Date: Feb 24, 2012
David D. Williams- I appreciate you doing this. Do you want
to just start telling me stories?
GG- It does start me thinking back.
I was gathering that you have a notion of a person who faced some decision
points in their life and kind of explored options and put information together
and came up with a decision and moved on for good or for ill. But I couldn’t
find a single instance of that in my life, probably up until six or seven years
ago.
All the major stuff was strictly emotional, emotional
searching for something. Usually related to my father and my relationship with
my father. I was often making decisions with people in which I felt like I was
in relationships with people like my father, dominant male characters. Other
big decisions, such as when to get married had to do with trying to live up to
a model of my brother’s life. My brother is 8 years older. He was a very
accomplished athlete, quite successful as a YMCA executive. A lot of what I
decided I liked was trying to live like he did. So, kind of a
model as an information collector/decision maker. I can’t see that that
happened in my life at all.
The closest I came to that was 6-7 years ago when I got
diagnosed with prostate cancer. There was a PSA test and a biopsy and I was
told it was cancer of a type that could become aggressive. I had at my disposal
all this information on the Internet and blogs, potentially about what to do.
There were three major options- radical surgery, radio
active seeds fired into your prostate, or watchful waiting. If you wait it out,
you’ll die of a heart attack or something. I actually studied all these options
based on survival rate, longevity and got the best research articles. It
essentially came down to an even choice—all research showed that these
three methods were all equal in terms of their cure rates, longevity, and so
forth! I remember going into the urology surgeon with the decision and said, “I
pick the radioactive seeds” because it seemed less gruesome and it involved an
outpatient procedure and it didn’t involve a catheter. The thought of a
catheter was horrible to me. I couldn’t even imagine it. He said, “Sure.” But
he said, “I do a thing with a robot. It’s called a D’Vinci
robot.” It’s a million dollar machine and he sits in a cockpit 10 feet from the
operating table, manipulating these 5 robotic arms. He said he can do the operation in an hour with the robot, three days
on the catheter. Said he had done 350.
I chose it right then because of the prospect of watchful
waiting or firing seeds in there that might take months and leave malignant
cells alive in your prostate. It may not kill all of them. In the long run, I
wanted the darn thing out, even though the research didn’t support my choice.
It just said flip a coin because they’re all equal. I wanted the darn thing out
once I heard how slick it could be taking it out. 3 or 4 guys I know made the
exact same decision, apprised of the same facts. They
wanted it out of their bodies if they could get it out. They, in the end said,
“We want the operation. Just get it out.” We did not want to wake up every
morning wondering whether the cells had escaped the prostate and metastasized
or not.
Three years ago at the faculty meeting where the President
said “We’re disestablishing your college” it was pretty clear that some of the
good things that my colleagues and I had worked for for
20 years were going away. I started feeling a funny pressure in my chest and I
went home and the pressure appeared in my back. I had never felt anything like
that before and I complained about it and Sandy finally said “I’m taking you to
the hospital.” I went to the hospital-- the EKG—we looked at it and said
you’ve got blockage. “You’re having a mild heart attack.” Advised to put in stents
right then, I was scared to death. The research I’ve done on that after the
fact shows that stents, drugs, and bypass surgery are all equal rates of cure
and longevity. But within a couple of hours I was lying awake, watching this
guy stick three stents in my heart. I didn’t collect any information. I didn’t
decide anything. Maybe some hyper-rational person would have said, “Well, let’s
slow down. Let me go back and I’m going to study this whole thing and we will
decide what I want.” I didn’t want to run that risk. The next morning after
that operation while one of these cardiologists was talking to me, my heart
stopped. I fainted. I didn’t know it. When I came to, the room was full
of technicians and nurses and doctors and the cardiologist whacked me on the
chest, starting my heart again. They put a pace-maker
in to not let my heart go below or above about 60 bpm.
No decision making involved in any of that. I was an undeciding
blob entirely in the doctors’ hands.
DDW- So you didn’t have something
that said, “If my heart stops leave me alone, or anything like that?”
GG- No, a living will—that’s more like if you’re a
vegetable.
I look back at going to college or not going to college – in my
day, for people in my social class, going to college was not automatic. My
brother had gone, but nobody else in my family. And I didn’t decide to go to
college, just knew I didn’t want to do physical labor. I didn’t pick a major
for any rational reason. I picked German because my father-in-law, my first
wife’s father, had it as his native language and was one of the first older men
I could be close to, unlike my father. I thought that was a way of getting
closer to him, and it was. Working for Bob Stake led me into the education
business. That was a total accident because I knew a girl from a very early age
who was typing in his department and said these people are looking for a
computer programmer. I was scrubbing floors in restrooms and doctors’ offices
to make money, so I ran over and applied for a computer
programming job.
DDW- So instead of washing floors you learned how to do
programming?
GG- I wasn’t a programmer but figured I could learn real
fast. I took a workshop and in a week I was doing it. A lot of decisions
in my life were escaping powerful dominant male environments that I assumed
were looking down on me and didn’t like me. That had a lot to do with how I
went through graduate school. And my first job with Bob at Urbana lasted only
two years; I think I was running away from an environment where there was
someone that seemed so powerful, so intellectual, and so superior that I imputed
to him the same feelings that I imputed to my father. My father thought I was
going to be a bum. My father told me very late in life that he was so pleased I
hadn’t ended up in jail, which is what he expected would become of me. I ran
away from Urbana to Colorado because there was an environment where I was free
of that kind of pressure. Ken Hopkins was so warm and easy to be with. I think
that, among other things, drew me there. That, and the fact
that my brother lived in Denver at the time. No rationality anywhere
there, David!
DDW- Don’t be defensive about that.
I didn’t expect rationality per se.
GG- (Laughs) I’m not defensive. I paid a lot of money to
figure these things out.
DDW- (Laughs) So was your brother
more like Ken then, and less like your dad?
GG- Exactly.
DDW- It seems from the beginning of
our visit that you have said, “I’m not rational. My life isn’t rational. I’ve
just kind of emotionally fallen into things until I had prostate cancer.” So,
you don’t think of those life kinds of decisions as being forms of evaluation?
GG- Uh, no I don’t, not really. Well, sure, they are
unconscious evaluations at the level of controlling anxiety. That is what
Freudian psychoanalysis is all about. And often the appearance of rationality
or the claim of rationality is just a cover for stuff we don’t really
understand.
DDW- Does it go the other way? Are
the things we claim in educational evaluation any more rational than these
decisions in daily life?
GG- Well, I think this could be relevant to your project or
your goal here. I’m talking about life decisions that involved me primarily,
sometimes other people were involved but they were very personal decisions like
marriage, career, life and death health, the way we’re going to live, stuff
like that. Decisions that involve a large group of people have more of the
character about them that we call evaluation. I think where you have to bring a
group of people along or they are trying to bring you along in a decision that
has ramifications for an entire group that is different. I think there, people
approach something that is a little less unconsciously driven, more public and
therefore more rational.
DDW- Okay, can you convince me? I’m thinking the decisions
your parents made certainly affected a lot of people and so did your decisions
about your operations, being around and influencing people.
GG- Okay, that’s kind of remote. The decisions my parents
made might have had effects on lots of people but they didn’t foresee those
effects when they were making them.
DDW- And you think in the more
public evaluation world we do?
GG- Yeah. Here, suppose you’re in your academic department
and you’re dealing with half a dozen colleagues and you have shared sets of
goals. You want to attract the best students you can. You want to get a healthy
share of outside money, and so on. I think that then people are cognizant of
what their goals are and they try to reach decisions. But my parents had no
idea the things they were doing were going to affect me the way that they did.
My mother thought I was fabulous and could achieve anything in the world and my
father thought I was a punk. (Incidentally, I recommend that situation highly
to anyone because it gives you the confidence you can do anything and the
motivation to prove them wrong.)
DDW- (Laughing) But they could never have done that if they
had planned to. Is that what you’re saying?
GG- They had no idea—I
remember one of the rare times my father talked to me. We were standing in the
drugstore. He worked all day composing for a newspaper as a printer and then
came home at 5:00 and worked at the drugstore til it
closed at 10:00. He saw all these candy and cigar salesmen coming in to sell
their wholesale stuff for us to retail. They all wore white shirts and ties and
went around at their own pace and he told me, “Son, you want to go into sales,
that’s where the money is, in sales.”
When I published my first statistics book in 1970, a couple
of months after it came out, I went to visit my folks back in Nebraska; and I
took a copy of the book and gave it to them. They sort of thumbed through it a
little bit and laid it aside and started talking about something else; and I
realized that just the fact that I had a job and hadn’t screwed up in a major
way, that made them happy. They were satisfied. They didn’t set out to produce
some academic guy or whatever.
DDW- Interesting. How about you, did you pass along that same
legacy or did you have expectations or set goals with your kids?
GG- No, no. I’m thrilled Julie is a
wonderful mother to her children. That is such a great satisfaction. If you see
one of your kids growing up to be a good parent, it really makes you feel like
you did some things right.
DDW- So you’ve talked about the
difference between the prostate cancer story and the previous part of your
life. Did you see a gradual change there or was it abrupt?
GG- That was gradual. That was the
result of my education. Ever since grad school, probably even slightly before,
I’ve been very cynical or critical about people who make decisions without some
modicum of scientific evidence. Come to think of it, I’m sure there are tons of
things that I would have nothing to do with because it hasn’t been established
by empirical evidence. Naturopathic healing, Tarot card
reading – hundreds of things like that.
DDW- So you got that in graduate
school or a little before that?
GG- Yeah, before probably. I
remember I was so eager to get out of college early so I took 3 or 4
correspondence courses and one was in philosophy and I remember studying John
Stuart Mill. I think it is more a matter of intelligence than it is a matter of
education frankly. But I think the education I got certainly strengthened and
reinforced that in me.
DDW- What do you mean it was more a
matter of intelligence?
GG- Well, you don’t have to have gone through courses in
statistics or experimental design to know that the local naturopath doesn’t
know squat about what they’re doing.
DDW- Do you feel like you phased
into that through maturation then? Why didn’t you have that in high school or
grade school?
GG- I think I did have some of this in high school too. I
think just by choice of graduate school where that line of reasoning was so
heavily emphasized made me far more skeptical, perhaps, than I would have been
otherwise.
DDW- It sounds like you’re thinking skepticism is a healthy
and important part of people’s thinking, choosing, that sort of thing?
GG- Yeah, I think so. You ought to interview Ernie House.
He’s over in Australia now. He goes to Australia every winter. I don’t know how
well you know Ernie. He is certainly an important figure in the evaluation
profession. When he retired from CU, he started spending all his time on his
investments. I don’t make a move without checking with him first. He has
parlayed our typical insignificant salaries into several million dollars. He
trades currencies and stocks and spends a few hours every day on his
investments! Talk about somebody who is rational. He’s hyper rational. He had a
heart attack with like 95% blockages. My blockages weren’t that bad, fortunately.
He had 95% blockage and they rushed him in and did a quadruple bypass on him.
He came away from that making lots of comparisons with evaluation and the
medical field. He was so impressed. He was really taken with their abilities.
DDW- This was about the same time
he was critiquing the drug companies?
GG- This was before by several
years.
DDW- I actually did contact him. Bob gave me his name as
well and he tells me he’s writing a book in which he’s reflecting on his
childhood memories.
GG- Yeah, He has been working on a family book since he was
at Colorado. Yeah, it’s his family book. I recruited him to CU in 1985 and I
left in 1986. We have always been close. He shared early drafts of chapters
with me. His father was a taxi driver in Alton Illinois, across the river from
St Louis. His father was in a car accident with the taxi and was killed when
Ernie was about 10 or 11 years old. He’s writing these recollections of his
childhood and is sharing them with me. Over and over in these things, somebody
gets hit and knocked out and comes to. An uncle got knocked out and somebody’s
boxing and they were knocked out. I said all these
people dying and coming back to life in your recollections, like wishing his
father back. For a moment he was really touched and then he pulled himself
together. He is a very cold and compartmentalized person. He has a two-year-old
granddaughter now, first one, and I’ve seen him warm up
for the first time with her.
DDW- He has agreed to visit with me. I’m looking forward to
what he has to say.
GG- Well, he’s very introspective. And should be a good one.
DDW- Have you had about enough for
today?
GG- That’s fine. Do you want to
come back at it later?
DDW- Okay, I’ll send you a copy of what I’ve written down,
if you want to look at it and see if it sparks any thoughts. What I had in mind
was to hear any contrasting views you have about all these issues. If I see
some patterns to it, I’ll propose that and you can tell me “There’s no pattern
there,” and that’s fine. Do you have suggestions on how I should proceed.
GG- No, let me look over what you’ve got first. Clearly I
won’t hold it back if I think I need to say something.
DDW- Yeah, you’re not a shy one ever!
GG- No.
DDW- I guess we can thank both your parents for that?
GG- My mother. She always thought I
was right and could do anything.
DDW- You had her initials so why
not, right?
GG- Right.
Some written comments sent between interviews:
From GG—
1. The role of evaluation in personal decisions.
We rationalist academics really don't like to confront
certain things about real life, one of which is that a fair sized chunk of our
actions and decisions – let's call them that – are determined by
unconscious motives. Each of us knows that many of the people close to us are
driven by unconscious motives but we are pretty sure that we aren't. Major life
choices are more likely to be the result of unconscious motives than trivial
day-to-day choices. The over-arching motive that drives many decisions
(choose a mate, choose a job, even choose a car) has to do with avoidance of
anxiety. The anxiety arises from psychic conflicts: will I be abandoned, will I
be loved, will I lose the love I have, etc.? "Evaluation" of
the type we academics like to talk about comes after the decisions are made at
this unconscious level. It is fair to say that evaluation arises as post-hoc
rationalization of personal decisions. "The unexamined life is not worth
living, but neither is the over-examined one."
2. The role of evaluation in public or group decisions.
A good deal of positions taken by
individuals in arriving at a group decision are also determined in the
same way that they make personal decisions. But unlike personal decisions,
positions taken in group decision-making can be
challenged by others in the group. Then the individuals usually must appeal to
a formal system of evaluation or else their position will be
rejected by the group as not legitimate. Those who tell the group that
they want option A because "my gut tells me that it is the right thing to
do" are likely to be ignored or ostracized (by us). Those who tell the
group that they want option A because "it maximizes return on cost without
significant unintended consequences" are likely to be seen as not just
legitimate but authoritative.
3. The intersection of personal and group decisions
Our business – human services, if I can call them that
– is so subject to indeterminate benefits and costs that the overlap
between how personal and group decisions are rationalized is very large. What
are the benefits of option A in terms of outcomes a, b, c, d, and e, most of
which cannot even be measured? How long do the benefits of option A last in
terms of outcomes a & b, and do we even know
whether outcomes c & d aren't superior in the very long run? And do we even
truly understand what option A is? Under such circumstances, personal decisions
can masquerade as group decisions.
People you interview will attempt to influence you to move
in certain directions. In essence, you will be prodded to make a personal
decision about the direction in which to take your project. How will you make
that decision? Do you really know why you will decide as you do?
Interviewer: David Williams
Interviewee: Gene Glass
March 16, 2012
DDW: Well, have you had any more thoughts before I start
pummeling you with questions or...?
GG: Ha ha. I was just thinking
that I was just trying to summarize my own feelings and thoughts about it, and
what I came up with was that in our business, maybe I wrote these things to
you. In our business, the empirical side of all the evaluations is simplified
by being open-ended. They never cover all the bases. There's always a loophole
for anyone to escape through if that's what they wish
to do. You know, usually you didn't measure this; you measured A, B, and C, but
you didn't measure D; you measured A, B, C, and D but you didn't measure C and
D long enough, you didn't follow up far enough. And so when the act of
collecting empirical data to support decisions as we talk about it, when
they're that open-ended, other things come into play to determine one's choices
and positions.
And so in my own mind when explaining the way we act, in my
own experience, it is helpful to distinguish evaluation as a method of
discovery, and then evaluation as a method of justification. And we commonly
present it to people as a method of discovery, discovering the better — the
best alternative. But I think far and away most of the time it's used as a
method of justification — of a choice and of a position that determines
how others think. Political self-interest, economic self interest and not just
political self-interest, or even less obvious, more hidden things of personal
motives, many of which are, as we were talking about last time, geared toward
avoidance of threat, anxiety, appearance, etc. Other than that, that's about
all I came up with.
DDW: So, you did send me an email on that and it sounded
like you were saying that you think you've seen that in other people too. It's
not just you.
GG: Yeah, well, it’s hard to see, you know? Hard to see
because we all pose and we all adopt this pose of objectivity, intersubjectivity, and that we are using this method to
discover the answer. Because of all the other motives they use for
justification of a decision that's already been made. The other motives aren't regarded
as legitimate or as worthy. So, we're really, you know, just defending — saving
face, saving money, playing politics, things like that.
DDW: So is that—do you have any feelings about if
that's a terribly bad thing, or just the way it is?
GG: No, just the way it is.
DDW: So what about when we start teaching people about
evaluation, should we be pointing this out and saying, so here are some tools
to do it even better or what's your view?
GG: Yeah, yeah, that's a real dilemma 'cause we certainly
don't teach it that way.
DDW: Right.
GG: Not at all.
DDW: Why not? Because it's not defensible, right?
GG: Doesn't seem as legitimate. Doesn't seem as
authoritative. But we present it as a quasi-science, you know. Should be above
all of these personal motives and whatnot.
DDW: So you feel like it's that way in personal decisions
for sure, right?
GG: Yeah, it's really, especially in public or group
evaluations it is that way a lot.
DDW: And do you think people are aware of
it, or is this kind of below their awareness?
GG: No, most people aren't at all. The
person on the street, not at all. And people in the field are not as
much aware as perhaps they ought to be. But I'm sure some people who would look
at it would see it that way fairly clearly. It—you know, I’m interested
in the global warming thing, and how that's a lot less open-ended than the
stuff we deal with. I mean, scientists ought to be able to pin that down pretty
well...and then you seem to have, like if you know, you've studied their
methods, and then they look pretty good and if you take a poll, they come out
about 99% to 1% saying they’ve concluded there is global warming. And so I was asking one of my former students who works in clinical
science and ecology, environment and stuff. And I said, well, what do
you think about it? I mean, is it a terrible thing? And she said, well, if
there is global warming to a significant degree, it could, you know, it might
do some melting of the ice caps, you might get a one-foot rise in the ocean, on
the coasts, wherever. But it might make a lot more land further north and
further south in the globe more productive in agriculture. And these benefits
might outweigh any negative benefits. And I think wow, even something that we
think is as solid and scientific as global warming and what we ought to think
about it, how we evaluate it isn't that simple.
DDW: Yeah. So do you think in the global warming case the
people that are making big noises about that have already made a decision and
then they're just gathering evidence to support it?
GG: No. I think that’s much more objective than anything we
do, but still trying to cinch the case—should we do anything about it?
How much should we invest in doing anything about it or whatnot.
Turns out, even in that instance, it isn’t that simple. There are pluses and
minuses associated with global warming.
DDW: Hmm. Yeah. Well it sounds like the last time you said
that because of graduate school and to some extent your undergrad you became
more skeptical. That's something that struck me when I was around you in the
lab at CU. Anything anybody would say, you'd say, okay well, let's
find what's wrong with that. And—
GG: Yeah.
DDW: That seems like kind of a good evaluative stance, but
are you saying that it won't ever lead you to any truth? Because we can't
really know with our methods these kinds of things about what's the right thing
to do or the best thing to do?
GG: Yeah. Well, it's—it's my father all over. And I
just listen to my brother and sister and they say yeah, it’s just like our dad.
And they're talking, they're speaking in that respect.
And—and I don't think—it is—it is a contentious
pandering—Lorrie said something about me recently. Can't remember what it
was, something about basically he disagrees with everything and—and I
think that it's true. My first instinct when somebody presents an argument is
to look for the other side of it. But I don't think it leads to truth. It leads
to—it leads to doubt and agnosticism in most cases.
DDW: And why is that? Because truth's
never found, just ways to destroy every claim?
GG: No just because—just because—just because
the truth to know is so elusive and so conditional and so complex
that—that something in me opposes people simplifying them.
Many years ago Ernie and I were working on a project where
we were essentially doing like a meta-evaluation of a follow through project,
Follow Through—the article, the published article about that with two
other authors. And Harvard did a review and the title of the author was, I
think the title was No Simple Answer. Follow Through was supposed to be a
controlled experiment of fifteen different models for early childhood education
or primary grade education. The government's idea was they brought a cracker jack experiment with really good measures like the
Metropolitan Achievement Test or whatever. And that would really decide, and
out of that came that everybody thought direct instruction was the answer to
everything. And our article was No Simple Answer, it's
not that simple at all.
DDW: Uh-huh. In that publication, I see that you're sending
out every week now is essentially doing the same thing, right?
GG: Yeah, uh-huh. That's the Education Review project.
Right? Right. Yeah, because you know I really, I really believe that what we have
here resembles debate or courtroom cases, it's not scientific discovery, what
we're engaged in here.
DDW: So in a way, you know, I got interested in this topic
because I read in Stufflebeam and Shinkfield
I think, right at the beginning of their text they had come out a couple years
ago that you know, everybody evaluates, but we all do a pretty poor job of it.
So that's why we have disciplined evaluation. However, I haven't seen
anybody do a careful analysis of how people in everyday life make good
evaluations, good choices and then said, now let's use that as the model for
our evaluation approach.
GG: Well, do you know about Nick Smith's project a few years
ago?
DDW: Yeah, the metaphors?
GG: Yeah I understood he went and looked at home appraisers
and different people like that.
DDW: Oh yeah.
GG: You know, to look at how they were evaluating.
DDW: And what did you think of that work?
GG: I never read it. I just knew he was doing it. You know
that they're—if you were making a purchase decision or something on a
refrigerator, having a checklist would be very helpful, you know.
DDW: Uh-huh. So I guess my question is, would it make sense
to get serious about trying to understand how people are making good
evaluations and then say, when I'm training new evaluators, say to them, “Let's
see what you're already doing that is producing good results for you, and then
let's expand off that instead of trotting out all these evaluation models or
approaches and saying you should go do it this way or that.”
GG: Mmhmm. Well I—I think a
contribution would be that you—that you analyze people’s evaluative
decisions…you try to uncover where they're driven by these sort of sometimes
irrational and unconscious motives. You reveal those to people and that becomes
a real warning and an education to others about what they can learn about
themselves.
DDW: Yeah. So educate others to basically meta-evaluate
themselves or critique themselves in terms of their irrationalities?
GG: Yeah.
DDW: Huh. Well I guess, that's kind of what you were doing
in my experience, when you were inviting everybody to make statements and then
you'd rip them apart. You were educating us to do the same thing, right?
GG: Well, that's putting a nice face on it. Other than just getting rid of a little hostility, yeah.
DDW: Okay.
GG: I remember Arlen Gullickson in
the lab once. Some of us were having this argument and of course, I was taking
some atheistic position, and getting sort of obnoxious about it. And Arlen just
said you can have your opinion, I'll have mine, I'm
not going to be listening to yours anymore. Took a lot of guts to say that and
that had a really big effect on me.
DDW: Really?
GG: Oh, yeah.
DDW: What did it do for you?
GG: Well, I shut up about it around him. At
least, after that. I remember when Michael told me once, he says, “I got
fired. Arlen fired me.” He was on a big project at the Evaluation Center at
Western Michigan. And, you know, Michael was always taking on things and just
being unconscionably late and never coming through with something until the
end. I mean, he's so brilliant, anything you can get out of him is wonderful,
and there are a lot of occasions where you see if you can get anything out of
him when [3:00] he'd lead you to expect that he would and so on. So this one
time it got so bad that Arlen just fired him and Michael just loved that. He
told everybody—“I got fired!” 'cause it fit his
whole world view, you know?
DDW: Oh, yeah?
GG: The summative evaluation, the up or down, you're in or
you're out, or something. Where Bob Stake would never fire anybody and Michael
just loved to see somebody get fired and often recommended somebody be fired,
and so it was only right that he get fired himself.
DDW: Yeah. Interesting. That statement you just made about
Bob Stake would never fire anyone—were you referring to him when you said
you'd left Illinois because of somebody else?
GG: Yep. Yeah, I think he and several others; there were a
lot of brilliant people there and I think I wanted to go someplace where there
was only one person more brilliant than me.
DDW: So it sounds like you were saying that personality is a
huge thing in terms of how we actually do our evaluations and how the field has
been shaped by the personalities that have been dominant in it.
GG: Yeah...Yeah, I think so.
DDW: So I guess my view is, well then why not let everybody
play that game. I'm basically saying well, what is your personality and what's,
you know, like Michael and Arlen, let them be pleased when they find out
somebody calls them on something.
GG: Mmhmm. Well the danger is that
people aren't self-aware.
DDW: Oh.
GG: When you do things but you're not aware why, they don’t
necessarily go to some bad end, but they might.
DDW: Yeah. Well, that's true. Seems like the big solution
there is to have systems that allow people to counter each other.
GG: Yeah, and that's what we got. Yeah, right, exactly.
Exactly. Or the other way is to improve self-awareness, but nobody's much into
that.
DDW: Well, we’re coming back to your parents again, aren't
we?
GG: Sure.
DDW: And they countered one another and you were the
beneficiary, you said? But neither one of them could really change who they
were.
GG: Right. Right.
DDW: Or maybe weren't even aware that they were doing what
they were doing.
GG: There's a joke in psychoanalysis that everybody knows
that everybody else has an unconscious, but everybody is certain they don't.
DDW: Yeah. They have nothing like that.
GG: No. Except when they go to sleep.
DDW: Yeah. Well...
GG: So do you remember your dreams?
DDW: Well, I worked on it when I took that class from you
and we read The Dream Poet.
GG: Oh really, were you in that class?
DDW: Yeah. I started putting a piece of paper by my bed.
GG: Uh-huh.
DDW: I was able to do it a bit then, but I don't remember
most of them now. I wake up and it's lingering but it's gone almost as soon as
I sit up, you know?
GG: Isn't that the most amazing thing in the world?
DDW: It is.
GG: You're experiencing this, your fears. It may be frightening, it may be very pleasant experiences and stuff.
And you wake up and it just disappears in a matter of seconds. It's
amazing.
DDW: So you think there's something to do with that in
evaluation?
GG: No, not really. I mean that is
the key to a lot of what drives you. What those dreams reveal, and you can
train yourself to remember two or three a night, and they can really be
wonderful. They can be amazing, wonderful things. But not many people are going
to go that route.
DDW: Have you kept doing it?
GG: I'm fairly aware. They’re kind of repetitious anymore,
so its not like I have discovered a lot about myself that I didn't discover
some time ago.
So What?
DDW:
What are some implications of Glass’s insights about his approach to
evaluation in his personal life and his approach in his professional work?
First, he acknowledged throughout the interview and in his comments at AEA2014
that although he has attempted to making sense of data all through his career
and has conducted and consulted meta-analyses on many issues of importance to
him, in “soft” areas, which many evaluations must address, he trusts his
feelings more than he trusts the data. Second, he believes that other people,
if they are honest, will acknowledge that the unconscious plays a much stronger
role than data analysis does in their evaluations too. Third, he notes that our
perceptions of our own social status and relationship to people in power play a
big role in how we participate in evaluation and how we work with others and which
information our evaluations collect and interpret. An important implication of
these findings is that we ought to be aware of our own perceptions,
interpretations, emotions, and unconscious motives and how we’re using them to
influence our evaluations in our personal lives as well as our professional
uses of evaluation.
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