have too many copies (assuming that's the trend for those who have larger numbers of partners/lower satisfaction) but wouldn't report lower satisfaction levels because the monos they tested were actually non-monogamists of some stripe who didn't know about poly, didn't understand themselves, and/or couldn't find others like them and so were forced to live in a mono world that didn't fit them; or they would find polys, even with their higher numbers of partners, also had the fewer copies of the genes, showing that polyamory is all ABOUT connection, and being connected to someone has little or a more complicated relationship with number of partners.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Also, poly people don't necessarily have a higher number of partners. I think I'm still below average for my age and culture. I tended to be, whether comparing myself to poly or to mono people that I knew. Most of the time I've been in relationships I have had more than one partner at a time, but I still haven't had many partners total.

[joreth]

That does seem to be my observation as well, and a point I make when addressing the STD issue (more partners = higher risk, well poly ppl don't have more partners so there!)

Research vs Experience

[ewen]

If I understand your position correctly you're saying "this explanation (viz the diagram) is the best explanation I have so far for what I feel", irrespective of it having been "discredited" (ie, other people don't think it works for them). Which I think is both a perfectly reasonable position to take, and sufficient in itself. From what you've said here and elsewhere I'd guess if you found another diagram that Explained What You Experienced Better you'd adopt that. Which is (at least analogous to) Science. (To my view Science is a series of "best explanation we have for now", tested against whatever we have to test it against, and discarded when the explanation fails to fit reality as well as some other explanation.)

It seems to me that at some level the other people you talk about are doing the same thing about their experiences. In many of those cases it seems that it'd be helpful if they were more open to listening to alternative points of view (also Science!) and consider whether what they see as evidence could be explained in some other way (eg, confirmation bias: one tends to remember the instances when it works out). But without another explanation that "works better" (for them and/or the majority) I think it's reasonable for them to hang on to the "best explanation they have" until they find something better. It'd probably be easier to respect that point of view if they were more literal about saying "this is the best explanation I have so far" (aka Science) rather than insisting it was the Literal One True Truth Forever. But that's mostly a matter of presentation.

Finally I think "valid" is probably not the ideal word for the concept that you're trying to express, about feelings. Particularly since there's various fields of counselling which repeatedly state that "all feelings are valid" (as in, you're entitled to experience them in yourself, they're legitimate feelings). Obviously this is a semantic argument. But without common meanings of words, communication is difficult if not impossible. Sadly I can't think of a better word at present (all the others that come to mind are also too pejorative -- which to my mind "valid", or the lack thereof, is as well).

Ewen

Re: Research vs Experience

[joreth]

Yes, your summary is a correct understanding of my position. I mainly needed to work out for myself that, when I say "your research can't tell me that what I feel isn't real!", I didn't mean it in the sense of those reality-is-subjective types, who use the "works for me" or "my Truth" to justify having totally bonkers ideas that don't match reality at all. I knew what I meant, but I wasn't expressing it well because I was angry at someone telling me that I was "wrong" about my own feelings and that I needed more instruction on how Science (TM) worked, and that this pompous asshole was the one to instruct me.