Keith Ablow's pronoun usage doesn't indicate narcissism
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David Bauder, "Fox's Ablow regularly 'diagnoses' Obama", AP 11/6/2014:
Over the years, psychiatrist Keith Ablow has diagnosed President Barack Obama as a man with abandonment issues dating back to his upbringing, a person with a victim's mentality who secretly identifies more with Africa than America.
There's no evidence that Ablow has actually treated the president. Yet the Fox News Channel analyst freely mixes psychiatric assessments with political criticism, a unique twist in the realm of cable news commentary that some medical colleagues find unethical.
As far as I can tell, Mr. Ablow is not among the many commentators who have accused President Obama of narcissistic over-use of first-person singular pronouns (see "Buzzfeed linguistics, presidential pronouns, and narcissism revisited", 10/21/2014, for a sample). But the issue of narcissism — in Mr. Ablow's personality — comes up in the AP article:
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, said Ablow seems more interested in entertaining than in reflecting well on his profession. Lieberman is past president of the American Psychiatric Association, which discourages members from speculating on psychiatric characteristics of non-patients.
"It is shameful and unfortunate that he is given a platform by Fox News or any other media organization," Lieberman said. "Basically he is a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise."
If I believed that pronoun usage had anything to do with narcissism, I might point out that Mr. Ablow's response to this article ("Statement from Dr. Keith Ablow in Response to Biased National Wire Stories", Everything PR 11/7/2014) contains 12 first-person singular pronouns in 258 words for a rate of 4.65%. This is more than four times the rate of FPSP usage in President Obama's speech about the killing of Osama bin Laden, about which Mr. Ablow's Fox News colleague Charles Krauthammer said ("Another casual lie from Charles Krauthammer", 9/16/2014)
Obama is clearly a narcissist […] I mean, count the number of times he uses the word I in any speech, and compare that to any other president. Remember when he announced the killing of bin Laden? That speech I believe had 29 references to I […]
(In fact that speech contained 10 I's and 15 FPSPs in 1396 words, for a rate of 1.1%.)
But I don't believe that FPSP usage has any useful statistical relationship to narcissistic personality traits, because I've read Angela L. Carey, Melanie Brucks, Albrech C.P. Küfner, Nichlas S. Holtzman, Fenne große Deters, Metija D. Back, M. Brent Donnellan, James W. Pennbaker, and Matthias R. Mehl, "Narcissism and the Use of Personal Pronouns Revisited", in press, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which tells us that in
a large-scale (N = 4,811), multi-site (five labs), multi-measure (five narcissism measures) and dual-language (English and German) investigation […] narcissism was unrelated to use of first-person singular pronouns […]
So I won't mention the exceptionally high rate of first-person singular pronoun usage in Mr. Ablow's statement.
Guy said,
November 8, 2014 @ 6:34 pm
"It is shameful and unfortunate that he is given a platform by Fox News or any other media organization," Lieberman said. "Basically he is a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise."
I agree with the sentiment, and I get that Lieberman almost certainly didn't intend "narcissistic" to be interpreted as or equivocated with a medical term of art in this context – whereas Ablow gets a platform precisely for the purpose of such misinterpretation and equivocation. But it is kind of awkward to leave such an obvious avenue for dismissing him as a hypocrite. This is why I think I would want all my correspondences with journalists to be in writing, if I were important enough to be interviewed.
D.O. said,
November 8, 2014 @ 7:28 pm
Prof. Liberman, this is definitely a long way not to say something.
On a psychiatry point, I don't see a problem of someone pointing out relationships between early childhood experiences and developing certain character traits (assuming that they actually exist), but not attempts to give diagnosis based on nothing more than biography.
Jason said,
November 8, 2014 @ 9:24 pm
"Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, said Ablow seems more interested in entertaining than in reflecting well on his profession. Lieberman is past president of the American Psychiatric Association, which discourages members from speculating on psychiatric characteristics of non-patients"
If only there was some kind of professional organisation that Ablow was a member of, some kind of medical regulatory authority, that could sanction a man diagnosing psychiatric conditions from secondhand sources using a methodology with no scientific basis behind it.
Perhaps the same authority that has the power to stop a man whose medical license was suspended for serious misconduct from calling himself "Dr Phil" and purporting to offer psychiatric treatment to vulnerable and gullible people, making them "waive" their right to privacy as part of a entertainment show on TV.
Bob Ladd said,
November 9, 2014 @ 5:47 am
MYL – Cicero would have been proud of you.
nl7 said,
November 9, 2014 @ 3:01 pm
Agreed that the argument is empirically very weak. I think it has traction mainly because a second-term President tends to attract criticism and fatigue, and because the argument feeds into a persistent perception among his opponents that Obama is arrogant.
[(myl) But George F. Will and Stanley Fish began beating the Obama-is-a-narcissist-because-pronouns drum in June of 2009, just a few months into Obama's FIRST term. And other members of the BS commentariat soon joined in.]
Most political leaders will eventually be seen as arrogant by their opponents. Anybody who thinks they have the skill and ability to be President is going to be arrogant, so in that sense it's my opinion that at least in recent decades every President and every serious presidential contender was arrogant relative to the mean (at least all those who wanted to be President from the time the job description included holding the power to unleash nuclear Armageddon). The pronoun analysis is shoddy but it comes to a conclusion that millions of people had already formed, which is why bad methods gain purchase: this presentation sounds better than simply stating a personal opinion.
This sort of pseudo-scientific political commentary is scarcely unusual. Many opponents of recent presidents tried to use personality analysis to explain policy prescriptions and personal flaws. I recall purported psychological analysis that Bush's alcoholism and Christian AA treatment led him to waging a holy war in the Middle East, that Clinton was a sociopath who had people murdered, and the idea that LBJ blindly ignored Vietnam War violence because he wanted a New Deal or a Marshall Plan for Asia. When Goldwater ran for President, a magazine famously sent out a poll to thousands of psychiatrists and with something like a 20% response rate got over a thousand to say that Goldwater was too mentally unstable or unfit to be President. We can keep pointing out the weak political arguments as they come, but we'll never see an end to the demand for new ones.
[(myl) Yes, BS commentators reliably generate BS analyses.]
Bob Davis said,
November 9, 2014 @ 7:54 pm
Why bother with psychological analysis when Newt Gingrich has already given us his "truth": "What if Obama is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
Mark Stephenson said,
November 9, 2014 @ 9:09 pm
Jason said, "Perhaps the same authority that has the power to stop a man whose medical license was suspended for serious misconduct from calling himself 'Dr Phil'".
I don't see anything in the Wikipedia article to support this allegation: the nearest thing is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_McGraw#Texas_State_Board_of_Examiners_of_Psychologists
Incidentally, I don't watch his show, and I have no particular reason to defend him, except concern for the truth.
Joseph Fineman said,
November 9, 2014 @ 9:37 pm
A notorious, massive political abuse of psychiatry occurred in the US presidential campaign of 1964, when a magazine called _Fact_ published an article based on the responses of some thousands of psychiatrists on the question whether Barry Goldwater was mentally fit to be president. I believe that that is still considered to be a breach of professional ethics.
Jason said,
November 9, 2014 @ 10:35 pm
@ Mark Stephenson:
"Dr. Phil McGrawA complaint has been filed against Dr. Phil with the California Board of Psychology.
The complaint reportedly accuses Dr. Phil McGraw of practicing without a license when he visited Britney Spears at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after her meltdown earlier this month, according to TMZ.com.
Dr. Phil is also accused of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The complaint alleges Dr. Phil practiced clinical psychology without a license and further violated doctor-patient privilege by discussing the pop star’s case with the media.
Dr. Phil has never been licensed to practice in California, and he is no longer licensed in his home state of Texas.
McGraw failed to complete the conditions imposed as disciplinary sanctions by the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in 1989.
At that time a former therapy client had filed a complaint against him, claiming their relationship was inappropriate.
McGraw later admitted giving her a job but denied touching her.
Soon after he was officially reprimanded, McGraw closed his private practice."
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/01/18/dr-phil-charged-with-practicing-without-a-license-in-britney-spears-stunt/
So the web is a little more tangled that I initially thought, but it appears that:
The Texas board required him to undergo "supervised practice" in 1989, declining to take a position on the sexual abuse allegations levelled at him by a former patient (reported in the National Enquirer in one of their factual investigations) and finding him guilty of merely an inappropriate relationship (not in serious dispute: he hired the former patient and began bullying her and continuing to "life-coach" her in ways that could be said to be crossing the line between therapist and patient).
He declined to comply with this order, instead ceasing practice altogether and getting into the jury-selection consultancy game, essentially suspending himself.
He relinquished his license to practice in 2006. His official position is that what he offers on his show is "entertainment", not therapy.
I find Dr Phil a very shady character indeed.
J. W. Brewer said,
November 10, 2014 @ 11:21 am
Referring to someone as "Dr. so-and-so" means, I think, that that person has a doctorate of some sort, not necessarily that that person currently holds a particular professional license for which a particular sort of doctorate might be a prerequisite. Certainly if one is a patient in a teaching hospital and is so unlucky to find oneself used as a guinea pig for residents (who are not necessarily yet licensed by the state to practice medicine) to be trained on, the residents have often been programmed to introduce themselves as "Dr. So-and-So." I think referring to *oneself* as "Dr. So-and-So" comes across as arrogant, but at least in the U.S. the medical profession afaik intentionally socializes its new recruits into arrogance, if they hadn't already self-selected on that basis.
Kivi Shapiro said,
November 12, 2014 @ 9:49 pm
"…I…I…I…I…I've…I…."
I see what you did there.