Individuating psychotherapies.
Two therapies are the same unless their causal engine or step-by-step practice differs.
01Research in Context
What this study did
O'Donohue et al. (2003) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
They asked: when are two therapies truly different?
Their rule: only if the cause of change or the way you do it differs.
What they found
The paper claims that many "brand-name" therapies are really the same tool in new wrapping.
If the active ingredient and the delivery match, you have one intervention, not two.
How this fits with other research
Moss et al. (2009) extends the rule to Motivational Interviewing. They show MI works because client change talk shifts stimulus functions through equivalence classes. That is a new causal story, so MI can stand apart.
Capio et al. (2013) give live data that back the idea. Therapists shaped client words moment-by-moment, proving the "way you do it" can be measured and counts.
Austin et al. (2015) map one mechanism—decoupling—across many mindfulness packages. By the 2003 rule, all those packages collapse into one intervention family.
Why it matters
Stop counting names on the training flyer. Start asking: what is the actual mechanism, and how exactly will I deliver it? If two manuals share both, pick the shorter one and measure the same pinpoint.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
One goal of an empirically oriented psychotherapist is to implement the same psychotherapy across similar clients for a similar specified problem. Adherence to a specified treatment is imperative when following a treatment manual. In other cases, such as when developing a new treatment, psychotherapists desire that the intervention be different from those currently available. To develop new treatments and to substantively increase the arsenal of psychological "tools" available to alleviate human suffering, criteria by which treatments are judged to be novel must be developed. The authors discuss criteria to make such delineations. They argue that psychotherapies are defined by two key properties: (a) a mechanism or mechanisms that causally produce the treatment's effects (if any) and (b) a manner or manners of instantiating these mechanisms. They also argue that if two psychotherapies share these two properties, then they are the same treatment: if not, they should be considered different treatments.
Behavior modification, 2003 · doi:10.1177/0145445503027003004