Inadvertent cueing: all teachers and communication partners are susceptible, but facilitators most of all
Your teacher asks:
“Was government corruption the only cause of the Russian Revolution?”
Your conversation partner asks:
“What do you think of Noam Chomsky? Is he a wise sage, an unreliable egotist, or a combination of both?”
Even if you know nothing about the Russian Revolution or Noam Chomsky, you could probably still guess the expected answers to these questions.
Based on the many discussions and articles on this site of all the ways in which facilitators can unwittingly cue their students, readers might conclude that we’re singling out facilitators in particular and claiming there’s something about being a facilitator that makes a person especially prone to cueing another person and influencing their responses. But inadvertent cueing is part of being human. And all of us—whether we’re teachers or merely ordinary conversation partners, are susceptible to cueing our listeners, however unwittingly, about which responses we think are appropriate. Just like facilitators (who act as both teachers and conversation partners), we’re all prone to signal to our listeners towards what we think of as the correct responses, or at least the responses we want to hear.
There are at least two reasons why this happens routinely and is difficult to suppress. First, even when we’re not playing a conversational or teaching role, we tend to react automatically to correct/desired vs. incorrect/undesired answers. The former keep us relaxed and satisfied; the latter do the opposite. And as the person we’re observing approaches the right or wrong answer, our bodies react in ways that can cue that person (however subconsciously) that they’re getting warmer or colder.
Second, more consciously, we generally want our students to succeed at the tasks we give them, and our conversational partners to agree with and affirm what we’re saying. We all want the discussion or lesson to progress rather than get mired in disagreement or confusion. And in rooting for the people we’re interacting with to succeed or to provide certain responses, we often supplement our automatic reactions to right vs. wrong answers by inadvertently cueing our audience in other ways—especially when it comes to tasks or responses that we ourselves are prompting them to perform.
But first, what are these cues and why are they so powerful? One of the most famous experiments illustrating the nature and power of cues involved a horse rather than a human. The horse was Clever Hans, one of several horses in the course of human history that seemed to be able to tap out answers to math problems and other prompts in response to the trainer’s unwitting body language cues. As Pfungst, who researched Clever Hans, wrote:
As soon as the experimenter had given a problem to the horse, he, involuntarily, bent his head and trunk slightly forward and the horse would then put the right foot forward and begin to tap, without, however, returning it each time to its original position. As soon as the desired number of taps was given, the questioner would make a slight upward jerk of the head. Thereupon the horse would immediately swing his foot in a wide circle, bringing it back to its original position…Now after Hans had ceased tapping, the questioner would raise his head and trunk to their normal position. (Pfungst, 1911).
(For more on Clever Hans, see Janyce’s post).
But the less-well known of Pungst’s Clever Hans experiments involved a human in place of a horse: namely, Pfungst himself. In this experiment, Pfungst, asked his participants to stand on his right and think "with a high degree of concentration" about a particular number while Pfungst tapped out the answer with his right hand. Pfungst iterated this experiment with 25 people from a range of ages and backgrounds. In all but two, he observed "a sudden slight upward jerk of the head" when reaching the final tap, a jerk that appeared to involve:
The release of muscular tension which occurs with the cessation of psychic tension, tends to bring about that position of the head (and body) which, at the time, represents the slightest amount of muscular strain.
Pfungst adds that “these movements seldom were pronounced enough to be compared to motion through a distance of one millimeter,” and yet were still perceptible to him. All but two of his participants, it seemed, were subconsciously “willing” him to get the correct answer.
In Nonconscious Movements, as I discussed in an earlier post, Herman Spitz devotes an entire chapter to scientific studies more rigorous than Pfungst’s. These involved instruments designed to measure nonconscious head, neck, and hand movements, using mechanical tools like ball bearings (to pick up movement directly) and galvanometers and electrodes (to measure the electrical activity of muscles). Taking this a step further, Kezuka (1997) used rods, ribbons, and electromyography (measurements of electrical activity in muscles) (see Janyce’s post for details) to study the movements of actual facilitators while they facilitated. These experiments consistently detected movements of which the subjects who made them were completely unaware, but which could serve to subconsciously cue others—be they horses, magicians, or individuals subjected to FC.
Besides these, there are facial expressions and eye movements. With fleeting, involuntary gazes, someone can betray to a magician the location of a hidden object, or to a student the location of the correct answer. Facial expressions, however subconscious and micro, can betray how satisfied we are with a student’s response. I’ve been told by friends that my face is quite transparent (particularly my eyes), and by students, as they start responding to a discussion question that I intended to be entirely open-ended and pressure-free, that they can tell from my face that they must be off track. I wish I didn’t do this.
Perhaps more potentially under conscious control, there’s the intonation and wording of our questions, which, in the case of choice questions and yes-no questions (like those with which I opened this post), can completely give away the answers. Here’s a breakdown of how it can work:
With choice questions, people tend, inadvertently, to put (what they consider to be) the correct answer last, and to lower their pitch more dramatically when pronouncing this answer than they would in cases where the last choice isn’t definitively correct:
“Is this an arithmetic series or a geometric one?”
“Did soldiers mostly sleep in the woods, or in the tunnel?”
I find myself inclined to do this all the time, and, when I catch myself, I try to give equal time in last position to the incorrect answer. This, for better or for worse, has sometimes thrown my students for a loop.
Beyond intonation and positioning, there’s wording. Particularly when there can be more than two choices, one can select the alternative choices, and choose wording for the best choice, such that the latter appears to strike a happy medium in between the extremes:
“Does free trade help all countries, hurt all countries, or help some countries and hurt others?”
“Does the world have fewer than 5000 languages, more than 10,000 languages, or between 5000 and 10,000 languages?”
With yes-no questions, there are also several ways to (inadvertently) cue correct responses. One can (inadvertently) signal that the answer is “no” by (inadvertently) using skeptical intonation, or by (inadvertently) including and emphasizing various extra words that suggest that the “yes” answer is problematic: e.g., unlikely, overly exclusive, overly simplistic, or overly extreme. The various possibilities include words that express skepticism, like “really” and ”actually”; words that minimize things or rule them out, like “only” and ”just”; words that express simplicity, like “as simple as”; and words that express extremes, like “necessarily,” “always,” “never,” and “no.” Here are some examples:
“Are crystals actually living things?”
“Are alkali environments the only environments that could have supported early life?”
“Is genetics as simple as each gene mapping onto one specific trait?”
“Are insects necessarily land animals?”
“Do supernovas always create black holes?”
“Are there no instances of cross-breeding between species in the wild?”
“Is it never the case that lionesses fight each other?”
We can add to the effect if we put a “but” at the beginning of the sentence: “But are insects necessarily land animals?” The expected answer is clearly—even to someone who knows nothing about insects—a resounding “NO.”
Meanwhile, one can (inadvertently) signal that the answer is “yes” by using but de-emphasizing any “really’s” or “actually’s” and (inadvertently) using certain rhetorically flavored “helping verbs.” These include negated auxiliaries like “wasn’t,” “didn’t,” and “hasn’t” and certain modal words, like “might” and “could”:
“Didn't wooly mammoths go extinct a long time ago?”
“Aren’t there built-in constitutional protections against tyranny?”
“Could it be that there’s actually no such thing as phlogiston?”
Again, I try hard to avoid all this, but it requires constant vigilance. Far easier is avoiding choice questions and yes-no questions entirely, whenever possible. Of course, given how easy it is to elicit correct answers from such questions, we’re probably all subconsciously conditioned to ask them. Yet another temptation to resist.
Open-ended questions, like “What caused the great depression?”, though harder to cue, allow the possibility of shaping the answer in a different way: interrupting the person before they’re done and shaping their words into the correct answer. I had a Russian professor who did this regularly: he’d call on one of us to translate a sentence into Russian, and as soon as the student got out the first couple of syllables—no matter what they were—he’d finish the translation for her. He probably honestly thought the student had gotten it right, but didn’t have the patience to wait.
Of course, sometimes we perform one or more of the above response-shaping strategies on purpose, as with rhetorical questions or deliberate interruptions—for example when we’re consciously trying to persuade someone of something or to lead the conversation in a certain direction. Indeed, deliberate answer-shaping happens even in teaching, namely, when we’re still introducing new material: at that point, it’s reasonable to use rhetoric to guide students in particular directions, or, at times, to interrupt them when they get off track.
Of course, one’s students and fellow conversational partners also play a role. And they, too, can be deliberate and conscious about cues. Even if they aren’t already certain of—or, worse, actually disagree with—the clearly cued answer, they may feel pressure to provide it, especially with questions that are loaded with rhetorical phrases and suggestive intonations. Consider how uncooperative it would sound if a student answers “Could it be that there’s actually no such thing as phlogiston?” with a simple “No.” (A simple “Yes,” in contrast, sounds perfectly OK).
But ultimately teachers must fade all cues. And this, of course, means avoiding yes-no and choice questions, not interrupting, listening closely to make sure we’re hearing what people are actually saying and not just what we want to hear, and keeping our eyes on our students, not on the targeted answers. Harder but still important is keeping a poker face and staying relaxed, even when students get off track. Since it’s probably impossible to eliminate all cues when we’re actively guiding learning and practice, it’s best to transition students to independent practice as soon as possible—and stay out of auditory and visual cueing range until they’re done producing their answers and are ready for feedback.
Oddly, there seem to be very few people writing about the cueing phenomenon in educational settings. I’ve had to base what I write about this largely on my own personal training, experiences, and intuitions as a teacher and a linguist. The only people I’ve seen broach the issue are the ABA folks, specifically Sundberg and Partington (2013). Their advice applies to a more basic sort of choice question: holding up two physical items for students to choose between. Here, there’s a tendency to inadvertently hold the correct choice closer and more directly in the child’s line of sight or reach, and to look at the correct choice. Sundberg and Partington advise:
Once the child has learned to touch one of two items held in front of him, training should be given on learning to touch one of two items placed on a table. The procedure is similar, but this type of trial is often a little more difficult for a child because it eliminates most inadvertent prompts (e.g., slight position, movement, or eye prompts). [Italics added].
These cautions about positioning, movement, and eye prompts, however, is applicable to all of us—especially when we act as teachers and communication partners. But facilitators, who see themselves as both (they teach the motor skills necessary to point to letters to spell words”), are especially prone to these and other cues—even if they think they’ve studiously avoided them.
First, unlike typical teacher or communication partner, all their cues take place while the FCed person is producing their responses. This makes facilitator cues much more influential than cues that take place before someone produces a response. Second, as Spitz discusses in Nonconscious Movements, prolonged muscle tension—which arises when we hold something up for a while, whether an arm or a letterboard—can reduce the facilitator’s sensitivity to the feedback she gets from her muscles. This, in turn, reduces her sensitivity to any movements she might make—including movements that result, say, in the target letter moving closer to the FCed person’s extended figure, or vice versa. Further distracting facilitators away from their nonconscious movements is their intense concentration on the letterboard and the FCed person’s extended index finger, and the intense concentration required, in the longer of the typed-out messages, to keep track of long letter sequences.
All this makes facilitator cueing, compared with regular teacher/conversation partner cueing:
more powerful, and
much harder to avoid.
The only people who’ve been able to suppress cues, or so the available evidence suggests, are those who have “failed” at facilitation. “Unsuccessful” facilitators include some of the parents of kids who are subjected to FC: people who were perhaps not otherwise inclined to become facilitators. Nonetheless, given how prone we all are to cueing, it could easily be that most of us, were we to try our hands at facilitation, would fall far short of suppressing the cues that potentially direct messages—no matter how hard we tried. Indeed, that’s consistent with what Burgess et al. (1998) found when they trained forty students in FC using a commercially available facilitator training video. 89% of these students were subsequently able to facilitate successfully, not realizing that they were cueing the individuals they were designed to facilitate (actors who were posing as developmentally disabled and unable to speak).
But perhaps what matters most of all is one final difference between facilitator cueing and that of ordinary teachers and communication partners. Most students and listeners can readily override the cues and speak over the interruptions. One can insist, for example, that “Yes, government corruption was the only cause of the Russian Revolution” or “Noam Chomsky is a wise sage and in no way an unreliable egotist.” A minimal speaker who is subjected to FC, in stark contrast, has much less power to communicate their actual thoughts and feelings—however hard they might try.
REFERENCES
Burgess, C.A., Kirsch, I., Shane, H., Niederauer, K.L., Graham, S.M., Bacon, A. (January 1998). Facilitated Communication as an Ideomotor Response. Psychological Science, 9(1), 71-74. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40063250
Kezuka, E. (1997). The role of touch in facilitated communication. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 27, 571-593. DOI: 10.1023/A:1025882127478
Pfungst, O. (1911). Clever Hans (the horse of Mr. von Osten): A contribution to experimental animal and human psychology (C. L. Rahn, Trans.). Henry Holt. (Originally published in German, 1907) doi:10.5962/bhl.title.56164 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33936/33936-h/33936-h.htm#CHAPTER_IV
Spitz, H. (1997). Nonconscious Movements: From mystical messages to Facilitated Communication. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Sundberg, M. L., & Partington, J. W. (2013). Teaching language to children with autism and other developmental disabilities. Behavior Analysts.
