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Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

Please make sure to read the full paper before jumping to conclusions! This was not a fully randomized study!

The main outcome of the study was that couples that participated in ANY treatment had similar outcomes. The benefit was compared to a "No treatment" group.

But the article fails to mention that this "no treatment" group was not randomly selected!! The "no treatment" group was made up of couples that refused treatment, or failed to participate in treatments because of scheduling constraints.

So a less misleading headline might be: Couples that refuse relationship counselling have higher divorce rates. But that would surprise noone.

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It's getting really tired how unreliably scientific results are reported in the mainstream media.

Is anyone building a (crowdsourced) fact checker to validate these kinds of claims that I could install as a browser extension?

The worst part is this isn't even a mainstream media source. This is coming from a university!

They may have even stronger incentive to juice up a press release.

It is soft science. Almost all results are unreproducable BS

> Couples that refuse relationship counselling have higher divorce rates. But that would surprise no one.

It would surprise some; it's perfectly possible to take the view that counselling causes divorces.

Even less adventurous would be to consider that counselling has no effect. But in any case, the study can only provide information regarding counselling with respect to couples that refuse it, not regarding counselling in general.

Scott Alexander wrote he has no clue if counseling works:

> I tell patients to have a consistent weekly meeting with their spouse, maybe a Saturday date night. During the meeting, each of them has to say one nice thing about the other, and then one problem that they want to work on. The other person thanks them for the nice thing and then they brainstorm a solution to the problem. If they both agree to the solution, they have to stick with it at least until the next relationship meeting. A lot of my patients have said this really helps them, have continued the meetings long after the immediate crisis passes, and probably expect the technique was invented by some clever person like John Gottman. I will never tell them that actually I picked it up from a different ex-girlfriend, not even the one who writes relationship advice columns.

> In conclusion, I have no idea what makes marriages work, and I am not convinced John Gottman does either.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-...

I find the speculation on what the patients think reaching. I also find the origin in terms of which girlfriend of his first suffested it completely irrelevat.

It is standard relationship advice that flies around in various forms. I have seen multiple variants of it - the two componentams are regular dates basically and system which creates safe regular times for dealing with issues outside of conflict situation.

I mean honestly, the above does not give much trust to him.

I think the point is that he learned (and presumably implemented) the technique in a relationship that failed and yet he recommends it without sharing that context.

“I recommend this construction technique.” “Sounds great. By the way where’d you learn it?” “I learned it building my last house.” “Can I go see it?” “No, it collapsed.”

Houses are meant to stay upright, but relationships are meant to end. Consider all your relationships (romantic or platonic) from middle school, high school, uni, first job, moving to a new city, cofounder etc. the expected, healthy, and natural conclusion for 90% of your lifetime relationships is to end to make room for the next ones. You learn from each one and try to apply from the best to the rest. Sometimes, very few times in life, an end is a failure - but the baseline is that it’s natural and desirable. Unlike your house collapsing.

Relationships certainly change but it’s depressing to assume they will all end. Actually most of my relationships have not ended, except mainly when the other party has died.

That would assume that the above technique is silver bullet that is meant to solve all possible relationship problems.

Such a thing just can't exist. If that is the standard, then you would give up on giving to fix anything in relationship. Since there is a couple that whose issue won't be solved by that, why bother.

Especially with new relationships, you two are basically figuring out whether the couple have compatible value systems, expectations, whether one of them has destructive tendencies it is safer and better to nope out of. It is ok to break up if with the "I realized this is not for me, I think I will be better off with someone else".

If all problems are emotional, then just the very act of a shared commitment, reccomended by an "expert" (e.g. to having "relationship meetings") may be enough to solve them, regardless of content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOLwDBcgSjs

I think it is perfectly reasonable to think that counselling correlates with divorce. People normally only go through counselling when things go wrong, and divorces also happen when things go wrong. I guess people are more likely to die after seeing a doctor for the same reason.

Refusing counselling against the advise of a specialist is another metric. And while I think that indeed, it correlates with higher divorce rates, it is not obvious at all and it took a few studies to get that result.

Maybe I chose the wrong word. Writing good summaries is hard!

What they describe in the paper (they call it a "treatment") is more like a training for newlyweds.

Maybe I should have phrased it like this:

Couples who decline to take part in free relationship training have higher divorce rates.

Or, more positively:

Couples who participate in free relationship training have lower divorce rates.

(But that implies causality, so it is again somewhat misleading)

This is the kind of paper where approaching it with a kind of Bayesian orientation is really helpful. As in: what's your prior on movies cutting the divorce in half? It's almost certainly very small. So either this paper has to have amazingly compelling evidence, or something is wrong.

HN should require (non-randomized) in the title for this kind of thing, the same way it requires (2014) or (pdf).

> This was not a fully randomized study!

Which makes it practically useless since most observational studies are poorly controlled.

You could also say “discussing movies as effective as therapy” which is quite an interesting find.

Yes, and that is the finding of the actual paper. The kicker is that the movie method takes less time overall and less therapist involvement than the other two techniques tested. I wish people could get past whining about how this isn’t a randomized controlled study and actually look at the findings on their merits.

> So a less misleading headline might be: Couples that refuse relationship counselling have higher divorce rates. But that would surprise noone.

Relationship counseling is delegating responsibility for your relationship to a third party. Or, in most cases, transferring blame for your psychological shortcomings to your spouse via a faux neutral third party.

(I don't doubt that there are good counselor, but they are probably even rarer than good psychologists.)

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