Dodo Bird Verdict - History

History

The “Dodo Bird Verdict” terminology was coined by Saul Rosenzweig in 1936 to illustrate the notion that all therapies are equally effective. Rosenzweig borrowed the phrase from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), wherein a number of characters become wet and in order to dry themselves, the Dodo Bird decided to issue a competition: Everyone was to run around the lake until they were dry. Nobody cared to measure how far each person had run, nor how long. When they asked the Dodo who had won, he thought long and hard and then said "Everybody has won and all must have prizes." In the case of psychotherapies, the Dodo Bird Verdict maintains that all therapies are winners; they all produce equivalent outcomes.

According to the Dodo Bird Verdict, all psychotherapies, regardless of their specific components, produce equivalent patient health outcomes. The Dodo Bird debate took flight in 1975 when Lester Luborsky, Barton Singer and Lise Luborsky reported the results of one of the first comparative studies demonstrating few significant differences in the outcomes among different psychotherapies. This study spurred a plethora of new studies in both opposition and support of the Dodo Bird Verdict.

The Dodo Bird debate, in brief, is focused on whether or not the specific components of different treatments lead some treatments to outperform other treatments for specific disorders. Supporters of the Dodo Bird Verdict contend that all psychotherapies are equivalent because of "common factors" that are shared in all treatments (i.e., having a relationship with a therapist who is warm, respectful, and has high expectations for client success). In contrast, critics of the Dodo Bird Verdict would argue that the specific techniques used in different therapies are important, and all therapies do not produce equivalent outcomes for specific disorders.