November 23, 2020 by Don Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, National Board of Directors

We have A. A. Milne, author of the beloved Winnie-the-Pooh stories, to thank for the word ‘woozle’. In Milne’s story, the woozle is a creature that Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet are tracking in the snow. As they follow the tracks, the footprints multiply and they are sure they’re hot on the trail of a woozle. As it turns out, though, they’ve been following their own footprints as they circle a tree. The woozle doesn’t exist and the “evidence” they’ve found of it is just a product of their own search for it.

In social science, though, ‘woozle’ has a different meaning. The term is familiar to shared parenting advocates because of important work by Linda Nielsen. Relying on work by Richard Gelles, who introduced the term to social science, here’s how Professor Nielsen describes a woozle:

[A] woozle is a belief or a claim that is not supported—or is only partially or tentatively supported—by the empirical evidence. But because the claim has been repeatedly cited and presented in misleading ways, the public and policymakers come to believe it. As a result, data that are not accurate or that

are only partially accurate come to be accepted as the “scientific evidence” on that particular topic. Put differently, a woozle is a definitive statement based on data that are very limited, flawed, ambiguous, or erroneous.[1]

One of the most notorious woozles in the area of divorce research was the product of sociologist Lenore Weitzman, who reported in a 1985 book that, after divorce, American women suffer a 73% decline in their standard of living while men enjoy a 42% increase in theirs. This claim is completely false—wildly at odds with reality. It was result of reliance on a small, unrepresentative sample, a flawed methodology, and an embarrassing mathematical blunder. Nevertheless, the story fit a narrative that many found attractive and it grew legs. It was cited so many times and by such respected sources, that it took on a life of its own and led to ill-advised laws and policies.

Beware: there’s a new woozle in town. It’s being advanced most recently by a widely cited paper by Joan Meier and several of her colleagues.[2] Meier is one of the leading critics of parental alienation theory, describing it as a “pseudoscientific” theory. In the recent paper, Meier et al. claim that parental alienation defenses function to undermine the abuse concerns of mothers, even when experts support these abuse claims. Giving credence to claims of alienation results in mothers who are acting to protect their children from abusive fathers losing custody of their children.

Fortunately, for those who know that parental alienation theory is anything but pseudoscience, and that parental alienation is destructive both to the children and the targeted parents, there is also a new team of woozle hunters in town!

Professor Jennifer Harman (Psychology, Colorado State University) and Demosthenes Lorandos (PsychLaw.net) have just completed groundbreaking research, soon to be published in Psychology, Public Policy & Law that is a woozle killer. Harman and Lorandos’s paper, “Allegations of Family Violence in Court: How Parental Alienation Affects Judicial Outcomes,” identifies 30—that’s right, 30—”conceptual and methodological problems with the design and analysis of the study [by Meier et al.] that make the results and the conclusions drawn dubious at best.”

Profesor Harman will present some of this important research at the upcoming conference (December 5 & 6) of the International Council on Shared Parenting—a conference that National Parents Organization is helping to support. This conference, which Professor Harman is a co-organizer of, is free and available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Professor Harman will be presenting her research in a session focusing on parental alienation on Sunday, December 6, that begins at 10:30 am Eastern Standard Time. Please register and attend this woozle slaying!

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[1] Nielsen, L. (2014, February 10). Woozles: Their Role in Custody Law Reform, Parenting Plans, and Family Court. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/law0000004

[2] Meier, J. S., Dickson, S., O’Sullivan, C., Rosen, L., & Hayes, J. (2019). Child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations. GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 2019-56. Available from https://ssrn.com/abstracte=3448062