Today’s blog post is a continued discussion of cueing and other factors that lead facilitators to covertly and, perhaps at times, overtly influence letter selection while using facilitator-dependent techniques like Facilitated Communication (FC), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), and Spelling 2 Communicate (S2C).

Facilitators reported “feeling” muscles movements/responses to yes/no questions from their partner (confederate) in this study, even though the partner was given instructions (in the presence of the facilitators) not to move. In addition, the partner received no information through headphones, and could not have known answers to the questions. Only facilitators in the study heard the questions. (Wegner et al., 2003)

As covered in prior blog posts (links below), the issue of facilitator cueing is more complicated than many people realized when FC was first popularized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Critics of FC recognized it almost immediately as a form of automatic writing, akin to using a planchette and Ouija board, and theorized that the ideomotor response, or small non-conscious muscle movements, could account for at least some facilitator cueing during letter selection. As controlled studies of FC were conducted, other possible explanations for facilitator cueing began to emerge, including resistance to testing (leading to poor self-awareness on the parts of facilitators), facilitator inattentiveness due to multitasking, and relaxed self-editing. (See blog post here). As suggested in a 2003 article titled Clever Hands: Uncontrolled Intelligence in Facilitated Communication, the ideomotor response may only play a small role in initiating movement during FC and cannot account for the in-depth “communications” or the long-term cueing exhibited by facilitators as they either hold onto their client’s hand, wrist, elbow, or shoulder during letter selection, or hold a letter board in the air while the person extends a finger toward it.

The Clever Hands (Wegner et al.) study is one of the few I’ve read that is entirely focused on facilitator beliefs and behaviors and, as a former facilitator, I find this article particularly helpful in understanding how facilitators can both provide cues (sometimes without fully realizing it) and convince themselves that someone else is producing the messages, all the while controlling the letters selected and the topics “discussed” during FC sessions.

In the study, Wegner et al. posit that facilitator belief in FC may play a larger role than researchers once recognized by (psychologically) priming facilitators to make FC “work.” This may, in part, be due to the internal pressure or responsibility facilitators feel to produce messages that reflect ideas and attitudes that are respectful—and not an affront—to those being facilitated. This (perhaps unwittingly) causes them to respond in ways that favor producing “correct” answers. In addition, participants in the study who believed FC could work were more likely to self-report “success” in feeling the other person’s muscle movements (even when the other person was instructed—in their presence—not to move). And, as documented in other controlled studies, the facilitators tended to attribute certain responses to their (silent) counterparts in the study that were based on information they (the facilitators)—and not their partners—had received during the trials.

*A facilitator “supporting” their student at the wrist. (from a Syracuse training video, 1991)*

The study explored authorship confusion by focusing on:

(a) how facilitators’ intelligence exerts uncontrolled effects on their movements, (e.g., how, for example, facilitators respond to information that they know or think they know about their clients’ lives and/or the topics being discussed during an FC session by—often covertly—cueing the correct answers)

(b) how facilitators’ beliefs in the ability of the client to communicate leads them to attribute these intelligent movements to the client. (p. 5)

The study also sought to answer the questions:

Why would a person serving as facilitator fail to recognize his or her own active contribution?
How does such projection of one’s own intelligent responses to another person occur? (p. 6)

Like researchers before them, Wegner et al. categorized FC as within the family of motor automatisms or “actions that are not experienced as consciously willed.” (p. 6) In other words, facilitators’ motor movements can affect letter selection without an accompanying sensation (known as “proprioception”) that they are physically participating in the activity. Facilitators feel like they are not influencing letter selection (even when they are) and this lack of proprioceptive feedback plays a part in strengthening their belief that the FC-generated messages originate not from themselves, but from the other person. Facilitators may also be influenced by “uncontrolled intelligence,” or “the production of intelligent actions that occurs without conscious intention.” For example, a facilitator who has firsthand information about a client’s activities and circumstances may be “primed” to elaborate on that information during an FC session even without an intention to do so. As the Wegner et al. study revealed, if facilitators knew (or thought they knew) the correct answer to simple questions, they couldn’t help but give the correct answer, even when explicitly instructed to give random (and sometimes incorrect) answers.

To explore these ideas further, Wegner et al. set up a series of experiments first to test whether (prior) knowledge informs people’s actions and then to test whether those actions (e.g., of the facilitator) can be projected onto another person (e.g., the facilitator’s communication partner). You can find a detailed description of the 5 experiments in this study in the Controlled Studies section of this website. However, if you have not read the study in full, I strongly suggest you do so.

Here are some take-aways from the experiments:

The participants/facilitators tended to correctly answer easy yes-or-no questions even when instructed to answer questions randomly.
The participants/facilitators tended to overestimate their ability to overcome this tendency to produce correct answers. Monetary incentives/manipulation seemed to distort their perception that “correctness had been avoided” (even when they performed poorly on the task).
Participant/facilitators incorrectly attributed responses to their communication partners when hearing yes/no questions through headphones and tasked with detecting unconscious muscle movements from the communicator (whose fingers were placed on top of the facilitator’s fingers positioned on a keyboard). Or, as Wegner et al. wrote: “Participants felt that the communicator had “exerted a considerable percentage of influence on the answers that were provided…far more than the actual level (which was zero because the communicator heard no questions).” (p. 12)
Participants/facilitators who believed in the plausibility of authorship (via FC) experienced an amplification in their belief that messages were generated by the other person (e.g., someone other than themselves)
Participants who attempted to answer empathically for their client (e.g., when not facilitating) were more likely to offer correct answers during FC and attribute them to the client.

Wegner et al.’s study raises two issue that I’ve rarely seen discussed elsewhere:

facilitator belief that they are inactive during facilitation (they are not) and how this effects their perception that their own thoughts or muscle movements accompany rather than cause the action(s) of selecting letters on a letter board. They write: “Facilitators in FC who help to ‘finish’ the words that a communicator has ‘started,’ for example, might then be inclined to attribute the words to the communicator.” (p. 17)
authorship confusion arising when facilitators interpret their behaviors as collaborating with the other or, as Wegner et al. write: “…authorship for any individual’s action is lost in the melding of individuals into the group.” (p. 17)

Wegner et al., at the end of their study, call for further research into “the oddly framed interaction that occurs in FC” between facilitators and their clients or loved ones. (p. 17) And, while I’m not sure further authorship studies are needed to prove FC is not an independent form of communication (certainly “traditional” touch-based FC has been thoroughly debunked), if S2C and RPM proponents want to step up and test their techniques under reliably controlled conditions, I can see the benefit of that. I think it would be fascinating to see more facilitator-focused studies like this one that explore how facilitator behaviors and mindsets (e.g., priming) aid in their deep devotion to facilitator-dependent techniques that, by design, do not and cannot lead to independent communication.

Note: A reader sent me a link to this article published on the I-ASC blog called “Prompt Your Heart Out!” It seems blatant facilitator cueing is now widely accepted in the FC community. Watch for a review of this article in an upcoming blog post.

References and Recommended Reading:

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

Dillon, K. (1993). Facilitated Communication, Autism, and Ouija. The Skeptical Inquirer, 17 (3), 281-287.

Greene, G. (1994). “Facilitated Communication - Mental Miracle or Sleight of Hand?” Skeptic Magazine.

Hall, G.A. (1993). Facilitator control as automatic behavior: A verbal behavior analysis. Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 11, 89-97.

Heinzen, T., Lilienfeld, S., Nolan, S.A. (2015). The Horse That Won’t Go Away: Clever Hans, Facilitated Communication, and the Need for Clear Thinking. McMillan Learning ISBN 978-1464145742

Hyman, Ray. (2003, August 26). How people are fooled by ideomotor action. Quackwatch.

Kezuka E. (October 1997). The Role of Touch in Facilitated Communication. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 27(5), 571-593. DOI: 10.1023/A:1025882127478

Spitz, H. (1997). Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication. Routledge. ISBN 978-0805825633

Wegner, D.M., Fuller, V.A., and Sparrow, B. (2003, July). Clever hands: uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 85 (1), 5-19. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.1.5

Select Blog Posts on the Topic of Cueing:

ABA vs. FC: What ABA knows about autism, instructional needs, and the harmful effects of inadvertent cues

An FC Primer

Clever Hans: It’s Not About the Horse

How Effectively Does the Ideomotor Response Explain Cueing in Facilitated Communication? - Part 1

How Effectively Does the Ideomotor Response Explain Cueing in Facilitated Communication? - Part 2

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part 1

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part II

The under-appreciated power of involuntary muscle movements—A review of Herman Spitz