Dodo bird verdict

The conjecture was introduced by Saul Rosenzweig in 1936, drawing on imagery from Lewis Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but only came into prominence with the emergence of new research evidence in the 1970s.

The Dodo bird verdict terminology was coined by Saul Rosenzweig in 1936 to illustrate the notion that all therapies are equally effective.

In the case of psychotherapies, Rosenzweig argued that common factors were more important than specific technical differences, so that (on the Dodo bird conjecture) all therapies are winners; they all produce equally effective outcomes.

Supporters of the Dodo bird verdict contend that all psychotherapies are equivalent because of "common factors" that are shared in all treatments (i.e. having a relationship with a therapist who is warm, respectful, and has high expectations for client success).

Najavits and Strupp (1994) demonstrated that a positive, warm, caring, and genuine therapist generated statistically significant differences in patient outcome.

[17] Specific components of therapy are concluded to be relatively frivolous when compared with the more profound and directly patient affecting common factors.

[22] The identified common factors were categorized into five main groups: client characteristics, therapist qualities, change processes, treatment structures and relationship elements.

Examples of some of the common factors included within these broad categories are persuasion, a healing setting, engagement, the use of rituals and techniques, suggestion, and emotional learning.

Wampold et al. 2009, suggests that people need to "accept the importance of the alliance and therapists and remain committed to developing and improving treatments.

[33][34][35] One challenge to the opposition, however, is that some studies were conducted with waiting lists or against medication and criticism can arise as the therapeutic relationship is known to be a factor which influences outcomes.

Humanistic therapies are also notably difficult to examine due to having less measurable factors that do not fare well under randomised controlled trials.

[30] ESTs are developed from multiple control trial tests to evaluate which therapies yield the best results for specific disorders.

[30][44] According to the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists and therapists have an obligation to avoid harming their clients in any way.

[48][49] Studies have shown that individuals exhibited negative responses to treatment in some substance abuse work,[44] some types of grief therapy,[47][50] and certain therapeutic techniques with trauma and PTSD patients.

[48][53][54][55] The emerging evidence to the effect that there are possibly harmful psychotherapies is not only contradictory to the "all therapies are equal" stance of the Dodo bird verdict, but may also point out problems implicating the APA's Code of Ethics.

For example, many researchers are said to "have an agenda" when conducting meta-analyses, cherry-picking experiments they want to use in their study in order to produce the results they want.

When this flawed experiment was removed from the analysis, the effect size was not statistically significant for the use of CBT over RT in panic disorder therapy.

Against this research, in support of the anti-Dodo bird verdict, Chambless (2002) stated that "errors in data analysis, exclusion of research on many types of clients, faulty generalization to comparisons between therapies that have never been made, and erroneous sorts of treatments for all sorts of problems can be assumed to represent the difference between any two types of treatment for a given problem.

Although both sides are trying to improve psychology in their respective ways, the disagreement about and lack of consistent evidence for the Dodo bird verdict may in fact be the cause of increased public doubt about the field.

For example, if the Dodo bird verdict is thought to be true regarding different psychotherapies, then many clinicians would feel free to use any therapy they see fit to employ.

However, if the Dodo bird verdict is proven to be false, then clinicians would likely have to use empirically supported therapies when treating their clients.

Those believing in a medical model of mental illness and cure see the Dodo bird verdict as necessarily untrue – even absurd – whatever the evidence supporting it.

[10] Those who see therapy as context-based – as relying on a shared frame of reference or context between client and therapist for optimum results[2] – will almost equally automatically welcome the Dodo bird verdict.